Club Offering Marijuana Reopens in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO —  Two months after California voters legalized medical use of marijuana, and five months after the Cannabis Buyers Club was shut down by state narcotics officers, the club reopened Wednesday with a promise to supply high-quality, low-cost weed just steps from this city’s Civic Center.

By closing time, the renamed Cannabis Cultivators Club had received more than 200 doctors’ recommendations from potential new customers, and founder Dennis Peron was crowing that “America’s never going to be the same.”

Milahhr Kemnah, a 28-year-old AIDS patient, became the club’s first official new client, buying a small bag of marijuana and rolling and smoking a joint for the benefit of reporters.

“I’m no longer a criminal,” Kemnah said. “It means that when I get so sick, my lover will be able to help me buy marijuana, by coming to this place and buying for me.”

Outside the doors of a nondescript Market Street office building, dozens of people stood patiently in line on a cold and rainy morning, blinking in the television lights as they waited for security guards to wave them inside. Many were patrons before the club was raided.

“Since the club was shut down, I’ve been buying marijuana from friends and off the street,” said a man who gave only his first name, Everett. He said he has been HIV-positive for five years and smokes marijuana daily to fight nausea brought on by drugs he takes to battle the virus. He said the smoking has helped him gain weight and relieve depression.

“Here it’s easier to get it, safer to use it, and hopefully, I’ll be getting better quality weed,” Everett said.

Most of those in line were men in their 30s and 40s. But there also were old and young women, people hobbling along with crutches or walkers, and people in wheelchairs. Many said they were HIV-positive or suffering from full-blown AIDS, but other complaints included arthritis, muscular dystrophy and various kinds of cancer.

Once inside, clients were ushered into an interview room, where volunteers asked them to fill out a membership form, checked their diagnosis papers and called their physicians to confirm that they are suffering from a chronic illness.

If the physician confirmed the patient’s diagnosis, clients were sent to the next room, where their pictures were taken and they were issued a photo identification membership card. They then were directed to the third floor, where they could buy everything from 3.5-gram bags for prices ranging from $35 to $65, depending on the quality, to $5 “Vegan Truffles,” chocolate confections that a worker said were made with “nuts, bananas, chocolate and marijuana.”

Within minutes of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, clients were rolling and lighting joints, smoking pipes and eating marijuana-laced brownies and chocolate chip cookies at cafe-like tables.

The unmistakable smell of burning marijuana quickly filled the room. Members sat beneath handmade mobiles hung with colorful origami birds. Oriental rugs and an overstuffed sofa made the room feel cozy. Members could help themselves to free oranges displayed in boxes near the tables.

“People get the munchies when they smoke dope,” said John Entwistle, Peron’s assistant. “We want to encourage them to eat healthy things.”

Peron co-wrote Proposition 215, the initiative that sent a shiver through the ranks of anti-drug officials when it was passed by voters in November. Other clubs have opened in the Bay Area since Peron’s was closed by state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren last year, and more have sprung up since the passage of Proposition 215, but none provide as clublike an atmosphere as this one.

“I’m so excited,” Peron said. “It feels like victory. I’ve never seen my name with marijuana that wasn’t on an indictment.”

Peron’s club is the largest and oldest in the state, started at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco when thousands of gay men were getting sick and wasting away from the virus. Among those who died was Peron’s lover.

Peron and the others who founded the club insist they came to believe in the medicinal properties of marijuana when they saw it ease the suffering of dying friends and lovers. Eventually, Peron’s club claimed 12,000 members.

For several years, it operated with the open support of most of the city’s officials, and San Francisco police maintained a hands-off policy toward the then-illegal club.

After authorizing the raid on the club in August, Lungren filed criminal charges against Peron and other club managers, charging them with illegally selling and transporting marijuana. Those charges are pending in Alameda County.

Lungren alleged that undercover narcotics agents were able to purchase marijuana without a doctor’s recommendation, and that the club had sold to minors and sold large quantities of marijuana to people who claimed they were going to deliver it to patients living outside the city.

Lungren also obtained an injunction in August that closed the club indefinitely. San Francisco Superior Court Judge David A. Garcia modified that injunction on Jan. 10, allowing the club to reopen and allowing Peron and co-director Elizabeth Moore to cultivate and sell marijuana on the premises.

The attorney general plans to appeal Garcia’s decision to allow the club to reopen, spokesman Steve Telliano said Wednesday.

“The state’s position is that Proposition 215 allows a caregiver to cultivate and provide marijuana to a medical user on a one-to-one, individual basis,” Telliano said. “Here, a group, being paid, is assigned responsibility. So it is a problem. Ultimately, it is going to take a court decision to clarify this gray area.”

In the club’s basement, about 20 marijuana plants were growing under lights Wednesday. Entwistle said the club plans to expand that cultivation to fill the entire basement. Eventually, the club hopes to develop a network of growers who will provide the marijuana at cost and cut the street price drastically.

“This is San Francisco,” Entwistle said. “We may be out on the edge now, but people grab our ideas and run with them. There will be clubs opening in places like Fresno, you’ll see. They won’t be run by little gay men, it will be Fresno-type people running them, but they will be opening.”