Burnt Out
Leighton, who founded the MRP in 1997 and was a New York gubernatorial candidate in 2002, cites a daunting shift toward a more conservative political culture in explaining why he no longer sees significant pot reform in this country happening anytime soon. Early indications that the United States Supreme Court will issue an anti-pot opinion in the well-publicized case of Raich v. Ashcroft hasn't helped improve Leighton's mood.
His motivation waning, Leighton has let the MRP web site become a museum piece. October 13, 2003 is the date of "Today's Featured Article" on the front page of the site. Multiple links to "incest porn" populate the otherwise empty reader-comment areas below some stories. Leighton says the site hasn't been updated in months. MRP contact numbers and locations have been shuttered. The main phone now rings at Leighton's house "because we've been hurting for resources," he confesses.
Leighton now even hesitates to get excited about local medicinal marijuana legalization, something that could become reality if New York State Assembly Bill A-5796 ever gets passed. Introduced in 1997 by Assemblyman Richard Gottfried (D-75thÊAssembly District), A-5796 would protect New Yorkers who bought and consumed pot with a prescription from a doctor. Leighton used to have faith in A-5796, sure it would find its way into law quickly. Now he thinks it's going nowhere, and he's bitter about it.
"Everything with that bill is in a sort of limbo. Unless we have a ballot-line initiative for legalization of pot in some form, I don't see how we can do anything. But maybe if enough of [the lawmakers] get cancer or something that causes them to change their mind-maybe then we'll see change. But even then, Pataki won't sign it. Until there is a powerful Republican sponsorship, I don't think we will go anywhere on the issue," he says.
Leighton is just one example of the pessimism that has gripped the legalization community. Another is seen in the pot growers and distributors all over New York who feel things have moved backward for pot reform since today's retro-conservative domestic environment began hardening after Sept. 11.
Even in California, where medicinal pot is supposed to be legal, the mood among those supposedly leading the way is downright gloomy.
"The mood in this country is not very proactive to pot anymore. The social agenda has really changed," says Lynn Tucker, a Mendocino County grower who lives on a farm along California's Highway 20.
Tucker is a veteran of three decades of harvest seasons, and a locally recognized organic grower. But in September, two weeks before harvest, Tucker had all her pot plants-nearly 900 pounds' worth, according to the Mendocino County Sheriff's department-confiscated by the police.
Though Tucker had on-hand the prescriptions of the medical marijuana patients for whom she was growing, and even after cops discovered their search warrant had contained errors that could be used to foil prosecution, police snatched Tucker's entire crop and hauled it away. Given all this, you'd think Tucker would have at least some confidence. She knows she was growing under state guidelines, and she knows her attorney can build an illegal search and seizure defense. But like Leighton, Tucker has lost her faith in the system. After 10 years, she now thinks California's medical marijuana laws will actually work against her when she faces arraignment in January. You hear a lot of Leighton's despair in Tucker's voice.
"I was growing under Prop. 215. I should have been protected. But I don't have the faith in it I used to," Tucker says. "The way they've begun to rule on 215 is totally inconsistent, and judge by judge. It's so confusing. And now it's getting used against growers. The permitted weights are defined separately by every judge, so you just try and get a lenient one if you're in trouble. I felt protected under the guidelines of 215. I am an organic farmer. I have a long history of providing sick people with organic food. This wiped me out. At this point, I'm not sure what I'm going to do."
Proposition 215-California's Compassionate Use Act of 1996-basically says that if a grower like Lynn Tucker can point to every pot plant she has and prove it's part of the permitted prescription amount for a documented patient, then growing it and selling it to someone who identifies themselves as a buyer for a medicinal marijuana co-op is perfectly legal.
After almost a decade under Prop. 215, the California towns of Ukiah and Willits-both right down the road from Tucker-have begun prosecuting pot growers large and small for reasons that seem to stem from little more than pot fatigue from a mammoth increase in local pot cultivation. Pot is sprouting everywhere throughout Mendocino County, causing crime, traffic and even complaints about "the skunk-like stink emitted by ripening marijuana plants," according to a report by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. More crackdowns on growers are expected from police in both towns, and Willits has banned marijuana co-ops for the moment while it studies the issue, the paper said.
AS A LOBBYIST FOR MARIJUANA reform in New York, Vincent Marrone of Public Strategies LLC doesn't permit such news to dampen his spirits. Marrone says medicinal marijuana laws in New York can be written to avoid the havoc Prop. 215 has unleashed in California. Marrone also believes that A-5796 has a very good chance of passing in the 2005 legislative session. Why the confidence? Marrone has found the turnkey Albany lawmaker that Leighton sarcastically said the bill needed for passage: a Republican cancer victim whose compassionate story could sway his constituency to sign on to medicinal marijuana legislation.
New York Senate Majority leader Joseph Bruno is that man. Bruno, a 75-year-old Republican, is a prostate cancer victim who began radiation therapy in late 2003. Empathy with other cancer patients looking for any kind of relief has made Bruno a potential supporter of medicinal marijuana in New York, says Marrone. With Bruno, several of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and 44 other co-sponsors in the State Assembly backing A-5796, Marrone thinks the bill will pass if written in the right language.
That "right language" will be the stuff that restricts medicinal marijuana rights to match the required comfort level of more conservative opponents. For example, some of the early "right language" only allows patients to grow their own, a scenario that conveniently ignores the opportunity that a medicinal pot market will create for the existing pot supply chain.
"The idea in New York would be to allow patients to grow their own," says Marrone.
Selling lawmakers the notion that medicinal marijuana patients in New York will be adequately supplied by their own innocent little reefer plants means ignoring the white elephant in the room: the New York drug trade. The fact is, medicinal pot is going to be supplied mainly by professional growers. Even if nothing but the horticulture expertise of pot growers makes it into the homes of medicinal marijuana patients, A-5796 better have the right language to address the yield of a well-skilled grower.
Case in point: Tucker was growing 25 plants each for seven patients, a formula in line with Mendocino County District Attorney Norm Vroman's guidelines that allow for 25 plants per patient, plants that are allowed to grow as big as 10 by 10 feet wide. However, the "right language" that passed in Prop. 215 outlines that "a qualified patient or primary caregiver may possess no more than eight ounces (half a pound) of dried marijuana per qualified patient. In addition, a qualified patient or primary caregiver may also maintain no more than six mature or 12 immature marijuana plants per qualified patient."
California lawmakers apparently weren't thinking about plants the size of Tucker's when they voted in Prop. 215. Harvested correctly, one of Tucker's plants can yield well over four pounds of pot. That means six of Tucker's plants that are allowed under Prop. 215 provide about 24 pounds of weed-23 and a half pounds over the lowest amount of "dried marijuana" a patient is allowed to possess under the same law. Apply Vroman's 25-plant limit to specimens the size of Tucker's and a patient gets as much as 100 pounds of pot.
What's more, Prop. 215 has transformed practically all pot into medicinal marijuana. The legal right in California to forge above-ground relationships between growers and co-ops has made everything about traditional non-prescription cultivation-from finding seasonal laborers for the harvest to finding buyers for the pot-a considerably more organized process. Seasonal workers on many pot farms now go by the name "patient volunteers," and are commonly recruited right from the co-ops from which they purchase pot.
Marrone says New York's 1977 decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana removed the incentive for non-prescription pot growers/dealers/smokers to seek cover beneath medicinal marijuana laws.
"We are a decrim state. If you have a small amount of marijuana on you, the last thing you would want to do is use the medical law as cover," explains Marrone. "Right now if you possess seven-eighths of an ounce of pot or less, it's a violation-15 days, like a traffic ticket. But if you defy public health law, which A-5796 would be-that is misdemeanor: one year in jail and up to a $10,000 fine."
Waiting behind this sales pitch to lawmakers is the pot trade of the Northeastern United States, a supply chain that's up and running, providing pot to several underground co-ops in New York and countless hundreds of thousands of recreational smokers. If A-5796 is passed, New York pot suppliers say they will quickly re-design their supply chain, packaging and distribution to better resemble a medicinal pot operation under the new law. This is similar to what happened in California, and proof can be found by looking no further than price. Because it's all the same supply chain, California pot costs the same at the co-ops as it does on the street, preventing what marketing people call "channel conflict."
States can't take steps to partially legalize medicinal marijuana without speeding the process of a showdown with the larger marijuana supply chain, not to mention the federal government. Prop. 215 is what propelled the medicinal pot case of Oakland resident Angel Raich to the Supreme Court.
Likewise, the passing of A-5796 would modify the pot supply chains in New York to better fit the bill's final language. Hydroponic growers within New York state lines might align themselves with medicinal marijuana guidelines and begin stocking copies of pot patient prescriptions onsite. Vietnamese cartels that leverage a cozy 30-year diplomatic relationship with Canada to covertly import pot into New York would also update their systems to appear in line with A-5796 in the event of a bust. Eventually, an Angel Raich from New York might appear to face the Supreme Court.
You'd think Leighton would get excited that an A-5796 would trigger the inevitable face-off on the real issue of broader marijuana reform. After all, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has signed on as a pro-marijuana reform advocate. And there are other positive signs. Earlier this month the New York State Legislature voted to soften Rockefeller-era drug laws that put some offenders away for 15 years to life, reducing the length of the longest sentences to 20 years.
But Leighton remains cynical. "The way I see it, what it's really going to take is some pro-pot celebrity or billionaire candidate to make any headway in pot legalization. Besides, I'm more worried about a dirty bomb here in New York City than I am about medical marijuana. One of our founders was a fireman in the World Trade Center and never came out. Sure, I'd love to have medical marijuana. It'd be great. But the movement peaked in the late 90s and things are changing."