Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine | 24.09.2002 15:14

The medical-marijuana garden operated by Steve McWilliams and his associate Barbara MacKenzie in the Normal Heights neighborhood of San Diego was raided by agents of the San Diego County Narcotics Task Force (NTF) at noon on Tuesday, September 24, five days after McWilliams was hand-served a notice from the U.S. Attorney for Southern California, Carol Lam, that he faced federal arrest and prosecution unless he immediately destroyed all marijuana plants and product in his possession. Neither McWilliams nor MacKenzie were on the premises when the raid occurred, and neither were arrested — though both were convinced they would have been taken into custody had they been there when the officers arrived.

McWilliams’ Medical Marijuana Garden Raided September 24

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine
Used by permission

The medical-marijuana garden operated by Steve McWilliams and his associate Barbara MacKenzie in the Normal Heights neighborhood of San Diego was raided by agents of the San Diego County Narcotics Task Force (NTF) at noon on Tuesday, September 24, five days after McWilliams was hand-served a notice from the U.S. Attorney for Southern California, Carol Lam, that he faced federal arrest and prosecution unless he immediately destroyed all marijuana plants and product in his possession.

Though Donald Thornhill, Jr., spokesperson from the San Diego office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), was on the site when the raid took place, according to McWilliams the people who actually entered his home and garden and removed his plants were local city and county law-enforcement officers working under the NTF. According to McWilliams, Thornhill was also the person who gave him the letter after encountering him outside the Great Frame-Up frame store in Hillcrest September 19.

According to Thornhill, the raid was the result of an “ongoing investigation” over a period of several months and was not sparked by any individual complaint to the DEA office. Thornhill also said the timing of the raid was “coincidence” and had nothing to do with other raids on medical-marijuana providers in Santa Cruz and Petaluma earlier in September.

Neither McWilliams nor MacKenzie were on site when the raid occurred. The officers gained entry to the property through an open window and filled the back of a pickup truck with 18 plants uprooted from McWilliams’ garden. They also searched the inside of the McWilliams/MacKenzie home for loose marijuana. Though Thornhill maintained that the officers merely had “a search warrant, not an arrest warrant,” both McWilliams and MacKenzie said they were sure they would have been taken into custody had they been on the property when the NTF agents arrived.

The raid on the McWilliams/MacKenzie garden was the latest skirmish in a long conflict between medical marijuana activists, local and state government authorities, and the U.S. Department of Justice ever since the passage of Proposition 215 by California voters in November 1996. Proposition 215 allowed individual California residents to grow and possess marijuana for personal use if authorized by a doctor for medical reasons.

However, the federal government maintained from the first that Proposition 215 was invalid because federal law had already declared marijuana to be useless as medicine, and that an individual state could not create a medical exemption against marijuana-law enforcement unless the U.S. Congress amended federal drug law to recognize marijuana as medicine. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on May 14, 2002 that the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative could not claim medical exemption from federal law to grow, possess and distribute marijuana, but this case left open the question of whether an individual user could still claim a medical exemption from federal law for marijuana s/he grew and consumed him/herself.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Justice and DEA have treated the May 14 Supreme Court ruling as a blanket overturning of Proposition 215, and have proceeded accordingly. On September 6, 2002, DEA agents raided the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) in Santa Cruz in what California Attorney General Bill Lockyer called “a disheartening addition to a growing list of provocative and intrusive incidents of harassment by the DEA in California.”

In protest, medical marijuana activists staged a series of events on Tuesday, September 17 to protest the DEA’s enforcement actions against medical marijuana users in California in general and the WAMM raid in Santa Cruz in particular. In some of the events, including the one in Santa Cruz, local elected officials joined activists in distributing samples of marijuana to users with letters from doctors authorizing medical use.

By contrast, the September 17 event in San Diego was led by McWilliams and featured only volunteers from his organization, Shelter From the Storm. They passed out half-gram quantities of marijuana buds to anyone who presented them a doctor’s letter authorizing medical use. Anyone without a doctor’s letter was turned away. The event was held in the Community Concourse near San Diego City Hall downtown and was extensively covered by the local media.

McWilliams said he is convinced that the September 19 raid from Carol Lam threatening him with prosecution and the destruction of his plants, and the September 24 raid in which the plants were actually destroyed, was retaliation for his leadership of the September 17 solidarity protest near City Hall. “No one else is being targeted,” McWilliams told Zenger’s on September 21, three days before the raid. “No one else has received a letter. Barbara MacKenzie lives at this residence and [half of] the plants are hers.”

Though the warning letter came from a federal prosecutor, McWilliams is convinced that local government was behind the raid and in effect set him up. “I think the San Diego City Council called in the feds because the local police can’t stop us,” McWilliams said September 21.

McWilliams had participated in the city of San Diego’s Medicinal Marijuana/Cannabis Task Force from its creation in July 2001 until his resignation earlier in September 2002. The job of the Task Force was to recommend guidelines to the San Diego City Council for how Proposition 215 could be implemented in San Diego. Among the recommendations was an official city ID card, similar to the one already used in San Francisco, that would certify an individual as a medical marijuana user and provide that person a so-called “safe harbor” from local and state law enforcement action.

According to McWilliams, he meticulously followed the Task Force’s recommendations in setting up his own garden in a residential area in the Normal Heights neighborhood of San Diego — and local police left him alone because he was following the guidelines. “We’ve had officers from the San Diego city attorney’s office and a number of police officers see our garden,” McWilliams told Zenger’s on September 21. “The police chief and the City Council are aware of what we’re doing. I maintained this garden while I was on formal probation for three years and used and cultivated marijuana for medical reasons with the full knowledge of my probation officer and the judge in my case.”

McWilliams said he holds the city government — not the feds — responsible for the fate of his garden and his medicine. He believes city officials falsely gave him assurances that he would not be a target of federal prosecution as long as he followed the Task Force’s guidelines and kept the number of plants he was growing below the 100-plant minimum for mandatory federal sentencing guidelines. (At the time of the raid there were 18 plants growing on the premises, nine belonging to McWilliams and nine to MacKenzie.) While the raid was still in progress McWilliams was across the street discussing with his attorney the possibility of filing a lawsuit against the city for allegedly having led him to believe he was safe from federal action when in fact he was not.

Despite McWilliams’ former membership on the city’s Medical Marijuana/Cannabis Task Force, the Task Force refused to issue a statement of support for him when MacKenzie came to their meeting on Friday, September 20, a day after McWilliams received the letter from Carol Lam. When Task Force member Mike Barbee, who replaced McWilliams as chair of the group’s patient advocacy subcommittee, offered a motion in support, Task Force chair Juliana Humphrey quickly ruled it out of order. “I’m sorry about what’s happening to you,” Humphrey told MacKenzie, “but it’s not appropriate for the Task Force to respond.”

While the raid was in progress, members of McWilliams’ organization called the offices of several City Councilmembers asking for statements of support. None responded positively; according to Barbee, the person who answered his call to Councilmember George Stevens’ office told him point-blank the raid was “not our problem.”

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net
Homepage:: http://