[We look for Dennis, who's nowhere to be found, probably somewhere outside the club, smoking a regular cigarette.]

HARRY GOLDSTEIN: Politically, it seems necessary that you have to divide out marijuana's mental and emotional effects from the medicinal ones. Has this caused a rift between the people who just want to legalize marijuana and people who want to legalize it for strictly medical purposes?

There are a lot of people in jail in America right now that were using pot medicinally. But where did they buy it? They bought it in the parks and schoolyards. They bought it through whatever channels. There's no recognition or separation, or rifts. It's total chaos, is what it is. And there's total misunderstanding. We're discovering why a lot of people are using marijuana: there is a triage. We're trying, through this club, to recognize that society does have a problem recognizing where it wants to go and what lines it wants to draw. So we've focused on the top medical uses, the AIDS, the cancer, the glaucoma, the multiple sclerosis, the epilepsy. That's the most anecdotal evidence. Those are the five things that nobody will argue.... A person going through chemotherapy in some cases is better off having access to marijuana. Nobody doubts that anymore. So we started with what everybody agreed on, as a starting point. So that's where we started, but that's not an indication of a rift or a schism. It's a starting point. A perception, a triage, a prioritization of those most in need by those with something extra to give.

JE: Right, it's ok to watch television. It's ok to drink booze. Frankly, radial arm saws are on the market and people lose their arms to them all the time, but I haven't seen a real movement to pull radial arm saws off the market, although I as a carpenter wouldn't be caught dead using one. I think they're too dangerous for me, as a trained carpenter, to use, so it just shocks me that they're on the open market in Sears, and anyone can bring one home and put it in their garage and let their kid wheel the bike in and turn on the radial arm saw and just pull their shirt right in there. There are so many chronicled examples of people losing hands like that in America for so many years, that it should terrify everybody that they're out there and yet it doesn't bother anybody, It's a radial arm saw, what do you want? Marijuana, however, is saving people's lives and people are being put in jail for obtaining it and that's what we're addressing here. That's where our focus is. We're not trying to protect America from itself.... The club is not a harm reduction experiment. This is good medicine.

HG: Right, and towards that, in the political sense, you're up against pharmaceutical companies that have cornered the market on pain reduction. There's an economic motive behind....

JE: If I could be honest with you? "Up against" isn't correct, because potentially, it's very easy to sit down and say this embodied interest or that embodied interest is seeing our emerging thing as a threat to them, but the truth is, from sitting at the Political Desk watching it day to day, that is not our problem. That isn't actually our problem. The funny thing is, our problem is ourselves: we are a neophyte, fledgling organization coming out of a place that is very dark, realizing an answer that is very big. Our problem is ourselves, our own ability to organize fast enough. Just like a child can't run the first day, we can't either, and that kid wants to run, that kid sees his older brother out there running, he knows it can be done, he has to crawl and fall and fall and fall and then he gets to stumble a couple of steps. That's all it is for us, our own learning curve on how fast we can learn to agree and focus and grow as an interest group....

HG: So you don't ....

JE:...in California. We're growing so fast it hurts.

HG: Now you have what, 200,000 names on a...

JE: Now you're talking about our political goal. We want to qualify a medical marijuana initiative for the 1996 ballot. To do that you have to collect 460,000 good, registered voter signatures, but to statistically achieve 460,000 good voter signatures, you have to collect the ungodly number of 700,000. Of that, we've collected approximately 150,000. We have just been committed to by an independent group of people who have an interest and deeper pockets than we do--500,000 signatures through the California open market system for these sort of things.... And give or take a few of ours that aren't so good, our shot is another 100,000 in the last seven weeks of this campaign, by us, by the same mechanism we achieved the first 150,000, and we will qualify this for the ballot on April 20. [Editor's note: as of the end of May 1996, they have 770,000 (unverified) signatures, so the initiative will almost certainly be on the ballot in November.]

HG: If you get it on the ballot, are you going to buy media, is it a grassroots thing?

JE: It's going to be a lot of things. But the real truth is, it's beautiful. You're in a situation where you're in a state of 30 million people. You've got a thing on the ballot, and the fact is that when we wrote the thing we tried to figure out what the people would already be inclined to pass.... We did a poll and found out that of 750 people, statewide, registered voters, both parties, across the board, 64% would vote yes for the initiative the way we have it worded.

Dole voters are going to vote for us, Clinton voters are going to vote for us, everyone no matter what their cause was was going to vote for us. That's the 64% figure, that's as of February of last year, California statewide. It's gone up since then, we've been educating, there's been no negative influence on these people, it's all been our way; but that's where we started from. Then, six months ago, we got the Field polls organization, 1500 people, this was one everyone was watching, 1500 people from every walk of life. We really thought this was going to do us in, and it turned out 57% of them believe that a doctor should have the right to recommend marijuana and that a patient should be able to use it. Exactly, precisely, and only what our initiative does. We're already in a position where people want to vote for this. The fact of the matter is that the ungodly number of people are commited to this already and have been for a year and are just waiting to walk in and vote for it.

HG: What's going to happen in terms of the law? Is this binding, is it a resolution?

JE: Nothing happens for the law except for one thing: the law is now interpreted with one caveat. The caveat is that it doesn't apply to people who have AIDS and cancer and letters of diagnosis for medical conditions that are helped by marijuana and they're only cultivating a certain amount or possessing a certain amount.

If that's the case, then the police are not going to generally enforce that law against those people. And there's only one reason they won't enforce that law against those people if California passes the Compassionate Use Initiative: if you did enforce it, these people would win in court by medical necessity anyway. Which isn't changing a law, it's interpreting a law. And that's what's going on here. We're not challenging the federal codes. We're not changing the state laws, we're merely interpreting en masse to a population that needs this interpretation desperately.

HG: Do you think this will work across the country?

JE: Yes and no. We believe in the big picture. This is California, and it's the model for future activity in America to some extent. This is a big state, 10% of the country lives here. You've got 8-10% of Congress as our seated delegates in Congress. It's a very influential state.

We want to set it right, here in California, just like we did in San Francisco. Then we want to go through Congress and set it right for the rest of America. Because people in Miami, in Florida, in Maine and New Hampshire and all these places, in North Carolina, they shouldn't be suffering.

HG: But once you get to that point... JE: It becomes easier.... HG: We were talking about baby steps.... JE: It becomes easier....

HG: It becomes easier?!?! Don't you think that once this movement is recognized that the pharmaceutical companies or whoever that we choose as an example for industries that would regard the legalization of marijuana as a threat....

JE: No--for a very good reason. Because you're going to be looking at an example that works. You see when this election happens and the initiative is passed, people in California with medical need will be able to cultivate and possess marijuana--and they will do that. They will grow it, they will cultivate it, they will possess it, en masse, all over this state. What will happen immediately will be two things: people will find out that this system works and that it's harmless.

You can say anything you want to say, you can challenge it anyway you want to challenge it, but your group's, your perspective's credibility is going to be on the line if you're wrong. And to just go out there and say that what's happening out there in California is wrong is about as dumb as saying we're going to fall off into the ocean tomorrow.

HG: Don't you think the lobbyists would be far more sophisticated than that when it gets to the Congressional level?

JE: Well, that's the point. You've got people in California living better now than the rest of the country. You've got them accessing a really good medicine. If you want chemotherapy to survive cancer, you will come to California after this is done. There is no question that this will set our whole medical system in this state way ahead, superior to what exists anywhere else in this country.

When you start with that as the reality, anybody that's knocking it is going to appear pretty negative. It will be wonderful trial ground too, because if we do learn something from that, we will correct our actions for the national effort. But frankly, we've thought very, very long and hard, this has grown very slowly and has evolved very, very carefully and there ain't much wrong. It's pretty good.

It's good to fly. And while we're showing California how it works, we're going to responsibly work it right through the legislature at the federal level and make it so on a federal basis. I'm sure there'll be concerns. But that's real. We're not airheads. We're not perfect. We'll work with folks that have concerns. In Congress you're dealing with a bigger group of folks, and you're also dealing with better-thought-out concerns because it's a deeper picture. But the same thing, we'll be better then, and we'll be more than ready to meet those concerns, whatever they may be.

We don't think there's going to be a total negative barrage against us either. We're not putting pharmaceutical companies out of business. All we want is one more drug on the market, for godsakes. Marijuana does not cure cancer. Chemotherapy does. Fifty percent of diagonosed cancers can be cured through traditional means right now. But the problem is, basically, that one third of the people who are diagnosed with cancer drop out of the treatment. They don't go through the chemo.

They choose to die. So you've got a third of the people dropping out, when half of those people would survive if they didn't. Marijuana helps them stay in treatment. Marijuana helps their nausea, and they survive the chemo and the cancer and they grow old and die. This is better. You can't take that away from people. You need the pot to make the drugs work better because people don't want to do the drugs. The pot helps you do the chemo. Why would the pharmaceutical guys hate that?

According to NORML, a lobbying group that advocates the legalization of marijuana, there are 17 large, established buyer's clubs. NORML and other pot activists estimate there are 40 in all. "It's just impossible to track the smaller groups that tend to be more casual and include people who know each other," says NORML's Executive Director Alan St. Pierre.