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claims. And it was as the assistant district attorney had claimed. Our staffers were given blank caregiver forms. 10News learned that one person named his dog as a caregiver. As part of the investigation, 10News nominated a bird named Riggo as a caregiver. "The doctors --because they're giving it to so many people --are basically legalizing marijuana one doctor and patient at a time," said Greisen. (Source: http://www.10news.com/news/9480300/detail.html) Medical Marijuana abuses reported among teens By Stephanie Bertholdo bertholdo@theacorn.com (Excerpts from the Article) Part I of two parts on local teen drug abuse A decade has passed since Californians voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. At the time, one of the arguments against legalizing the drug was that the law might open the door to abuse, especially among teens. Indeed, many teenagers in the area have found that the marijuana grown and dispensed by medical groups can be easily obtained, and is perhaps of even higher quality than what can be purchased on the street. 'Know the right doctor' To safeguard against abuse, people who suffer from cancer, AIDS, chronic pain and other conditions must obtain a prescription from a licensed physician, the first step to possessing a Medical Marijuana identification card. Once a Medical Marijuana identification card is in hand, a citizen can drop in to any local Medical Marijuana dispensary throughout California and legally purchase up to eight ounces of marijuana or other cannabis products. One Oak Park teen who wished to remain anonymous for this article said that at least 10 of his friends have fraudulently obtained Medical Marijuana identification cards. "It's really easy to get," said the 19-year-old. "You just have to know the right doctor." According to several experts interviewed by The Acorn, if a person cannot convince their own physician that the drug is necessary for a particular medical condition, the dispensaries will often recommend a doctor who is more likely to write a prescription. The process to obtain a Medical Marijuana identification card is fairly straightforward. 40 Once a doctor's prescription is obtained, a form is filled out and after the prescription becomes verified a patient is legally eligible to purchase marijuana in limited quantities. "It's better pot, I guess, than a lot of the street stuff," said the Oak Park teen. Each dispensary devises guidelines on how much marijuana a patient can purchase. A spokesperson for Herbal Independent Pharmacy in Woodland Hills said that the store allows individuals to purchase only two ounces within a two-week period. "Someone could reasonably smoke an ounce in a week," the HIP employee said. For those who want to bypass such limitations, a regular supply of marijuana can be obtained by visiting different dispensaries in the Conejo and San Fernando valleys. Cannabis "clubs" do not check with other dispensaries, another HIP spokesperson said. The onus is on the patient, who by law may possess only eight ounces of marijuana at a time. But "they could hit 50 dispensaries in one day if they wanted to," the employee said. Some marijuana issued with 'little or no justification' Dep. Matt Dunn, a member of the Lost Hills Juvenile Intervention Team in Agoura Hills, said law enforcement officers often deal with teens in possession of Medical Marijuana. Randi Klein, the alternative education counselor with the Las Virgenes Unified School District, has seen a rise in Medical Marijuana usage over the past 18 months and believes that Medical Marijuana cards are being obtained by students who should not qualify. Klein said many of the clinics have doctors on staff who will write the prescriptions for such ailments as insomnia or anxiety. Klein considers doctors who prescribe marijuana for minor ailments, especially for teens who fabricate complaints of back pain, insomnia or anxiety, to be negligent. "I do think that kids are starting (to use drugs) younger and younger," Klein said. She said parents must take a more proactive role in supervising their children, from monitoring computer usage to making sure their teens are where they say they are. There are thousands of web pages outlining the drunken escapades of students, and thousands of pictures of students who appear drugged or drunk, Klein said. "It looks cool to so many kids," Klein said. She recommends that parents ask to see their children's profiles on the site. "It's important to know what your kids are doing," Klein said. (Source: http://www.theacorn.com/news/2006/0727/Front_Page/004.html) Who is Ken Estes you ask? Ken Estes is a long time proponent of Medical Marijuana who has or has had interests in at least four Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, all of which have come under law enforcement and media scrutiny. His dispensaries have been robbed, the focus of law enforcement scrutiny and when ordered by two cities (Oakland June/04 and Richmond currently) to close his dispensaries has refused to do so. When Pot Clubs Go Bad: Ken Estes just wants to share the miracle of Medical Marijuana. Everyone else just wants him to go away. (Excerpts from the Article) By Chris Thompson Article Published Jul 24, 2002 Neighborhood lore has it that before Ken Estes set up his medical-marijuana club, the property used to be a whorehouse. The neighbors wish it still was. Back then, the customers walked in, took care of business, and got out. Bad shit never went down at 41 central Berkeley's local brothel --certainly nothing like what happened on the afternoon of June 5. At 2:37 p.m., roughly ninety minutes before closing According to the police report, they forced the guard through the door, rushed into the club, and screamed at everyone to lie face down on the floor. Everyone did except for one man, a wheelchairbound patient who had come to get his legally prescribed dose of reefer and now had a gun in his face. The two men trashed the place and finally found the stash after prying open a locked file cabinet. It was the third armed robbery at 1672 University Avenue in ten months. You get into a lot of creepy stuff when you hang out with Ken Estes. You get burglaries, armed robberies, police raids, and felony charges. You also get allegations of cocaine dealing, tax fraud, and spousal abuse. Shortly after a motorcycle accident left Estes paralyzed below his chest, he became a devoted advocate of Medical Marijuana. He carefully organized his club to offer every possible comfort to the sick or dying. And unlike other East Bay pot clubs, most of which stress a clinical pharmacy's atmosphere, patients can sit down and light up right there, beneath rustic paintings of Jimi, Janis, and Jerry. If it weren't for the crime that has plagued his club's operation, Estes might be the patron saint of Berkeley stoners. "We have the best prices and the best medicine." he boasts. "If you know buds, we have the bomb." But ever since Estes first got involved in the medical-marijuana movement, men with drugs, guns, and evil intent have followed him everywhere he goes. They have robbed him, exploited his generosity, and endangered the lives of everyone around him --even his three children. He always picks the wrong friends. At least that's Ken's side of the story. His estranged lover, Stacey Trainor, told a darker version to the Contra Costa district attorney's office. She alleged that Estes is a former coke dealer who lied to secure his club's lease, that he has a Berkeley doctor in his pocket who will sell pot prescriptions for $215 a pop, and that up to thirty percent of his customers buy his product without any medical notes at all. Police and University Avenue merchants, meanwhile, claim that high-school kids used to line up for a taste outside Estes' club, and that his security guards scared away neighborhood shoppers and even got involved in fights on the street. His fellow cannabis-club operators even tried to drive Estes out of town. In the six years since its passage, mayors, district attorneys, and state officials have been so focused on protecting patients from federal prosecution that they've neglected to implement any sort of regulations about how pot should be distributed. No state or local agency or mainstream medical group has offered any comprehensive guidelines on who should hand out pot in what manner. As a result, medical pot is not just legal, but superlegal, perhaps California's least-regulated ingestible substance. In the absence of official regulation, it has fallen to pot-club operators themselves to craft some sort of system All they have is a gentlemen's agreement. Ken Estes broke that agreement, whether by design or neglect. And no one may have the legal power to make him stop. In 1992, he signed over his share of the salons to his business partner and started distributing pot, going to demonstrations, and working to decriminalize medical cannabis. Yet as Estes became a fixture in the medical cannabis scene, his life became increasingly chaotic and dangerous. At the very time that Proposition 215 liberated thousands of medicalmarijuana smokers from prosecution, Estes began a long, almost farcical slide into crime. Even scoring on street corners didn't compare to what was to come. "No guns in the face at that point," he says of his early years. "That came later, with the medical-marijuana movement." 42 Estes began his cannabis activism by volunteering at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers cooperative. Jeff Jones, the co-op's executive director, doesn't even smoke pot. If Estes is a creative but befuddled libertine, Jones is rigid and dogmatic. From the start, the two rubbed one another the wrong way. After passage of Proposition 215, the co-op emerged from the shadows and began distributing pot out in the open. But no one had any idea how to go about it. There were simply no rules; one day medical pot was illegal, the next day it wasn't. Proposition 215 is one in a long series of brief, poorly conceived initiatives whose implementation has proven to be a giant headache. The "Compassionate Use Act of 1996" offers no guidance on how pot should be distributed; indeed, the initiative is a single page in length and merely encourages the federal and state governments to "implement a plan to provide for the safe and affordable distribution of marijuana to all patients." Six years later, no one in Sacramento has figured out what this means. No state agency has ever issued binding directives on how to distribute pot, or to whom. With the state paralyzed, it has fallen to local governments to regulate Medical Marijuana. The portion of the Berkeley municipal code governing medical pot, for example, is so ridiculously lax that it plays right into the city's worst stereotypes, and yet it's as strict as virtually any other Bay Area city. Although the code limits the amount of pot a club can have on hand, there are no provisions limiting how close a pot club can be to a school, or requiring doctors to conduct an actual evaluation of patients, or requiring background checks for pot distributors --which is standard practice for anyone who wants to run a liquor store. Yet the code does encourage pot clubs to "use their best efforts to determine whether or not cannabis is organically grown." The end result is that medical pot is actually less regulated than candy bars, which must at least have their ingredients printed on the wrapper. Club operators disagree on whether this is good or bad. Jeff Jones wants the government to step in and bring some common sense to pot's distribution. "We thought the government would get involved in distributing Medical Marijuana as per the state law," he says. "I never though that five or ten years later, we'd still be operating in a vacuum." Others worry that if the state takes a firmer hand, a conservative governor or attorney general might interpret the law so narrowly as to effectively recriminalize medical cannabis. But everyone agrees that since the government hasn't set up rules, club operators must police themselves. Even the police, hamstrung by a city council cognizant of the overwhelming public support for medical pot, can do virtually nothing to crack down on rogue clubs. If someone wanted to hand out pot like candy, no one could stop him. His neighbors along University Avenue soon figured this out. Accounts differ as to what Estes did when he first showed up at the Oakland co-op's door in 1995. Some say he taught the co-op's pot cultivation classes; others claim he weighed out the baggies and sampled the wares to categorize their potency. Estes says he did both. Whether the Oakland co-op itself was entirely aboveboard is a matter of some dispute. According to Trainor's statement to the Contra Costa DA, the co-op paid Estes in pot and unreported cash. "Part of the marijuana he received as payment from the club he would sell to other people, including persons who had no medical prescription for marijuana," her statement reads. In October 1998, the feds managed to get an injunction prohibiting the Oakland co-op from dispensing marijuana and Estes jumped in to fill the void. But he needed customers, so Trainor says Estes called a friend who worked there. 43 This employee gave Estes the names, addresses, and phone numbers of five hundred patients, and Estes soon started drumming up customers. Estes concedes he made no effort to call their doctors and confirm their medical condition he just started making deliveries to anyone with a card from the Oakland club. By the time that Estes went into business for himself, he, Trainor, and their three children had moved to a house in Concord, where he began growing pot to supply his growing army of patients. On September 20, Concord police officer David Savage took a call: Estes' neighbor claimed that she could see a bumper crop of pot plants growing in his backyard. Savage stopped by and peeked over the fence. Later that afternoon, he returned with a search warrant. Savage's police report indicates that he found pot everywhere. He found roughly fifty plants in a makeshift greenhouse in the backyard. He found an elaborate hydroponics system in the garage; behind sheets of dark plastic, dozens of plants were growing on on plastic trays and in children's swimming pools; grow lights wheeled back and forth on a track hanging from the ceiling. He found baggies of weed stuffed in desk drawers and scattered along the floor, and plants hanging in the closets. In the master bedroom, underneath a crib where one of the children slept, Savage found two garbage bags with dried marijuana in them. "None of the growing and dried marijuana was in a secure place," Savage wrote in his report. "Most of the marijuana was accessible to the children in the residence. But Savage didn't know what to do with Estes. Estes had an Oakland coop card certifying him as a patient, as well as patient records indicating he was a legally valid caregiver. How much dope did Proposition 215 allow him to have? By then, Estes had bought some property near Clear Lake, and Trainor had moved up north with the kids, growing more dope in a shed behind the house. Meanwhile, Estes' cousin Tim Crew had moved into the house to help him grow a crop that dwarfed his prior prior stash. This period marks the beginning of one of Estes' most foolish habits: keeping massive amounts of drugs and money lying around. "People told me, 'Don't put more than a certain amount in the bank, or you could get in trouble,'" he says. "We had a lot of money, and I kept it with me. I'd hide it in my closet, hide it in my suitcase. I just didn't want to put it in a bank." As more and more people got hip to Estes' stash, his cavalier attitude would provoke a spate of armed robberies that left his University Avenue neighbors terrified. The first robbery happened in Concord on January 1, 2000. Neighbors called the cops and reported that several men had burst out of Estes' house and raced down the street, leaving the door ajar. When Concord officers arrived at the scene, they found that the front door had been forced open. They also found no fewer than 1,780 marijuana plants in various stages of cultivation, even after the break-in. This time, the cops wouldn't be satisfied with confiscating his stash. The DA charged Estes with four felony counts of possession and cultivation of marijuana for sale, and will probably argue that the volume of pot on hand proved that he was an outright dealer, not a medicinal caregiver. With the heat coming down in Concord, Estes eyed Berkeley. Taking out a business license and a zoning permit to sell "herbs and other homeopathic remedies," Estes set up shop at 1672 University Avenue. From the very beginning, Berkeley Medical Herbs was characterized by his permissive business style. Michael "Rocky" Grunner showed up at Estes' door just months into his new operation and handed him a bag of quality product. But over time, a tense, nervous atmosphere infected the club. Finally, Estes claims, a friend came to him and broke the bad news: Grunner was dealing crank out of the back room. 44 Estes says he promptly threw Grunner out of the club. But the club's neighbors were beginning to worry about the sketchy new element. Machinist Richard Graham is a longtime area resident and has been known to take a hit upon occasion. But he even he draws the line at Estes' way of doing business. A few months after Estes opened the club, Graham dropped off a package mistakenly delivered to the wrong address. When Graham asked the man behind the counter how business was holding up, he offered to set him up with a physician for $200. "I asked them how their operation works, and they told me you just need a note from the doctor, and we have a doctor, and you can get a note for just about anything," Graham says. "Then he told me the prices, the registration fee to get the note, $200 per year. I just got the impression that these are people in it to sell marijuana as a business. I didn't feel that these were people motivated to help sick people, which I think other people are. It was a decidedly unclinical atmosphere, let's put it that way." In fact, Estes' operation was so unclinical that it even advertised in the Berkeley Daily Planet. Superimposed over the image of a big fat bud, the club announced that it had plenty of pot for sale, listing killer strains such as "Jack Frost, Mad Max, Romulin, GSpot, and more." Other club operators groaned in dismay when they read the notice: "One-source shopping for all your medicinal needs! First visit, first gram free with mention of this ad!" Soon, kids were lining up outside, neighbors and police report, and the club's busiest hour was between three and four in the afternoon, when Berkeley High students got out of class. "The biggest complaint was the kids going in and out of there," says Lieutenant Al Yuen, head of the Berkeley Police Department's Special Enforcement Unit, which handles narcotics investigations. "We looked into that and watched kids going in and out. We never caught him selling to kids without a card. He claims that the kids had medicinal cards, but he he doesn't keep records on who he sells to." In fact, Trainor told the DA's office that Estes sold his product to anyone with the cash. She estimated that seventy percent of the club's buyers were patients from the Oakland co-op, and that the other thirty percent were recreational users. And Trainor alleged that even many of the so-called patients may have had fraudulent doctor's notes. She claimed that Estes referred everyone without a card to Dr. Frank Lucido, a Berkeley family practitioner who allegedly charged a fee for every note. "Estes would tell his buyers to go to Lucido, give him $215, and he would give the person a prescription. For a while, Estes says, he even accepted photocopies of Lucido's notes, and neighbors used to find them littering the sidewalk in front of his club. Lucido says he used to write such notes and rely on patients to provide verification later. But he says he discontinued that practice two years ago, and now requires independent verification of his patients' ailments from another physician. Lucido says Estes has been a headache for his medical practice. Two years ago, the doctor says, Estes printed business cards that claimed he was working in conjunction with Lucido. The physician says that as soon as he found out, he had a lawyer call Estes and tell him to stop making that claim immediately. Why is Trainor telling so many tales out of school? It all began two years ago, when she began an affair with Rocky Grunner. The feud culminated on August 31, 2000, when Trainor swore out a temporary restraining order against Estes, claiming that Estes threatened to kill her. When the Lafayette cops arrived at his house to serve it, they found more plants growing in the basement. Back went Estes into the pokey, and the cops even raided the club and seized product and financial records. Two months later, Lafayette narcotics agents raided Grunner's own house and seized seventeen pounds of marijuana. 45 Trainor eventually broke off her affair. Grunner could not be reached for comment. Six months ago, as Estes became the subject of a Contra Costa district attorney investigation, Trainor met with assistant district attorney Phyllis Franks and county investigator Tony Arcado. Over the course of several hours, she told the story of their life together. According to her statement, Estes didn't start his new career dealing medical pot --but cocaine. "After selling the tanning salon, Estes earned income by selling cocaine," Arcado wrote in his summary of Trainor's interview. "Trainer [sic] said the income from the cocaine business ran out in 1993, and Estes switched to selling marijuana." On the evening of Friday, October 12, 2001, the club was winding down after a long day when someone knocked on the door. An employee pulled the door open and stared straight down the barrel of a silver handgun. "We opened up the door, same as for everybody: 'Hey, what's up?'" Estes says. "The guys came in. They put everybody on the ground and took everything." Time was running out for Estes. The kids and the police raids were bad enough, but now men were waving guns around and racing off with drugs. At the time, Estes had no security guards, no iron gate on the door, just a lot of cash and pot. Neighbors and police representatives claim that this just made things worse. The men were not professional guards, and scared people away from the neighborhood by loitering on the sidewalk during business hours. Estes says the neighbors are giving way to their own racist fears. "If you talk to them, they're big, soft, easygoing guys," he says. "But unfortunately they're black. And in this society, you think of black as criminal. So the moment you see black people standing around, looking at your ID, I guess it looks like a crack house. I have black friends, and that seems to be held against me. None of the other clubs seems to be scrutinized as much as me." Not only did the guards not sit well with the neighbors, they also didn't stop the the crime. On the evening of December 13, 2001, one last patient, a young woman, knocked on the door. As an employee opened the door for her, he glanced down to his left and saw three men crouched low. The woman turned and walked back to the sidewalk and the men rushed through the door. One pulled out an Uzi submachine gun, and the second robbery in two months was under way. The thieves probably wouldn't have kept coming back if there hadn't been so much to steal. Estes refuses to say how much pot was lost during the first robbery, but he says he kept an average of three pounds of dried marijuana in his store at all times. "Plus we had hash, we had kief, we had oils and other extracts from marijuana. We had baked goods, brownies, carrot cakes, Reese's peanut butter cups that were done like that. We had everything." At $65 an eighth, that meant thugs could make off with about $25,000 with one quick hit, to say nothing of the cash he kept on hand. With this, the city had finally had enough. City Councilmember Councilmember Linda Maio convened a neighborhood meeting about the club --which Estes didn't bother to attend --and told the rest of Berkeley's cannabis dispensaries to bring their colleague to heel. On January 2, Geshuri agreed to the following terms: the club would only operate five hours a day; less than a pound of dope would be on the premises; newspaper advertising would stop immediately; a professional security company would be retained; and security cameras would be installed. The final robbery on June 5 spelled the end for Ken Estes. Despite his promise not to keep more than a pound of pot at the store, neighbors report that during the getaway, the robbers' duffel bag was so heavy that they had to drag it down to the car. As for the security cameras, club officials claimed that they had mysteriously broken down that day, and there was no film of the incident. 46 Estes had used up his last store of good faith, and even the other clubs agreed he had to go. He, his brother Randy Moses, and Geshuri have signed a lease at a new club in Oakland, near the corner of 18th Street and Broadway, where he promises to tighten up security. If this the best local government can do, Estes is in the clear. Of course, good old-fashioned drug laws may solve the Ken Estes problem for us. Assistant district attorney Phyllis Franks of Contra Costa County is preparing to try Estes on four felonies stemming from the Concord raids, and if convicted, he'll be out of business. This brings up the final legal question unresolved by Proposition 215: how do prosecutors determine whether someone is a legally sanctioned caregiver, or a drug dealer? The answer is there is no answer. When Estes turned himself in, forty demonstrators accompanied him to the station, and his image --the martyr of Medical Marijuana, persecuted by vindictive prosecutors --was flashed across the nightly news throughout the Bay Area. Estes admits he's made some mistakes, and vows to improve his operation. I believe I know who's behind this, the robberies. All this stuff that's gone on has happened since Stacey went to the police, and the police believed her. They told me that many times women turn on their drug-dealing boyfriends, and this seems like a case of that. I wish I could have hired better people, but I can't say that I would have done anything different. I really didn't foresee the criminal element making its presence like it did. But I can only do so much." And should Estes revert to his old, seat-of-his-pants ways, we may have no choice but to put up with him. (Source) www.compassionatecoalition.org/comment/reply/3789 Medical Marijuana merchant defies Oakland order to close. Others might go underground, as city's new rule gets mixed reaction from consumers, business owners (Excerpts from the Article) Oakland Tribune (CA) Wednesday, June 02, 2004 By Laura Counts, STAFF WRITER OAKLAND --Medical Marijuana patients who packed into the Dragonfly Holistic Solutions dispensary on Telegraph Avenue on Tuesday seemed unaware the business had been told by the city to shut down. They said they were seeking the most potent medicine in town --a strain of marijuana called "Barney Purple" --and didn't like hearing that new city rules will limit them to four city-sanctioned establishments. Those that received licenses will have to pay a $20,000 annual fee. Those that did not were supposed to close Tuesday. Dragonfly did not make it, but owner Ken Estes said he will continue to operate in defiance of city rules until he is arrested. He planned a protest outside the dispensary Tuesday morning, but the only signs of one emerged when the doors to the club opened 15 minutes late. "There is some kind of discrimination going on behind the scenes," Estes said. Still, no one except Estes continued business as usual. There are too many people who appreciate getting marijuana in a civilized way," said Lee, one of the backers of an initiative now collecting signatures for the November ballot that would all but decriminalize adult use of marijuana in Oakland. Sparky Rose, operator of Compassionate Access on Telegraph --which also was approved --said he serves 7,000 patients and is expecting more. He plans to soon move to a larger location nearby. The city will review the new rules in six months. Jeff Jones, director of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative --which issues identification cards but does not dispense --said he has been advising clubs to follow the rules. 47 "The city is our friend, and we are in this together.