THE CALIFORNIA
MEDICAL MARIJUANA REBELLION:

Dennis Peron, Dan Lungren
and the Battle for Proposition 215
By Bill Weinberg

Dennis Peron with a bottle of Medical "Marijuana Cigarrettes"
"Can you picture what will be? So limitless and free..."
--Jim Morrison, The End
The battle for Proposition 215, California's groundbreaking medical marijuana initiative has been won. Or perhaps only the first round has been won. Approved by California's voters, it now faces a struggle in the courts. The forces of intolerance represented by the federal Drug War apparatus and California Attorney General Dan Lungren are not going to take 215 lying down. The grassroots rebellion for medical marijuana faces a struggle to defend its hard-won turf. SHADOW reporter Bill Weinberg takes an in-depth look.
California is a state of schizophrenic political extremes. It has some of the nation's most fiercely conservative coun-ties--like notorious Orange--as well as the nation's most wide-open city--San Francisco, Babylon on the Bay. The struggle for the medical marijuana initi-ative--Proposition 215--was a struggle of Northern California versus Southern California, urban versus heartland, freaks ("druggies" and "faggots") versus the majority culture. These opposing forces are represented by the two men pitted against each other in the battle for 215--California Attorney General Dan Lungren and San Francisco medi-cal marijuana crusader Dennis Peron.

Dennis Peron was a part of the hip-pie wave that arrived in San Francisco three decades ago. The Bronx boy arrived in 1970 straight from the trenches of Vietnam, where he had de-cided, in the face of death, to come out of the closet, as a gay man and as a marijuana afficionado. San Francisco was a cultural haven, even by the stan-dards of the hedonistic 1970s.

Peron settled in the gay Castro district, opened the now-legendary Big Top marijuana supermarket, and got close to Super-visor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, champions of San Francisco as an Open City. The dream came tum-bling down in 1978, when Milk and Moscone were gunned down by Twin-kie-crazed Supervisor (and ex-cop) Dan White. But Peron desperately kept the dream alive in the age of Reagan and AIDS, when real estate and high fi-nance booms transformed San Francis-co. He watched his own lover die of the disease which ravaged the gay commun-ity--and his strategies transformed from a defense of `70s-style hedonism to a struggle for survival in the medical emergency of the `90s. His showmanship and charisma madehim a focus-- and a target. The most powerful man to target him is California Attorney General Dan Lungren--described by the Sacramento News & Review as "the single most dan-gerous adversary one could go up against in the Golden State."

Bay Area Municipal Revolt
The August 4 raid (see SHADOW #39) was Dan Lungren's first move against Dennis Peron's San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club--which also served as campaign headquarters

for Proposition 215, the statewide referendum on legalizing medical marijuana. The bust brought 800 candlelight marchers to the streets of San Francis-co. Lungren denied that the raid was politically motivated, and made much ado about the alleged sale of pot to nonmedical users at the CBC. But he insisted that the Club was illegal even if it didn't engage in such activities.

The raid was also a move by Lun-gren against the municipal rebellion in San Francisco and other Bay Area cities and counties in response to the AIDS crisis. First on the issue of needle-ex-change, and then on that of medical marijuana, Bay Area municipalities have been deciding that the necessities of ad-dressing a health crisis are more im-portant than following the Drug War dogma of state and federal law.

In 1991, San Francisco's voters passed Proposition P, officially embrac-ing a non-enforcement policy for medi-cal marijuana. A Board of Supervisors resolution after Prop P, introduced by crusading liberal Terence Hallinan,

made medical marijuana the lowest enforcement priority for the San Francisco Police Department. Marin and Santa Cruz counties and the city of Oakland followed San Francisco in passing resolutions pledging non-en-forcement against medical marijuana.

In 1992, Peron opened the CBC in a cozy upstairs den just off Castro Street. By 1996, the CBC had moved into a swanky five-story building at Down-town's 1444 Market Street and had over 11,000 members. One hundred pounds of pot and over $250,000 a week were changing hands. All pot was sold in sealed baggies with an "Rx" sticker reading "Not for Resale." Peron says all the profits were plowed back into the Club.

1996 also saw a new administration in City Hall. Longtime California As-sembly Speaker Willie Brown, one of the country's most flaming liberals, be-came mayor. Terence Hallinan became district attorney. Following the CBC raid, Mayor Brown convened a task force to keep medical marijuana avail-able. This task force approached the pioneering AIDS foundation Healing Alternatives, which provides herbal treatments not approved by the FDA. Healing Alternatives

moved into medical marijuana distribution with city approval. Local churches serve as dis-tribution centers.

But as revolutions become institutionalized, the burning visions and loose antics of the pioneering radicals are left behind. Healing Alternatives' Curtis Ponzi expresses ambivalence about Peron's CBC. He told the San Francisco Examiner: "We recognize that the Club did some good, but some people perceived that it was out of control. Our protocol and procedures are so rigorous that only people who have legitimate medical needs are going to be in our program."

New East Bay buyers clubs also took up the slack after the San Francisco CBC was shut down. They also eschew Peron's flair for the flamboyant in favor of a more low-key approach. The Oak-land CBC, in sharp contrast to the luxurious San Francisco club, is stark, functional and sterile, in a downtown office building overlooking a landscape of ur-ban decay. It feels like an inner-city clinic, with no-nonsense pamphlets on AIDS prevention displayed.

Says the Oakland CBC's Jeff Jones: "The OCBC went from 280 members to 510 after the raid. We started as a bike delivery service in October 1995, entirely word-of-mouth. On July 4, we moved into our new office. It was just in time."

The OCBC is backed by three Oakland city council resolutions: one en-dorsing a state assembly medical mari-juana bill in October 1995, one endorsing the OCBC in March 1996, and one setting up a working group "to ensure enforcement of and compliance with the city's medical marijuana policy." The twelve members of this working group include doctors, attorneys and police charged with implementing a policy of non-harassment of the OCBC. All three resolutions passed unanimously, and Mayor Elihu Harris supported the CBC effort publicly after the San Francisco bust.

"If they bust us, they're looking at a long court battle," says Jones. "The ACLU is on alert."

The OCBC's Liana Held is quick to emphasize their control of the pot for medicinal purposes only. "Our members are not allowed to divert. If

they do and we find out about it, we tear up their membership card and their records and say `see ya.' We're trying to become a model agency to help other clubs around the country to work with city officials and create a secure environ-ment for their operation."

Currently offering $7 an eighth for Mexican and $65 an eighth for the good stuff, on a sliding scale tied to patients' income, the OCBC is equally clear on having no profit motive. According to Held, "We're trying to get the price down. Our goal is to be in the pot dis-tribution business, not the pot selling business."

They need more political elbow room to achieve their highest aspira-tions. "We can bring the price down to $6 an eighth for high-grade if we be-come licensed growers," says Held. "We can grow medical grades for specific strains--six percent or twelve percent THC."

Even Hayward, a conservative bed-room enclave south of Oakland, has a medical marijuana effort. Says Bob Wil-son of the Hayward CBC, "I'm getting a lot of overflow from San Francisco now. And I'm scared to death right now. Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz have an OK from the local government to sell to sick people. We don't have that in Hayward. They'd love to shut me down." The Hayward club opened in 1993 and went full time in 1996 at an undisclosed location. It now has nearly 100 members and serves up to 15 folks a day. A massage therapist comes in once a week, and works on patients for free. It has even held a cloning seminar to teach patients to grow for themselves --"get 'em independent from the black market," says Wilson. Drug Abuse Re-sistance & Education (DARE) and the PTA protested when Wilson opened his Hayward Hempery in 1993. Now Parents Against DARE meets at the store. A similar effort in Oakland last year won, when the city bounced its DARE program from the schools. "I'm a thorn in their side," says Wilson, who is on the executive board of the Hay-ward Democratic Club. "But I'm not a pain in their neck like Dennis."

The movement has also jumped to Southern California, where Santa Moni-ca and West Hollywood have pledged a hands-off stance to local buyers' clubs.

Even if many are now rushing to dis-tance themselves from him, it was Peron who spearheaded the movement. Even his critics respect him for that.

Peron Pushes the Envelope
Immediately after the August bust, Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a longtime CBC supporter, asked the Board of Su-pervisors to declare a state of emergen-cy to protect medical marijuana, similar to the one already in place for needle exchange, allowing the CBC to continue operating. City health chief Sandra Her-nandez, despite her support of medical marijuana, remained noncommittal.

After initial enthusiasm, the idea died on the vine. Vic Hernandez is a former Peron housemate, CBC health advisor, and needle-exchange activist with a Harvard public health doctorate. He argued that the law covering the needle-exchange emergency doesn't ap-ply to medical marijuana. "The law is about prevention. We need another law about quality of life. And for that we need another governor." And the prevention law is precarious enough.

"The needle exchange in San Francisco is illegal," Dan Lungren's ubi-quitous press spokesman Steve Telliano said flat-out to the San Francisco Chron-icle after Ammiano's bid. Gov. Pete Wilson has vetoed three bills to allow needle-exchange statewide. But Bay Area municipalities are putting public health first--and once again, San Fran-cisco is at the forefront. "The San Fran-cisco Health Department bureaucrats know there is an activist community that will wipe them off the map if they don't respond," explains Hernandez.

The California state code allows county authorities to declare a state emergency to fight epidemics, temporarily suspending state law. The San Fran-cisco Board of Supervisors declared a state of emergency for needle exchange in March 1993. There are also states of emergency in Santa Clara County and the cities of Berkeley (across the Bay) and Long Beach (in Southern Califor-nia). But needle-exchange activists ar-gued that applying the law to medical marijuana was spurious. And there were criticisms of the CBC's exuberant if sometimes

sloppy style. Tom Ammiano himself admitted to the Board of Super-visors: "Dennis is not Mother Teresa." Even Peron realized it wasn't going to fly. "They'd have had a confrontation with Dan Lungren over the state of emergency. Now I'm into confrontation in the voting booth," he told the SHADOW. Peron was talking about his bid to export the medical marijuana revolution statewide through Prop 215.

In both 1993 and 1994, California's state legislature voted to legalize medi-cal marijuana. Gov. Wilson vetoed it both times. Then Peron launched the Northern California campaign that col-lected 763,000 signatures to get Prop 215 on the ballot for November 1996.

Following its adoption by the voters, 215 is now addition 11362.5 to the Cali-fornia Health & Safety Code. It affects the possession and cultivation statutes of the Code--11357 and 11358, respec-tively. 11360--that covering marijuana sale--is not mentioned. But 215 does state that the purpose of law is "To en-sure that patients and their primary caregivers who obtain and use marijua-na for medical purposes upon the re-commendation of a physician are not

subject to criminal prosecution or sanc-tion." Even the ultraconservative Orange County Register joined the liberal San Francisco papers in backing 215. Dennis Peron was convinced that the bust ac-tually helped the 215 effort. "The to-do about selling to non-medical users im-plies that it is OK to sell to medical users," he told the SHADOW. "And we were selling to 12,000 medical users. The bust put us on the map, and it shows the lengths our opponents will go to." But Dan Lungren wasn't finished yet.

Lungren Counter-Attacks
Dan Lungren is a piece of work. The ambitious attorney general is even to the right of his boss Pete Wilson. He has built his career by playing to fear of crime and drugs. The son of Richard Nixon's personal physician, Lungren is a ten-year veteran Republican Congress-man from Southern California and a heavy favorite for the 1998 Republican gubernatorial nomination. A zealous ad-vocate of California's "three-strikes-yer- out" law, Lungren took flack when a 1994 campaign mailer

soliciting support for the bill asked that checks be made out to the Attorney General's own re-election campaign. The hard-ass Lun-gren has made racking up death penalty convictions central to the Attorney Gen-eral's mission, and has argued repeated-ly for bringing death row inmates to the gas chamber. He has transferred attor-neys and investigators from the "white collar" corporate crime units and shut down the office's fraud division in favor of chasing street-level drugs and low- brow thugs. In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Lungren backed up Police Chief Darryl Gates and called the Rodney King beating an aberration. In May 1996, when Santa Clara County at the south end of the Bay launched a County-financed needle exchange pro-gram, Lungren threatened to lock up the Santa Clara Supervisors.

The No on 215 campaign was co- chaired by Lungren and California Sec-retary of State Bill Jones--the very man charged with overseeing the vote. Also on board were Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, the California Narcotics Officers Association, California Prison Guards Association and the California Sheriffs Association.

The No on 215 political committee was censured in August by state Judge Wendell Ford for using inaccurate infor-mation. No on 215 had said the Ameri-can Cancer Society is against 215 when in fact they were neutral. No on 215 said no medical society endorsed 215, when in fact, the San Francisco Medical Society, representing 9,000 city MDs, of-ficially endorsed 215. It was joined by the 7,500-member California Academy of Family Physicians. The 34,000-mem-ber California Medical Association took a stand against 215. Judge Ford also ruled against Bill Jones, who tried to squelch the 215 ballot on the grounds that it was printed with 14 point type in-stead of 12 point.

Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti demanded that his name be re-moved from No on 215's endorsers list, saying that he had no stance on the issue. Stan Vegar of the DEA's San Francisco office called 215 a "scam" and said, "it won't affect our work."

Lungren's media man Steve Telliano took the opposite tack: "It's true that federal regulations would still be in effect if 215 passed, and it's true that the state can enforce

federal law. But the Attorney General believes passage would be tantamount to de facto legal- ization of marijuana. It would be tough to file a violation against anybody who had a recommendation from a doctor. And the initiative is so loosely worded that "doctor" could mean a veterinarian or a Ph.D., not only a physician."

On September 16, law enforcement upped the ante. LA sheriff's deputies arrested four people and seized a pound of pot (as well as medical re-cords) in a raid of the West Hollywood Cannabis Buyers Club on Santa Monica Boulevard. No charges were filed and the CBC opened two days later at a lo-cal Methodist church. After the bust, the West Hollywood City Council adop-ted a resolution protecting the CBC from local enforcement.

In October, an installment of the syndicated comic strip Doonesbury turned into a First Amendment show-down. Tipped off by a HIGH TIMES editor, controversial CBC media whiz John Entwhistle contacted cartoonist Garry Trudeau in New York, who leapt at the bait. "What country are we living in?" asked an incredulous Zonker Harris when he heard bout the CBC bust. "Germany? Russia? Idaho?"

Lungren, not amused, called on newspapers to pull the comic strip. He challenged its distributor, Universal Press Syndicate, to squelch it or run a "disclaimer side-by-side with the strips which states the known facts related to the Cannabis Buyers' Club." They all re-fused. SF District Attorney Hallinan re-marked that Lungren "has as belligerent and vindictive an attitude toward mari-juana as he does toward cartoonists."

At the eleventh hour, the big guns were brought in. Former presidents Bush, Carter and Ford issued a joint statement calling 215 a threat to the public health of "all Americans." Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey's statement asked "whether we really want Cheech & Chong logic to guide our thinking about medicine." But by then, the inevitable had happened.

SFPD Intrigues
After the August 4 bust at the CBC, everybody was waiting for the October Surprise--Dennis Peron's felony bust. And it came like clockwork. The hand-writing had been on the wall since the August raid--when it

became clear that elements in the SFPD had been co-op-ted by Dan Lungren. As Hallinan's As-sistant DA David Millstein told The New York Times: "It's a highly unusual case where the District Attorney and the federal government won't prosecute, and law enforcement has shopped the case around to see who will."

Both Peron and his personal nemesis on the SFPD, Cpt. Gregory Corrales, are Vietnam veterans, both zealots with a flamboyant style. The much-decorated but highly controversial Corrales is San Francisco's self-declared "arch-enemy of evil" who once stormed a suspect's apartment wielding a pair of pistols and clad in a Superman outfit. A 27-year police veteran, Corrales was suspended in 1982 for firing his gun after leaving a bar outside the Hall of Justice. He also crashed his patrol car doing an illegal U-turn on the Golden Gate Bridge. In the 1970s and 80s, Corrales racked up an awesome 110 citizen complaints and was the target of ten abuse lawsuits. The city paid $100,000 to settle four of them.

Corrales first busted Dennis in 1974--the first of Peron's many arrests. Peron still

carries in his leg bullet fragments from his 1977 arrest by Corrales' room-mate, Officer Paul Mackavekias. Peron recalls Mackavekias calling him a "mo-therfucking faggot" on the witness stand and said, "he wished he'd killed me so there'd be one less faggot in San Fran-cisco." Mackavekis was subsequently banished to the taxi bureau, while Cor-rales rose through the ranks.

In 1993, just as the CBC was getting off the ground, Corrales was promoted to lead the SFPD narcotics unit--where he initiated a probe of the CBC. When Corrales' investigation began, then-DA Arlo Smith declined to prosecute. The new city administration was even less likely to go along. Mayor Brown had supported Peron's legalization efforts as a state assemblyman and sparred sever-al times with Corrales in drug cases as a private attorney. The new Police Chief, Fred Lau, was kept in the dark about the investigation. In May, the federal government likewise declined to prose-cute. But Dan Lungren and the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement took the bait.

Peron says he was meanwhile trying to mend fences with Corrales. "I'm a Catholic Buddhist.

I forgive people. I wanted to put the past behind us." On January 29, 1996, Peron sent a letter to Corrales at the Narcotics Division: "There is irony in the fact that our own lives have run parallel for so long. From the bunkers of Vietnam to the streets of S.F. we both felt strongly about what we were doing. Now you are the Chief of Narcotics and I am the Director of the medical marijuana legalization move-ment: two posts that on the surface seem to be at odds. But do they have to be? Can you and I put the past behind us to work together for a better future that is less violent and more loving? History is watching us, to see how we work out our differences to help the city and country we love. I offer you my hand--can we work together?" Peron never received a response.

In June, a Club courier was confron-ted by gunmen as he unloaded a stash from his car. Fifty pounds and the car were lost. "I think it was narcs," says Peron. In July, a gun that Peron be-lieves was planted by police agents was found at the Club. "We found a pistol with 13 bullets in a backpack behind a couch some ten days before the bust. We dismantled it and threw

it away." Five nights before the bust, a bullet was shot through the window of the lower unit at Dennis' Castro district house.

Finally, 100 state Bureau of Narco-tics Enforcement (BNE) agents were brought in for the raid--from LA, San Diego, Bakersfield, "the toughest of the tough," says Peron. At eight o'clock on a Sunday morning they burst into 1444 Market, carrying automatics and decked out in body armor and rubber gloves. Client records, computers, $60,000 in cash, 150 pounds of marijuana, 400 plants and a small quantity of psyche-delic mushrooms were seized and carted away in two big rental vans. Peron says he has no idea what the `shrooms were doing there. Peron was in Vancouver at a gay pride parade the day of the bust.

At Peron's place, CBC medical ad-visor Vic Hernandez was rousted nude from his bed at gunpoint, handcuffed and interrogated. Hernandez says that when he asked to see a warrant, one officer said, "What are you, an attor-ney?" They also asked questions about Peron's sex life and made homophobic comments like, "This house needs a wo-man's touch." The agents also searched the

home of Peron's downstairs neighbors, who are not involved in CBC.

In simultaneous raids, four other houses in San Francisco, Oakland and San Mateo were also hit by state agents. CBC director Beth Moore was hand-cuffed, held at gunpoint and interroga-ted for over two hours as ten agents ransacked her home in San Francisco's West Portal district.

In all, ten computers were confisca-ted from people involved in the CBC. At one site, police seized a Chinese ma-ple they thought was marijuana. The next day Lungren filed suit--in a court-room filled with CBC advocates--and won an injunction to stop the CBC from operating from Superior Court Judge William Cahill. He also held a press conference with BNE Chief Joe Doane where he displayed a videotape of an unnamed 15-year-old boy who claimed he purchased at the club. Peron calls it a fabrication.

Immediately after the bust, CBS news aired a video clip of Peron selling a pound to an undercover agent. Dennis says he thought it was for AIDS patients on Sonoma County's Russian River. The buyer turned out to be BNE man James Kerrigan, who joined the club purpor-ting to be

HIV-positive, made several big purchases, and then approached Dennis--wired for sound. Peron took the bait. Kerrigan put the following tape transcription in his affidavit:
Peron: "What do you need, dude?" Kerrigan: "Mexican, as much as I can." Peron: "I can sell you a pound, is that what you want? I can sell it to you for nine."
The August 4 raid was launched with no warning to city authorities. An out-raged DA Hallinan said he found out about the raid as it was underway--"about an hour after Lau and an hour before Brown." He also scoffed at the dirty tricks. "It's almost like a defense attorney's dream come true," he told the San Francisco Bay Times. "I mean, they were forging prescriptions, they were going through the garbage, they were making traffic stops that were in fact in-tended to discover marijuana..." Mayor Brown blasted the "Gestapo tactics dis-played by Attorney General Dan Lun-gren." A Chronicle editorial opined: "It is a pity that Lungren cannot mind his own business and let San Francisco han-dle the use of marijuana as medicine."
Hallinan's man Millstein raised the specter of a Lungren-inspired mutiny in the Police Department. He told a news conference the day after the bust: "If any law enforcement officer were in-volved without the knowledge of the Chief of Police or the Mayor, I think that's something that could be very seri-ous."

Chief Lau told the press the investigation was started by former Police Chief Anthony Ribera, and that he had not interfered. Openly gay un-dercover SFPD Officer Joe Bannon was officially the Department's man on the case. His presence allowed Lungren and Telliano to cite SFPD involvement--de-spite the Department's hands-off stance. But Bannon's own boss, Chief Lau, wasn"t even informed of the raid until seven o'clock--and initial reports said the SFPD"s only involvement was traffic control. The politically correct Bannon was also a more acceptable choice than the gung-ho Corrales--who denied hav-ing anything to do with the investigation. But Corrales appeared alongside state agents at the post-bust press conference on August 4.

The initial press conference also sta-ted

that a weapon was found at the Club. This claim was later dropped. Peron believes this was a reference to the gun he found and discarded. "They wrote the press release before the bust, then realized the gun wasn't there." Bannon and Corrales were both on leave and unavailable for comment after the bust. There was considerable confu-sion in the press as to whether Bannon was "on loan" to the state BNE, and who he really answers to. Chief Lau said Bannon "is not really working for us, although he is salaried by us, on the payroll." Lau said he only learned of the loan after the bust. He said the news came from Corrales--who justified the secrecy by citing the "confidentiality re-strictions" of a state investigation.

Deputy Chief for Investigations John Willett also knew about the CBC probe. He told the Bay Times that he was briefed on it by Corrales and Bannon with the January administration change. He also apparently did not deem it fit to clue in his boss Lau.

Peron sees Bannon as a fall guy for Corrales. "He'll never get a blow-job in this town again!" he snorted.

After the bust, Corrales was trans-ferred to run the quiet Ingleside station, the Department's equivalent of exile to Siberia. And Chief Lau ordered an in-ternal SFPD investigation of the De-partment's protocols on working with other law enforcement agencies.

Lungren's media man Telliano dis-missed San Francisco's protests in the press: "California as a state created the counties and the California state go-vernment oversees the counties. It is not the other way around." Corrales told the Examiner, "Peron is a drug dealer who hides behind the mi-sery of other people to sell to kids and anyone with enough money."

And Peron, as usual, remained in-transigent: "We're going to become the Cannabis Cultivators' Co-op, with grow rooms on the premises and a green-house on the roof. Members will be able to buy at cost. If they want to throw me in jail, they'll have to jail the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors and the Police Chief!"

He also dismissed the threat of felo-ny charges that seemed to hang like the Sword of Damocles. "They aren't gonna bring charges. All

their evidence is tainted. They committed perjury to get in here. Falsification of medical notes, entrapment to get us to sell marijuana to sick people--we were already doing that! I told the narc who bought the pound, `Start a buyers' club up there!'" Peron summed up: "If they had proof of selling to a teenager, I'd be busted. They don't have it."

Steve Telliano told the Bay Times after the bust, "If this was really an effort to make the initiative look bad, we'd be doing this in October."

They both spoke too soon. In October, as anticipated, the other jack-boot dropped. Busted!
At ten AM on October 11, state BNE officers rang the doorbell at Peron's house and asked if Dennis was home. He was. "Am I under arrest?" he asked. "OK, let's go."

Peron and five CBC colleagues were charged by an Alameda County grand jury with conspiracy, sale and transport of marijuana and contributing to the de-linquency of a minor. Peron was taken

to Santa Rita jail to await his hearing. Lungren's Deputy AG Mark Howell asked for $25,000 bail for Peron, but Alameda Judge Ronald Sabraw dis-missed the notion that Peron was a flight risk and had him released on his own recognizance. That same night, Peron was toasted by supporters at a benefit bash at 1444 Market Street.

"This is like committing a crime in San Francisco and being charged in Orange County," said an outraged May- or Brown. "If Dan Lungren tries to get away with this, my guess is that Mr. Peron will not be convicted."

Chief Fred Lau denied prior know-ledge of the raid. "They didn't have the guts to charge us in San Francisco," Peron told the Examiner from Santa Rita.

Lungren countered that the indict-ment was brought in Alameda because many of the crimes took place in Oak-land. But the Examiner's examination of the indictment found that just one of the 48 cited "overt acts" had its genesis in Oakland--the transporting of about 50 pounds of marijuana by defendant Peter Veilleux from

his home to the San Francisco CBC. The rest were all in San Francisco.

Alameda County DA Tom Orloff himself is not cooperating in the prose-cution. Orloff is required by Oakland City Council Resolution 72516 "to cease prosecution of persons involved in the medical use of marijuana." In the Ex-aminer, Peron accused Lungren of "playing dirty tricks on the electorate." "The timing had nothing to do with 215," Lungren countered in the Chroni-cle.

As a twice-convicted felon, Dennis Peron may face a "three strikes" manda-tory life sentence if found guilty on the new charges. "I'm eligible for that great grand life imprisonment for sale of marijuana," Peron boasted. "I put myself on the line to help sick and dying peo-ple in the middle of the biggest plague since the Black Death. I think I'm gon-na be acquitted. In fact, I think it'll never go to trial."

Aftermath
But on the morning of November 6, the day after the elections, Peron's ac-tivist critics and boosters alike were all smiles. Early reports put Prop 215 at a 56% victory.

Only Dan Lungren was fuming. By-passing his usual media flack-catcher Telliano, he went directly to the press himself. He told the San Jose Mercury News, "Its going to cause legal and law enforcement anarchy." He pledged to the Chronicle to use "every legal avenue to fight it."

At the election-watch party at 1444 Market, a jubilant Peron was openly toking before a Chronicle reporter as the results came in. "I think this is a great moral victory," he said. "This is about who we are as a people and where were going as a nation. Let's hang around, let's get stoned and let's wait for more votes!"

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