San Diego Reader

Colleen Daley lives on a sunburnt patch of overzoned Chula Vista real estate. She is besieged by the odiferous crosscurrents of wafting grease and the crackling bark of drive-in order speakers — her one-bedroom ranch is surrounded by fast-food joints. And that’s where she thinks her problems as a marijuana farmer started.

“The plants were eight feet tall,” she says. “My boyfriend and I were trying to keep things under wraps, but you know, you can only do so much. So it’s like they kind of knew.”

“They,” she suspects, were employees from one of these restaurants who had spotted her marijuana plants sprouting up through the roof of the greenhouse tucked in the far left corner of the yard, a rust bucket of a thing in its final stages of dilapidation. Daley guesses that if some covetous neighbor couldn’t have Daley’s grow, he’d made sure she couldn’t either.

“There were 13 officers in ninja outfits,” she recalls, of the day the police busted her.

She had 20 plants, putting her grow at 8 plants over the legal limit according to the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 (California Proposition 215), which makes the growing, purchasing, and ingestion of marijuana legal for those who can demonstrate a medical need for the drug.

Daley smokes pot because she suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS). Most of the time, she deals with an exhausting but manageable combination of muscle numbness, irritation, and spasms. But she knows it’s only a matter of time before her MS kicks into high gear.

She’s a big girl, “on the hefty side,” as she puts it. Her fleshy face holds expressive brown eyes, and when she smiles they smile right along. “It’s a lifetime thing,” she says of the disease. “The regression is very slow — like a slow torture.”

MS eats away at the sheathing around the brain and spinal chord — in the same way that mice will nibble away at a house’s plastic-coated wires. Depending on its severity, the disease causes excruciating pain. Daley has undergone heart surgery and lives with a pacemaker and a mechanical aortic valve in her heart. The mutiny in Daley’s body has also manifested itself in a bizarre condition known as Arnold-Chiari malformation, in which part of the brain pushes down through the base of the skull.

“The first time I went to get diagnosed by a neurologist, he sent me for a neck X-ray,” she says. “They found out that — this is so weird — that I had about an inch and a half of brain leaking down my neck — like the stem was coming down into it. Right, like I don’t have enough problems. So I had to have brain surgery too.”

Cannabis’s active ingredient is THC — tetrahydrocannabinol — a complex molecule that custom fits itself to inhibitors and stimulators in the human body’s neurological skein. Medical research is coming around to what everyone from Bob Marley to William F. Buckley has held to be true — by tweaking these various response mechanisms in the body, the naturally occurring THC in marijuana palliates pain and delivers an intricate palette of highs that depend on the cultivation and processing of the cannabis plant.

The other common active ingredient in marijuana, cannabidiol (CBD), works as both a spigot for THC, controlling the amount released by the plant, while adding its own particular effect to the drug. If THC puts the “high” in marijuana high, then CBD puts the “stone” in marijuana stone. Working as a sedative, it both complements and counteracts the THC, leading growers to breed pot varietals that rival wine grapes in number and flavor.

It was Daley’s desire to process her own marijuana that first led the CVPD on its wild goose chase — before the CVPD could confiscate her grow, it’s had a tough time of it corralling three ornery China geese that made no distinction between cops and thieves.

With 700 square feet of backyard to run around in and three kiddie pools to wade in, the geese served as guards for Daley’s late, great marijuana-growing operation. She put the geese out there, she said, after she began noticing footprints and bent plots of grass where sleeping bodies, presumably transients, had lain the night before.

As a backup to her guard geese, Daley electrified the top of a five-foot-high stone wall, enclosing her backyard with a livestock fence packing a 7000-volt charge.

“You really have to be trying to get over that wall to hit that charge,” she explains. “And one night, someone did.”

She figures that one of the restaurants’ employees just couldn’t resist.

“I have an audio tape [part of a homemade camera surveillance system] of a pulsating shock and then—” Her face lights up with a mixture of sympathy and mischievous delight — a scream — ‘AH...

AHHH... AHH... AHHHHHHH!’ And then a couple of minutes later you hear a girl’s voice saying, ‘Can you stand up?’ So someone got zapped and thrown, and I heard the scream — I was up watching TV, say ten o’clock at night — and you can hear me in the audio tape saying, ‘Yeah.… That’s why I bought [the electric fence]!’ ”

Perhaps, she acknowledges, the precautions were too effective — not long after, the CVPD came knocking. Daley admits to being guilty as charged of exceeding her 12-plant limit, but she found out the hard way that the letter of the law is all that matters to officers of the law.

“I was way over my legal limit, so I can’t say anything about that because that was my fault. But we were growing outdoors, and bugs were killing everything, and we went through two harvests without production because of the bugs. With this second harvest, the cops showed up and took everything. They left one plant for me, and I told them that they were taking my medicine…”

These days she buys her weed. Compared to growing her own, the monthly visit to a local dispensary (she won’t reveal its name or location) leaves a hollowed-out feel to her wallet.

“The difference really was the quality,” she says. “Medical marijuana [from the dispensaries] — you’re paying out the butt for it. Street prices, you can get half a pound of Mexi on the street for anywhere from $300–$350 for half a pound; but you go to a medical-marijuana store, and you pay $70 for an eighth of an ounce,” or $1200 for a half pound.

Daley smokes both strains of pot, indica to enhance sleep and sativa to palliate her chronic pain. The most popular theory differentiating the two relates to the fact that the sativa plant has a higher THC-to-CBD ratio. Its ingestion yields a livelier high — think Bill Cosby’s take on a pothead laughing his ass off at a hamburger. This sort of high diminishes the body’s pain levels to a manageable degree. The converse ratio — higher CBD-to-THC — is found in the indica strain, allowing a smoker to achieve a heavier high — think the languishing, stoned-out look of a veteran pothead. In fact, the stereotype is not altogether unfair: it is this particular property of indica that facilitates a horizontal attitude after ingestion.

“So far, medical marijuana has handled every MS symptom I’ve had,” Daley attests.

According to Daley, she was never charged with a crime after the raid, receiving only an incident report from the CVPD.

“I think once the cops found out I was small potatoes, they never came back. They never did anything to me. They told me not to grow ever again — and I said, ‘Don’t worry about that — you scared the you-know-what right out of me.’ ”

And with a wave of her hand, she dismisses the police and neighbors as two of medical marijuana’s more unfortunate — but acceptable — side effects.

How big? How much? How often?

Despite Daley’s insouciance, San Diego’s legal community is feeling the side effects of medical marijuana. And no wonder, given that San Diego has a hate-hate relationship with Prop 215. The anti–medical-marijuana crowd hates it for going too far to indulge the rights of patients, and the pro–medical-marijuana crowd hates it for not going far enough.

Whichever side of the joint Californians see it from, Prop 215 ensures the right to medical marijuana as recommended by a physician and lists a number of diseases that benefit from its use. It ensures that patients, physicians, and caregivers are protected under the law from persecution or sanction. It even has the benefit of an accompanying bill — California SB 420 was signed into law as Gray Davis’s parting shot in 2003 — calling for the creation of a voluntary identification-card program and limiting the number of plants — 6 mature and 12 immature — a patient may grow. SB 420 also limits the size of a patient’s stash to eight ounces at any one time.

San Diego attorney Patrick Dudley never meant to become involved with medical-marijuana law. But as lawmakers pass a flurry of amendments and clarifications on Prop 215 around the statehouse like doobies on a Saturday night, lawyers such as Dudley are stuck defending a stream of California residents hauled into court on federal charges. Knowing that these cases, which stem from foggy distinctions persisting in the current law, can be easily remedied, Dudley’s routine has all the professional satisfaction of getting stuck with an empty roach clip.

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