Jeff Jones has good reason for taking the heat in the medicinal marijuana battle

By Thaai Walker, Chronicle Staff Writer

As the cancer stole his father away bit by bit, 14-year-old Jeff Jones would sit by his bedside in their South Dakota home and talk about fishing and camping and other ordinary things a boy might discuss with his father, as though time wasn’t running out.

Those are days that Jones, now 24, does not like to remember. But he forces himself to when he needs a reminder of why he has given up everything—old friends, a college education, the regular worries of a young adult—to become one of Northern California’s leading crusaders for the rights of the ill and dying to use medicinal marijuana.

Soft-spoken and shy, Jones, the co-founder and executive director of Oakland’s Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative, seems an unlikely person to be at the center of one of the biggest political battles in California.

But in the almost two years since California’s passage of Proposition 215, the law that legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes, Jones’ cooperative has been labeled a model program and Oakland has willingly put itself at legal risk for the club by declaring it a city agency in an attempt to shield it from federal attempts to shut it down.

"Jeff has always made an attempt to be professional and has done everything he could to cooperate with the community, law enforcement, the medical community," says Dale Gieringer, coordinator of the California branch for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

A hearing on whether the case should go to a jury trial is scheduled for September 28. The clubs are allowed to remain open until then.

But Breyer rejected the Oakland club’s novel legal argument that it should be immune from prosecution because its staff had been designated as "officers of the city" by Oakland last month—a status, attorneys for the club argued, that gave it protection under a provision of the Federal Controlled Substances Act.

As a show of support, the City Council also told police to make medical marijuana arrests a low priority and passed a policy that gives users of medical marijuana permission to store up to 1 ½ pounds of it -- 24 times more than is allowed under state law.

Not everyone is happy about the leniency afforded the Oakland club. City Manager Robert Bobb, Police Chief Joseph Samuels and Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente have said they consider the 1 ½- pound policy too permissive.

Officials of the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on Jones or the club.

But 2,000 club members with AIDS, cancer, glaucoma and other ailments are delighted by what Jones has been able to pull off.

"He is putting his freedom on the line for us, the patients," says club member Ken Estes, a gaunt, ponytailed man who has been wheelchair-bound since a motorcycle accident 22 years ago. "I have the utmost respect for him for that."

Such sentiments weigh heavily on the lanky, boyish-faced Jones, who resembles those wholesome- looking missionaries who stand on street corners and politely but determinedly ask whether you’ve come to know the Lord yet. Jones is not a natural-born crusader. He speaks quietly and blushes easily.

In high school, he was kicked off the debate team because he mumbled.

"Sometimes, I think, ‘You’re only 24,’ and it freaks me out," Jones says. "I think, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ " For Jones, the daily worry isn’t simply that the club’s doors will someday be padlocked. As a named co-defendant in the federal suit against the club, Jones himself faces civil conspiracy charges. He worries that they may be upgraded to criminal and that he will end up in jail.

In his hometown of Rapid City, S.D., word of what he is doing in Oakland has spread. Old friends have severed ties, saying they don’t agree with his mission or that they are afraid of the federal attention he is attracting. After a story about Jones appeared in the local newspaper last year, the Rapid City mayor and sheriff threw an anti-marijuana rally.
(Ed. note: In 1984 Big Brother required daily sessions called the "Two-Minute Hate.")

Marijuana was never discussed when Jones’ father, Wayne, was dying of cancer. First it invaded his kidneys and then his lungs; he slipped from a hearty 200-pound man to a 100-pound silhouette of his former self in a matter of a year.

Years after his father’s death, when the growing national debate about marijuana for medicinal purposes caught his attention, Jones began to wonder whether marijuana would have helped ease his father’s torment. He now grows angry at the thought that it was never an option.

Jones came to the Bay Area in 1994 on a one-way bus ticket from South Dakota. He left college to join lobbying efforts to legalize marijuana.

After passage of Proposition 215 in November 1996, Jones and a handful of others opened the cannabis club in a third-floor office of a nondescript building on Broadway. Ten staff members and a handful of volunteers run the operation, which sees as many as 100 customers a day.

The Oakland cooperative is a different scene from the one captured by television news crews at Dennis Peron’s former San Francisco club a "social Amsterdam- like speakeasy" image that "tainted" all other clubs, lobbyist Gieringer says.

In contrast, the Oakland club is a no-smoking zone. A sign on the wall beyond the front door announces that cash, ATM cards and credit cards are accepted. Support groups and massages are offered.

Marijuana is sold from a back room that can be entered only by showing a police-approved club identification card to a private security guard. That card can be obtained only by providing a doctor’s letter that is verified by an on-staff nurse, Jones says.

But it is a somber place, too. Jones has gone, he says, from "one person in my immediate family dying to people dying all around me all the time."

He admits that part of him wants to finish college, to travel the world, to just be 24 and nothing else. Not a week goes by that he doesn’t question what he is doing.

Then he thinks of his father. And he is grounded.

"I knew in my father’s eyes what he was feeling when he was dying," he says.

"I know what I’m doing now is right."