Club Pot Med

Jon Graves heard noise behind his house one evening last October. The house backed onto an alley in the University District, and he was always watchful. He went to the back of the house to investigate. A woman was banging on his bedroom window from the alley below.

Graves calls her a crackhead and crack dealer. He took a laser pointer and aimed it at a "No Trespassing" sign. The woman and Graves exchanged unpleasantries. "Take your crack dealing somewhere else," Graves said to her. She'd been a hassle for him before. "They were always out back of the framing shop doing their thing," Graves says.

At some point, Graves pointed to an unloaded Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, hanging on a rack on his bedroom wall. Graves, about 5 feet 8 inches tall, stout, with a broken spine, was a firm believer in keeping neighborhood crackheads and street people from his property—and being capable of dealing with them should they break in. Once they learned what was inside his home, he'd be screwed.

Graves, you see, had a medical marijuana growing operation, associated with a religious group called Earth Family Ministries, in the basement of the house on 12th Avenue Northeast. Known as a "group grow," the garden had about 100 plants—worth maybe $200,000 on the street when fully grown, although many plants were far from mature. Graves was part of the subculture providing medical marijuana for patients in the Seattle area. In his case, Graves says, he and others grew the pot for at least 10 patients.

The crackhead called Seattle police. And so Graves' house became the site of the biggest medical marijuana bust in Seattle since medical marijuana was legalized in Washington in 1998.

If Graves' attorney, Douglas Hiatt, a crusader in a Cubs T-shirt and jeans, gets his way, a crackhead will help change state law. But back to the bust.

At 8:26 p.m., police arrived to investigate the alleged assault because the weapon was displayed. The cops caught the skunky odor of marijuana coming from the house—probable cause on the breeze. Graves, who'd been inside smoking against his back pain, came to the front porch to answer their query. The break in his spine is held together by interlocking C-clamps, and only a few hours go by when Graves isn't in acute pain, pain that multiple surgeries have not corrected.

One cop asked about a small tree in the front yard. A marijuana plant?

"It's a Japanese maple," Graves explained. Then he leveled with the cops: Inside the house was a pot grow for chronically ill patients. He told them, he says, that he wasn't the sole gardener, that others helped him grow the pot. Patients were working collectively to grow medical marijuana for one another—a group grow, as they are called, but nowhere near as in the open as they are in California.

Graves had run afoul of a gray area in Washington state's medical marijuana law, approved by voters. The law is silent on how patients incapable of growing for themselves are to gain access to medical marijuana.

The police entered Graves' home, the ministry, and seized about 100 marijuana plants in various stages of maturity. Seattle police also seized $1,730 in cash, money Graves said came from patients for the power bill. The cops clearly thought otherwise. They also took the shotgun and a Daisy air rifle in the sweep.

Then, police did something that could only happen in a city where police generally couldn't care less about pot. They permitted Graves to keep nine plants, as allowed under city of Seattle policy for medical marijuana patients; 2 pounds of dried marijuana; and several bongs and other smoking paraphernalia.

Graves says a sergeant on the scene told him that SPD was looking for a test case, in essence, to clarify the ill-defined medical marijuana law.

Soon after, Hiatt, a former public defender, got involved. He usually does. If there's a bust involving medical marijuana within state borders, Hiatt has his finger in the dike in some fashion, no matter how major or chippy the case, always working to get charges dropped by convincing cops and prosecutors that, yes, there is a medical marijuana law and his client abides by it. It's Hiatt's jihad in the drug war.

Is there a medical marijuana patient threatened with eviction from public housing? Hiatt pounds on the Seattle Housing Authority. A medical marijuana patient tests positive for pot on an employer-required piss test? Hiatt can negotiate that job back.

The mess that gets Hiatt out of bed each day exists because the state's medical marijuana law is so broadly worded that cops keep busting legitimate patients, that judges state that the law doesn't exist, and that newly diagnosed cancer patients, for example, are frequently left with no practical way to grow their own marijuana, as the law allows. They are a bit too sick, and it takes three to four months to go from seed to weed. That's a lot of vomiting in the meantime.