In a Kirkland ranch house surrounded by towering evergreens, Steve Sarich is pacing his living room, smoking a pipe, and talking a blue streak into his cell phone.
John Keatley
Sarich at home: The brownies help him sleep.
John Keatley
Way past the limit: Sarich in his grow shed.
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Thumping music comes from the basement, where the 59-year-old onetime Penthouse photographer and serial entrepreneur runs a medical-marijuana distribution outlet called Private Island Treats. Some half-dozen employees, "volunteers," and friends in their 20s and 30s are coming and going. They include Chelsea Fennell, a 20-year-old aspiring model who became Sarich’s girlfriend—and a medical-marijuana patient—after coming to his house for help with her portfolio. Sarich’s two pit bulls and one Pomeranian are barking. And the TV, tuned to Fox News, is running silently.
Through it all, Sarich maintains a steady focus on his conversation, which is—to say the least—heated. At the other end of the line is a deputy with the King County Sheriff's Office who has been charged with investigating the attempted robbery-turned-shootout that took place at Sarich's home a month prior. What's got Sarich worked up is the fact that the sheriff's office is simultaneously investigating his medical-marijuana operation. State law allows patients with qualifying conditions to ingest marijuana, but it does not, in most people's interpretation, sanction operations like Sarich's, called dispensaries, which distribute large volumes of marijuana to many different patients and take money in exchange.
Sarich, who during the robbery attempt shot one intruder in the leg and chest with a .22 caliber pistol he keeps in his bedroom, is not most people. He argues that the law doesn't explicitly outlaw dispensaries—although it does say that someone who provides pot can do so for only one person at a time, a problem Sarich gets around by saying he does just that, every 15 minutes.
On the phone, he rages over the county's raid of his house shortly after the shootout. "You're trying to get cooperation from me at the same time that you're trying to prosecute me!" he exclaims to the deputy. "I guess Dan"—King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg—"can decide which of his cases is more important."
Sarich isn't waiting around for a decision. Although deputies seized nearly 400 plants, his dispensary is back up. In a small room downstairs, a man Sarich calls the "gardener" prunes and waters dozens of marijuana plants labeled by strain: Sweet Willy, Mango, Train Wreck, Jesus, Chocolope, Headband (plus one called Alloway, named for a particularly disliked drug cop).
A room down the hall is stocked with so-called "edibles." Shelves brim with snacks like brownies, sugar cookies, and Goldfish crackers coated with pot-infused butter. A freezer holds chocolate cheesecake and single-sized microwaveable meals, including pasta primavera, chicken alfredo, and macaroni and cheese.
By the end of the week, Sarich will have to pack up his plants, pot, and edibles. The Kirkland house, which he rents, is being foreclosed on. Now, however, he's got a more audacious plan—to open what you might call a full-service dispensary, with Internet access, massage, and a cafe. The intended location: "within a mile of Dan Satterberg's office," he says.
Sarich is nothing if not a provocateur. He says law enforcement has made him a test case, but he seems to be doing everything he can to make sure they do. "Prove that I'm doing something illegal," he says. "Give it your best shot."
His challenge comes at a critical moment for the medical-marijuana movement. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced in October that his office would not prosecute medical-marijuana cases, fueling an explosion of dispensaries both locally and nationally. Whereas a year ago there were maybe a dozen in the Seattle area, now there are anywhere from 25 to 100, according to estimates by local medical-marijuana leaders. Nevertheless, as the Sarich case shows, these dispensaries—and, for that matter, patients who run afoul of state restrictions on how much pot any one person can have—are still vulnerable to busts by local law enforcement.
A proposed initiative to fully legalize marijuana (medical or otherwise) in Washington, called Initiative 1068, might make the legal issues around dispensaries moot, should it get on the ballot and pass in November. But if not, the Sarich saga may force the state legislature, as well as law enforcement, to take some kind of action. "It's really highlighted something a lot of people are not aware of," says Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle), meaning dispensaries and the legal netherworld they fall into. She says she intends to sponsor a bill in the next session that would allow and regulate them.
Yet others are fearful that Sarich—with his guns, his brashness, his entrepreneurial drive, and his circle of followers who look too young and healthy to need pot as medicine—will stir up a backlash against medical marijuana just as it seems to be gaining ever more legitimacy. Consequently, some of the most vehement hostility toward Sarich comes from within the medical-marijuana movement—a movement, not incidentally, in the middle of an identity crisis.
Sarich is 5'8,'' with brown hair combed away from his forehead, an intense gaze, and a slight paunch. His normal outfit is jeans and a leather jacket, and little about him seems out of the ordinary. Except his obvious love for a good fight.
