The San Francisco Examiner; May 26, 1998
Marianne Costantinou and Gregory Lewis of the Examiner Staff; Ray Delgado and Tyche Hendricks of The Examiner staff contributed to this report.

Instead, the end for San Francisco's best known pot club came not with a bang but a whimper - in a dawn raid on a sleepy holiday morning, its controversial founder finally admitting defeat.

"I'm giving up," said Dennis Peron, the gubernatorial candidate who not only founded the club's predecessor, Cannabis Cultivators Club, but wrote Proposition 215, which legalized use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. "How am I going to fight these guys?" Peron asked Monday evening. "The government has all the sheriffs and the judges. All we've got is the people's will.

"It was a long run. It's the end of an era."

On Monday, seven homeless people who were camped out in the recently renamed club, Cannabis Healing Center, awoke to find about 30 deputy sheriffs inside the four-story building at 1444 Market St. The deputies were acting on a Superior Court order issued Thursday to shut the place within five days.

The homeless were given a few minutes to gather their things. The locks were changed, the doors were padlocked.

And the state's biggest and longest-running pot club, with about 9,000 members, was closed.

On Tuesday, Peron's attorney asked San Francisco Superior Court Judge William Cahill to permit Peron to use the premises as headquarters for his gubernatorial campaign.

Attorney David Nick said Peron and other club leaders "are willing to stop the entire marijuana operation" if he can just continue his politicking at the club for one more week.

Judge Cahill directed Nick to draft an order for review later in the day spelling out the defendants' explicit agreement that there would be no marijuana selling, cultivating, furnishing, storing, giving away or using on the premises in exchange for letting the Peron for Governor campaign back in the building.

Cahill's order came a week after a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the closing of six Bay Area pot clubs, including Peron's and a club in Oakland.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said federal drug laws supersede the state's 1996 initiative legalizing the medicinal use of marijuana.

Even though he was giving up on the pot club, Peron said Monday night that he intended to continue growing pot at his ranch in Lake County.

Agents for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration had raided the ranch two weeks ago and destroyed about 200 marijuana plants, said Peron. He called the ranch a co-operative marijuana farm used by 100 or so patients, and said they had replanted seeds.

At least two other pot clubs in San Francisco continued to do business on Monday. They had not been named in the federal injunction or in Cahill's order.

Members who arrived Monday afternoon at 1444 Market found locked doors, but helpful fellow members milling about outside directed them to other clubs: C.H.A.M.P, at 194 Church St., and ACT UP, the AIDS advocacy group, at 3991 17th St.

Ken Hayes Jr., head of C.H.A.M.P., an acronym for Cannabis Helping Alleviate Medical Problems, said people had not yet flooded his small club of about 500 members, most of them infected with HIV.

But patients were upset, he said.

"We've got some nervous people in here," said Hayes.

Hayes credits his club's low profile and its stringent medical reference checks of prospective patients for keeping it out of court battles. Undercover drug agents have testified that they were able to buy pot at Peron's club with phony doctors' notes.

Peron blamed his own controversial role as the leader in the medicinal marijuana movement as the reason his club was targeted. He said he hopes that by avoiding a continued court battle over the club's closure, he can save the club's backbone, Prop. 215.

Each day, 800 to 1,800 people bought clear plastic "-ounce bags of marijuana for $5 to $65, depending on quality, good for about seven generous joints. Many would hang around the club and smoke.

Peron has been in and out of court for years to save the club. After a court bout last month, he stepped down and turned the reins over to Hazel Rogers, a 79-year-old grandmother who smoked pot to treat her glaucoma.

But given his long history with the club and the building's dual role as his campaign headquarters, it seemed that Peron had never left.

On Monday, San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey, a proponent of Prop. 215, showed up with his deputies at about 6 a.m. A locksmith let them in through a back door.

"The deputies were very polite. Wonderful, really. No threats, no drawn guns, no handcuffs," said Neil Peron, 46, the founder's brother who often slept at the club because he is homeless.

Hennessey lamented a bit about having to close the pot club.

"Here was a place trying to do something the right way," he said. "But the cards are stacked against them. The federal and state government don't want it at all . . .

"If the federal and state government want to shut you down, you're going to get shut down."

The deputies took an inventory of the club. They found some young marijuana plants, a small amount of pot, and a dozen scales set up in an assembly line fashion, said Hennessey.

Four deputies were to stay with the building overnight. Hennessey planned to present the keys and inventory to the judge on Tuesday.

As the deputies sat inside, more than 100 people gathered at dusk Monday outside the locked doors of the club for a spirited vigil. Some of them carried candles, many smoked joints, a few were in wheelchairs.

The crowd cheered uproariously when Peron arrived and hopped on a fire hydrant to make an impromptu speech. In a passionate voice he pledged that though the club had closed, the fight for medical marijuana would go on.

As he vowed to reopen his campaign headquarters and battle Dan Lungren for the Republican nomination June 2, the crowd burst into a chant of "Peron, Peron, Peron." Then, with an impish look on his face, the candidate took a long toke from a joint someone passed him.

A young woman named Leigh Highbridge said the closure of the club has been a disaster for her.

Highbridge, who said she uses pot for a thyroid condition, now has to buy her supply on the street.

"I bought $10 worth at the Civic Center today," she said. "But it was all parsley or oregano, some kitchen herbs. It just gave me a headache."

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