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PRESCRIPTION FOR CHANGE 1 With 43 medical marijuana dispensaries in San Franci... Page 3 of8 The Haight Street club is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 on Sundays. Patients can buy up to 2 ounces of pot every day, even on Christmas. An ounce, which ranges from $60 to $300 on the club's price list depending on quality, would be enough for 50 to 60 average- size joints, Beck said. To gain entry past the metal door and into the main room, decorated with Day-G!o murals, patients show their city-issued card that verifies a need for medical marijuana. (The state of California will begin issuing similar patient cards this summer.) The cards -- the city's way of identifying patients who qualify under Prop. 215 -- entitle holders to carry up to a half-pound of marijuana and possess either six mature plants or 12 immature plants. The cards also are required for entry into most city clubs, though some also take doctors' notes. In 2000, the first year that cards were issued by the city, 754 city residents received them. In 2004,7,014 cards were issued, an increase of 830 percent in just four years. Currently, 8,200 city residents have valid cards, and about 25 cards are issued each day. Those numbers include renewals of expired cards, however, making it impossible to know exactly how many new people receive cards each year. The city does not know how many pot clubs exist. Until 2003, there were five or six clubs, said Wayne Justmann, a major advocate ofthe medical marijuana movement since the first major club in the country opened on Market Street in 1994. In early 2004, Oakland, which had the largest concentration of pot clubs in the Bay Area, limited the number of clubs in the city to four. Police and club owners say that's when the explosion of clubs in San Francisco began. This expansion is encouraging to people who view medical marijuana as a half- step to full legalization of the drug. But it hasn't swayed the Drug Enforcement Administration. "According to the federal statutes, there is no such thing as medical marijuana. There is no accepted medical use," said Richard Meyer, spokesman for the DEA. However, "Our No.1 priority in California is methamphetamine, not marijuana," he said. Marijuana is second, agency officials said. Fear of eventual federal consequences has stopped many doctors from making recommendations for medical marijuana. That has created a market for people like Talleyrand, who is one of a handful of doctors who make the bulk of medical marijuana recommendations that allow city residents to obtain an ID card, according Anne Okubo, financial officer at the Department of Public Health who oversees the daily operations of card distribution. Talleyrand, 37, came to San Francisco in 1995 for residency work at San Francisco General Hospital after graduating from Boston University. He said he is more fulfilled working with marijuana than practicing traditional Western medicine, and in January 2004, he founded Medicann, an organization of five medical marijuana clinics throughout the state that has grown to 10 clinics today. Two of those clinics are in San Francisco; others are in Oakland, San Rafael, Santa Cruz, http:l /sfgate.com!cgi-binlarticle.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/24/MNGDTCEA9H I.DTL&type=pr... 4/29/2005