In Santa Cruz, an Official Handout of Medicinal Pot

SAN FRANCISCO —  Officials in the ultra-liberal seaside town of Santa Cruz may not be marijuana smokers themselves, but on Tuesday they became pot purveyors with a political cause.

In a display of defiance triggered by a recent federal bust of a local medical marijuana club, Mayor Christopher Krohn and numerous City Council members met outside City Hall to join workers from the Women’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in dispensing the drug to sick patients.

Several hundred residents filled the town’s City Hall plaza to cheer speakers and throw an old-fashioned anti-government rally.

Santa Cruz Vice Mayor Emily Reilly said suppliers drew names from a hat to symbolically hand out pot prescriptions to a dozen patients who would have normally picked up their medication in private Tuesday. Each time the drug was dispensed, she said, the crowd went wild.

“What was best were the speeches,” Reilly said. “There were medical marijuana attorneys, doctors and even a county supervisor. And the message was about love and healing and trying to alleviate suffering.”

Six of seven council members appeared, along with Krohn.

But Richard Meyer, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in San Francisco, was not amused.

“We’re dismayed that the City Council and the mayor of Santa Cruz would condone the distribution of marijuana,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re thinking, but they’re flaunting federal law. And we here at the DEA take violations of the law very seriously.”

Marijuana--medical or otherwise--is illegal under federal law. But under California law, the drug is legal if it is recommended by a doctor. Meyer would not say whether DEA agents had attended the rally and would not discuss whether any arrests had been made.

Police referred all media calls to City Hall on Tuesday, but local authorities said they did not plan to arrest anyone who showed up with a marijuana prescription.

Reilly said she saw no federal officers on the ground, “but there was a helicopter overhead that we assumed was full of them.”

On Sept. 5, federal agents raided a Santa Cruz medical marijuana collective, arrested three people and confiscated 130 plants.

The move was met with outrage by residents of this surfers’ haven and college town 75 miles southwest of San Francisco.

Four years before state voters approved Proposition 215, allowing marijuana for medicinal purposes, Santa Cruz residents--by a margin of 77%--approved a measure ending the prohibition of medical marijuana.

For years, Santa Cruz authorities have cooperated with local collectives, helping set standards for medicinal marijuana use, issuing IDs and looking the other way as suppliers provided free, organically grown marijuana.

No one answered the phone at the Women’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana on Tuesday, but a recording stressed that the event was not a “free pot giveaway” and that the drug would be distributed only to “certain patients with support of many city officials.”

The message described Tuesday’s gathering as a “wonderful, quiet and orderly vigil in honor of seriously ill and dying patients.”

Several other states have legalized medical marijuana, and Meyer said all those areas were possible sites of similar DEA raids.

“Like the officials in Santa Cruz, I’m sure they know that federal law supersedes state law, and under federal law, marijuana is illegal,” he said. “Drugs are not something to joke about, especially the city-sanctioned distribution of marijuana.”

Reilly said: “We don’t think it’s funny either. We take this issue very seriously.”