Portland cafe's specialty: medical-marijuana tokes

PORTLAND — At the newly opened Cannabis Cafe, people sit around taking tokes from a "vaporizer" — a contraption with a big plastic bag that captures the potent vapors of heated marijuana.

Glass jars hold donations of dried, milky-green weed, and the cafe serves up meals and snacks for the hungry.

It's all perfectly legal and, for cancer patient Albert Santistevan, it's about time.

"It's a very positive atmosphere. We could use more places like that," the 56-year-old former jewelry-shop owner said.

A few weeks ago, Santistevan would have had no place to go. But with the Obama administration's decision last month to soften the federal stance on medical marijuana, the Cannabis Cafe and a lounge across town popped up, bringing a little bit of pot-friendly Amsterdam to a working-class corner of Portland.

The idea could catch on in the roughly dozen other states with medical-marijuana laws. Allen St. Pierre, spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, said the organization has already gotten inquiries from Washington state, Michigan, Montana and Maine.

Portland police have not received any complaints about the cafe and it is not under any special scrutiny, officials said.

Jan Clutter lives about a block from the cafe and knows the owners well. She said many neighbors probably would prefer it were somewhere else, but there has been no push to have it moved. For some, things could be worse than having a pot cafe.

"It's better than having a sex club, a strip joint or a bar full of drunks open down the street," neighbor Claudia Nix said.

In 1998, Oregon became the second state to pass a medical-marijuana law, after California. There are nearly 24,000 patients with medical-marijuana cards in Oregon. Only state residents can obtain the cards after registering as patients in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program with a qualifying debilitating medical condition diagnosed by a doctor.

Even though they have a card, medical-marijuana patients have had to confine their smoking to their homes for fear of getting busted.

"We have no place of our own. So this is the place," said Madeline Martinez, executive director of the Oregon chapter of NORML, which operates and monitors the cafe.

No marijuana is sold there. Instead, patients bring in their own, which they also may donate for other patrons to use. The cafe has a pool table and comfy couches.

Martinez demonstrated the "Volcano," a vaporizer that collects marijuana fumes into a clear plastic pouch with a valve that releases the fumes for patients to inhale.

People who want to use marijuana at the cafe can't get inside until Martinez or other NORML members check their IDs to make sure they are patients registered with the state. The patients also have to be members of Oregon NORML to use the cafe and must pay a fee of $20 a month and a $5 coverage charge, which goes toward operating costs.

In another part of the city, Steve Geiger has turned the backroom of his pipe shop into a small lounge called Highway 420 — a number pot users have used as code for marijuana breaks. Rules for using the lounge are similar to those at the Cannabis Cafe. Geiger opened it in late October, and eight to 10 people come in on a typical day. They sit around, talk and watch TV while smoking marijuana.

Geiger said it's only fair for medical-marijuana users to have a place where they can socialize and use their medicine.

"The truth is that nobody that takes medication every day would be told you have to take that at home," said Geiger, who spent about 30 years working with computers before opening the shop.

One of the state's staunchest law-and-order figures, Oregon Anti-Crime Alliance President Kevin Mannix, said he wishes there had been more public discussion about the cafes before any were opened. He worries Oregon's law could be stretched beyond the original purpose of personal use for relief from disease or chronic pain, and said lawmakers need to weigh in before more cafes open.