At My Joint, Please Keep Off the Grass

The way Craig Tennis tells it, he and his show-biz pals, New York expatriates all, needed a place to hang out, have a drink and complain.

So with a little help from his friends, Tennis, a comedy writer, opened re$iduals in 1986. Cute name, re$iduals, christened in honor of those royalties actors and writers get for reruns. The decor in the Studio City bar features framed checks for sums as small as $0.12.

So maybe it was somebody famous (but probably not) whom Tennis encountered the other day in the alley behind his bar. The man, a regular, was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with an odd but not unfamiliar aroma.

“I tore into him,” Tennis said.

The man who used to write skits for Johnny Carson and the Mighty Carson Art Players was not amused. Angrily, Tennis told the customer that he could lose his liquor license because of illegal activities in and around his bar. The customer calmly inhaled, reached into his shirt pocket and handed Tennis a physician’s prescription for marijuana.

“Normally I pride myself on having the last word,” Tennis said. “This time I could think of nothing to say.”

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These days California marijuana laws seem suspended in a gray haze. We Golden Staters approved Proposition 215, thus blessing the medicinal use of cannabis. Federal authorities, however, are challenging the initiative in court. So everybody from high-ranking law enforcement officials to barkeeps like Tennis find themselves trying to understand a shifting reality.

Consider the case of Todd McCormick, the 27-year-old cancer survivor who was arrested after 4,100 marijuana plants were allegedly found growing at his rented Bel-Air mansion. Hemp activist and actor Woody Harrelson has agreed to post the $500,000 bond for McCormick.

Certainly 4,100 plants would seem to strain the legal definition of “personal use,” but McCormick has offered an interesting explanation. No entrepreneur, McCormick has long advocated marijuana as medicine. He says he was breeding different strains, trying to enhance its therapeutic value. Do we fault researchers trying to make better antibiotics?

Tennis, who is 57, says he understands the beneficial value of marijuana, having seen how it made his elderly mother’s last year of cancer treatment bearable. That’s why he voted yes on Proposition 215, he says. But Tennis, like most of us, didn’t anticipate all the questions it would raise.

“If someone decides to light up a joint in my establishment,” Tennis asked, “have I the legal, moral or ethical right to forbid it? Am I allowed to tell someone they can’t use prescription drugs in my bar? . . . And if that’s correct, then where do I draw the line? If someone is having an angina attack, may I tell them they can’t take their nitroglycerin tablets?

“If individuals with prescriptions for marijuana are allowed to medicate themselves in public, then in my paranoia, I envision re$iduals becoming a bar like those we’ve heard about in Amsterdam, where a person who walks in for conversation and a club soda becomes so stoned on secondhand cannabis smoke, they’re legally intoxicated before they can find a table.”

Now, it occurred to me that some people wouldn’t complain about a little Amsterdam atmosphere. Certainly this would distinguish his tavern from others.

Tennis assured me that he doesn’t like smoke of any kind, but worries most about the side effects of sanctioning marijuana. How hard would it be, after all, to get a prescription? How could a barkeep know if it were a forgery? What would the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control have to say?

I posed Tennis’ questions to people who might have answers.

“That sounds like a man who needs to talk to his lawyer,” said Maureen Siegel, chief of the criminal division of the Los Angeles city attorney’s office.

OK, we’ll start with Tennis’ lawyer, Joshua Kaplan. The crucial point, as Kaplan saw it, was the difference between simple possession of prescription marijuana and the consumption of it in a public place.

Your doctor, after all, might say a nightly glass of red wine would be good for your heart, but that doesn’t mean you can stroll down Ventura Boulevard drinking Boone’s Farm from a brown paper bag. So certainly Tennis had every right, Kaplan suggested, to ask his customer to cease and desist smoking pot in and around the premises.

Dale Rasmussen, the ABC’s district administrator, said Tennis’ question was a first for him, and he believes the barkeep responded correctly. The law, Rasmussen suggested, would still be less tolerant of prescription marijuana than, say, prescription Valium.

If ABC investigators were aware of a marijuana violation, Rasmussen said, not only could that spell trouble for the tavern owner, but evidence would be referred to the city attorney’s office.

So now we return to prosecutor Siegel. Kaplan’s comments made sense to me, but Siegel says the marijuana laws actually don’t distinguish between possession for personal use and public consumption. If somebody with a marijuana prescription decided to light up on a beach, she said, an officer might still confiscate the pot and issue a citation. But prosecutors, upon review, may decide against pressing charges.

Siegel told the story of a man who, not long ago, was arrested with a small amount of marijuana. The suspect also had a letter from a noted AIDS specialist declaring that the man had HIV-related wasting syndrome and the doctor had “no objection” to his use of marijuana.

The wording was interesting. This wasn’t a prescription; the doctor had simply acquiesced in writing. Proposition 215 allowed marijuana use “recommended” by a physician.

“As a prosecutor,” Siegel continued, “at some point you have to make a determination whether or not you can make a successful prosecution.”

The city attorney’s office dropped the case.

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Kaplan, Rasmussen and Siegel were just offering considered opinions. Questions will keep popping up, and right now definitive answers are hard to come by.

Say you drop into a bar for a medicinal glass of wine the doctor has casually recommended. Patrons everywhere are boozing it up and puffing away on their carcinogenic nicotine-delivery systems. Say your doctor prescribes that you toke half a reefer a day. Or maybe you just know a shifty physician who writes prescriptions for a fee. Or maybe not even a real doctor, but a guy who plays one on TV and has an unreadable autograph. . . .

The Old West had its opium dens. Will the New West have pot pubs?

I doubt it, but just thinking about it makes me thirsty. If a little merlot is good for you, a gin and tonic must be terrific, right?

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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.