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SUING THE REAPER
LA City Beat | By Dean Kuipers | Posted June 25, 2004.

A South L.A. sickle-cell patient had to sue the LAPD to stop pulling up her legal pot harvest

When agents of the DEA came swarming over the garden wall into Sister Somayah Kambui’s backyard on October 8, 2003, guns drawn, the snappy, outspoken medical marijuana patient wasn’t really surprised. The house she owns in South L.A. had been raided a reported six times since 1996, and usually in September or October – harvest time for marijuana. The agents did not handcuff her, but asked her to step aside so they could pull up 12 healthy plants, one of them the size of a gangly Christmas tree. Kambui, who relies on marijuana to combat debilitating pain from sickle-cell anemia, was in tears.

Then her eyes fixed on someone who turned her sorrow to rage: accompanying the federal agents was LAPD Detective Steve McArthur.

McArthur had busted Kambui at least four previous autumns, and each time there had either been no charges filed or, most important, she’d been acquitted and her grow operation approved under California’s 1996 Compassionate Use Act, better known as Proposition 215. Unable to get an indictment under state law, McArthur had brought in the feds, whose warrant was based solely on his testimony. After two hours of questioning, the DEA set Kambui free, and one of the agents even gave her a hug.

Kambui, however, had had enough of Detective McArthur. She filed a civil suit against McArthur, the LAPD, the City of Los Angeles, and “John Does 1-50” in January, backed by an increasingly effective medical cannabis advocacy group, Bay Area-based Americans for Safe Access. Steph Sherer, ASA’s executive director, says the group spends most of its time battling federal raids, but this case sends an important message to the state.

“The Compassionate Use Act has been in effect for seven years, and there’s been no implementation,” says Sherer. “Activists and patients across the state have done the best that they can to set policies that work, but the truth is, these are sick people. We have to show cities and counties there’s actually a financial reason why they have to start listening to this: million-dollar suits against their police departments.”

LAPD spokesman Jason Lee declined to comment on the case, noting, “It is our policy of not making any statements on ongoing lawsuits.”

“The LAPD, in particular, has frequently raided legitimate medical marijuana patients, seized their medicine, and in the majority of cases doesn’t file charges,” says Joe Elford, ASA attorney representing Kambui. “We hope this will cause the police to change their policy from ‘seize first, ask questions later’ to ‘ask questions first and seize only if those questions suggest that the person is not in fact a legitimate medical marijuana patient.’”

“This man, McArthur, has literally thwarted our ability to reach our goal,” says Kambui, interviewed by phone from her home. The purpose of the peer support group she founded, the Crescent Alliance Self Help for Sickle Cell Research, is to empower sickle-cell sufferers through “herbs, nutrition, and lifestyle change,” she says, and get them off heavy narcotics.

“I know of no other class, race, creed – designated genetically or otherwise – born to live and to die to be dependent upon narcotics, and to be dependent on the conventional medical world. That’s bullcrap,” she growls. “That sounds like slavery.”

The suit seeks to redress unreturned property and civil rights violations, not from the 2003 DEA raid, but from a previous incident in which McArthur arrested Kambui on September 26, 2002. At least one of the 16 causes of action listed in the suit could result in punitive damages. She is also seeking injunctions to prevent the LAPD from having any part in future raids on her legal stash.

Kambui has a lot at stake; with two felony convictions from her work in the early 1970s with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, she risks a 25-to-life sentence under California’s “three strikes” law if she were ever convicted on pot offenses.

The story of this lawsuit begins on October 5, 2001, when McArthur led a team of LAPD officers into Kambui’s home and arrested her, warrant in hand, seizing what officers claimed were 260 pounds of wet-weight marijuana, pot cookies, and “hash oil.” Kambui was indicted on 14 counts and spent 62 days in jail before going to trial, during which time her health deteriorated. On the stand, expert witnesses clarified that the real dried weight of Kambui’s marijuana crop was 11-25 pounds (still a sizable amount) and that the so-called “hash oil” was really hempseed oil, pressed from sterilized seeds, with negligible amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, the psychoactive ingredient in pot. On March 18, 2002, she was acquitted on all counts and her cannabis was returned to her.

Six months after her 2002 acquittal, however, Kambui was raided again by McArthur on September 26, and this time he had no warrant. Officers found Kambui and her brother praying in the garden, where 25 plants were growing. According to testimony given by her brother, who was arrested, one of the officers called for a warrant right there on the spot and was denied. With no warrant and no subsequent indictment, all charges were later thrown out, and Kambui and her brother were released after four days. The plants were destroyed.

It is this raid, the September 26, 2002 search and seizure, that is the subject of the lawsuit.

Kambui was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia at age 19 when she was in the U.S. Air Force. Her father, a Choctaw Indian, introduced her to pot as a way to cope with the excruciating pain caused by the disease, which increases with age. The fatal malady is usually treated with morphine and other opiates, and many sickle-cell patients actually die of a morphine overdose. Kambui’s Veterans Administration physician, Dr. Alan Lichtenstein, and Dr. William Eidelman of Santa Monica, whose license was temporarily suspended in 2001 for distributing medical marijuana, both testified at her trial that marijuana was uniquely suited to manage pain in Kambui’s case, because she was allergic to Demerol and it allowed her to drastically cut her morphine intake. Kambui credits the weed with keeping her alive. She doesn’t smoke it, but almost always cooks the buds into teas, tinctures, and foods. Her folk remedy and her research have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This kind of shows you how ass-backwards all this is,” says Elford. “In the name of the drug war, they’re trying to require someone to take much more serious narcotics than relatively harmless marijuana. And in this case, not just much more serious narcotics in terms of toxicity and addictiveness, but in this case, narcotics that are actually extremely harmful to the person prescribed them.”

In 1993, Kambui founded the Crescent Alliance, which informs patients how to use cannabis to manage pain, including frank discussions about how to grow weed, press hemp oil (which she claims has anti-inflammatory properties), and use massage, baths, and other techniques to battle pain and inflammation. Sherer believes it is this aspect of her work, in which patients with sickle-cell, AIDS, cancer, and other ailments come to her house, that is the real reason for the repeated busts.

When asked how many patients she sees at her house, Kambui replies: “That’s confidential. But I work with a substantial amount, obviously a threat to the LAPD – enough to where they think I’m gonna have some kind of economic development program going on here, and gee, I might end up being independent or something.”

That independence, says Steph Sherer, lies at the heart of this case; Proposition 215 was supposed to give patients another option for treatment of serious illness. “That’s a huge part of this issue,” she says, “money and politics deciding about your life. I guarantee if you ask any person in the United States: ‘Would you break a law to live?’ Hell, yeah, you would.”

More information on Kambui’s case can be found at www.geocities.com/sistersomayah.

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Alien Space Signal

There's no money for your issue so long as we're squandering $50 billion a year on the DrugWar. Ben Masel

Fear became the ultimate tool of this government - V.

 

cassiusclay

I hope this lawsuit sticks it them good. I also hope Sister Somayah recieves that million dollars or more settlement. Godamn assholes!!!

StewScum

This is strait harrassment from the LAPD and should not be tolerated by anyone. She is sick. GIVE HER A BREAK. Honostly, a woman that cannot take the "better" legal opiates is given an pain reliever that is safer and not addicting and she is in court half the time. I too hope she gets a just suit for all the plants she has lost.

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Life is like a pot of stew, if you don't stir it up every once and a while, all the scum rises to the top -Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.

TiKiTiKi

she totally deserves a very healthy settlement. Especially for the plant that looked like a christmas tree!!

smoking_joe_lee

It's all about money and where you live and who you are. The person in question here is African-American and lives in South [Central] LA, probably the most economically disadvantaged area of the entire greater Los Angeles area. Travel 10 miles northwest on the 405 freeway and you enter another world. Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood; LAPD is there to "protect and serve" and not hassle folks, unless their name is Simpson and he is probably guilty anyway. Even then, LAPD handled him quite differently than, say, Rodney King.
"It's the ECONOMICS, stupid!"
Smoking Joe

 

freshair

There is so much harassment. Seems like the police job is to protect and harass. What they need to do is protect and serve hash.

Suetaz

I hope many more medical marijuana patients sue thier police departments. This would force them to back off. I think Sister Somayah will fight this to the bitter end and I know never to underestimate the power of a p*ssed off woman! Go get 'em Sister Somayah!

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