Bryan Epis: I suffered chronic pain from a car accident long ago. I was seeing orthopedic specialists for compound fractures of the vertebrae, and they would prescribe things like codeine, Vicodin, but that stuff put me into a state of lethargy and incoherence. I complained to my doctors that I couldn't function as well as I liked on their pain medications, and they said all conventional pain killers would do the same thing. This was back in the 1980s, before Proposition 215 and all that. One of my doctors recommended I try marijuana. He said he couldn't prescribe it, but that it worked a little differently and wouldn't make me drowsy all the time. He was right. It worked well with the pain, and I wasn't as drowsy or lethargic or incoherent. I continued using it, and when the California medical marijuana law came into effect in 1996, I thought, "Oh, this is nice," and went out and got a recommendation from a physician.

Bryan Epis reunited with daughter Ashley

But one thing I noticed when I visited a few dispensaries was that they were charging the same price as on the street -- $50, $60, up to $80 for an eighth! I didn't see why patients should have to pay that much anymore. After all, the law had changed, right? I got the wild idea to lower the price. I thought I would open a dispensary and charge $10 an eighth. I was living up in Chico and I saw in the paper that someone was going to open a dispensary there. At the same time, I saw that San Jose -- my mom was living nearby in Silicon Valley -- had created some rules and regulations for dispensaries. I wrote to San Jose about that, but never started a dispensary there. Instead, I met the guy from Chico and we decided to start one there together.

I was pretty busy. I was also in my third year of law school, and at the same time, I was starting to really get intrigued with the Internet and was learning programming languages to get ready to set up a hotel reservation web site. [He has now done that -- http://www.bestlodging.com is the site.]

Chronicle: What happened in Chico?

Epis: It wasn't like San Jose. San Jose would say "Yes, send us a proposal, we'll work with you." They were complying with the spirit of the law. I thought Chico would be the same way, but they were hostile to the idea of a dispensary opening. They threatened us and said they might call the DEA. I was arrogant. I thought I was safe because I was complying with state law. I was reasonably relying on a San Francisco judge's holding that the California law permitted nonprofit dispensaries to operate. That didn't matter to the DEA, and they ended up raiding me.

Chronicle: You were charged with conspiracy to manufacture more than 1,000 plants and faced a mandatory ten year federal prison sentence if convicted as a drug dealer in federal court as a drug dealer in federal court. What happened at trial?

Epis: All of my defenses were denied. The judge ruled we couldn't use a medical necessity defense. We were denied an entrapment defense. We tried to argue that the federal courts didn't have jurisdiction under the commerce clause. That didn't work.

The only way the words "medical marijuana" got in the trial was because the prosecutor, Sacramento Assistant US Attorney Samuel Wong took one page out of my proposal to the San Jose authorities and used it to portray me as a greedy drug dealer. As I said, I was thinking about charging $10 an eighth for five star quality cannabis buds. As part of my proposal for a San Jose dispensary, while I was doodling one day, I made a spreadsheet with an overly ambitious preliminary calculation, with the dispensary going from 20 members to 100,000 nine months later. The rest of the 17-page proposal talked about how it was nonprofit, about how half of everything would go to charities and good causes, but we weren't allowed to bring in the other 16 pages because the judge didn't want the jury to hear about the cannabis clubs in San Jose.

I was charged with growing plants at my house, not distribution, but the government commingled everything. Chico Medical Marijuana Caregivers was totally separate from the San Jose dispensary, which didn't even exist except as a proposal. Using the one page spreadsheet, they claimed we were growing enough marijuana in my basement for 100,000 people! I was actually growing with four other people there, and I allowed them to grow there just because I was a nice guy. They didn't have anywhere else to go, and they were sick. Two of them are dead now. The prosecutor knew what his witnesses were saying was a lie, and they were allowed to lie to the jury. The judge let them get up there and lie, but he wouldn't let us mention cannabis clubs. The jury convicted me of conspiracy to grow more than a thousand plants, even though we never did, and I was sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy to follow California's medical marijuana law. I served 25 months and 26 days before I was released pending appeal. The county jails were the worst; they were horrendous. I spent almost ten months in county jails in between going to Lompoc and then Terminal Island Federal Prison.

Chronicle: It must have been great to be a free man again.

Epis: It was so nice. Mike Gray from Common Sense for Drug Policy and Don Duncan and Stacey Swimme of Americans for Safe Access picked me up. We went over to Mike's place, had some beer and wine and nuts and cheese, and then went out for sushi. I hadn't had any of that stuff for two years.

Chronicle: You have gained a lot of support over the years. There have been demonstrations on your behalf, people have gotten themselves arrested doing civil disobedience over your case, there was the billboard campaign. Why do you think your case has resonated so deeply?

Epis: I was one of the first to go to trial rather than taking a plea deal. Before Wong, there was a different prosecutor, and he offered a deal for six months of house arrest. I could have taken that, but then he left and Wong came along and suddenly instead of six months house arrest it was four years in prison. I figured why should I plead guilty for that, especially when I didn't think I was guilty of anything? Then, when I was sentenced to ten years for growing marijuana for patients, people were really sickened. That's when the billboard campaign with my daughter came about, with her holding a sign saying "My Dad is Not a Criminal." It was pretty nice to know you have that kind of support.

Chronicle: Now you face the prospect of doing more time. When do you have to go back to court?

	David Borden & Bryan Epis at the April 2005 NORML conference

Epis: August 1. The US 9th Circuit remanded my case back to federal district court in Sacramento pending the Raich decision. We were really hoping for a victory in Raich; they could have applied it to my case. Now that Raich has been decided and we lost, the prosecutor says it is time to resentence. It is possible it will be postponed, because we are arguing that the 9th Circuit first said I should be resentenced under the Blakely and Booker sentencing decisions, though they later changed that to "extant law applicable to sentencing." If they apply Blakely and Booker, that would nullify my mandatory minimum sentence and I could be resentenced under the guidelines. We're also arguing that the judge should not have found I was a "manager" or "supervisor" in sentencing me. We are asking for time served. I think that is way more than enough. The prosecutor wants the same ten year sentence.

Chronicle: What can people do to help at this point?

Epis: They can write to the judge. If they are patients, they can talk about how marijuana helps them with their ailments. If they are caregivers, they can talk about how they help a patient. If they know me, they can tell him what I nice guy I am [laughs]. If not, they can tell him they have heard about my case and think the sentence is excessive and I should be sentenced to time served. The more letters, the better. It's going to take a lot of letters.

But it's not just about me. People need to get everyone they can involved in doing things like writing Congress -- it's up to them to change this situation.