The Kindness of Strangers

The tale of the Colorado Compassion Club begins with a couple of antagonistic tree trimmers. As the story goes, in the summer of 2004, a Denver resident, whom we shall call Frank, told a few tree trimmers he would pay for their services in marijuana. The trimmers knew Frank was good for it. All they had to do was look into his house to spot his pot – hundreds and hundreds of plants.

When the tree trimmers' work was complete, however, Frank apparently failed to pay up. So the trimmers took matters into their own hands, namely making off with some of Frank's marijuana plants. Incensed, Frank called the cops, which, in hindsight, might not have been the best decision. When police officers arrived at Frank's home, they were less interested in his tale of mischievous tree trimmers than they were in the fact that he had hundreds of pot plants growing all over his crib.

When the cops tried to take the plants, Frank told them they'd have to go through the Drug Enforcement Agency. Bad idea number two. Frank ended up with federal agents crawling all over his cannabis arboretum.

To lessen the heat, Frank told the authorities he'd rat out the folks who'd helped him grow his sizable marijuana garden. Frank's admissions led North Metro Drug Task Force officers and federal drug agents to the door of a low-lying red-brick bungalow in a neighborhood of low-lying red-brick bungalows in east Denver at 10:30 p.m. on June 1, 2004. The home belonged to Thomas and Larisa Lawrence. Thomas is just over six feet, with light-blue eyes, brown hair tied in a ponytail and a soul patch plummeting from his lower lip. Larisa is small and pretty, with straight brown hair. At the time, both were inside the house celebrating Thomas' grandmother's 72nd birthday.

The officers asked Thomas and Larisa if they could search the premises. What happened next is in dispute.

Larisa says she asked to see a search warrant. She says the officers responded that they didn't need one because of the Patriot Act, but that they would be happy to get one, provided that Thomas, Larisa and all their guests didn't mind being locked out of the house for six hours while they whipped one up.

Jeff Dorschner, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver, unequivocally denies such a conversation ever took place. He says Thomas and Larisa must have given the officers permission to search the premises.

Whatever the circumstances, the officers searched the house. The investigation turned up 84 young pot plants in the basement, 12 ounces of loose marijuana and six pounds of ice in the freezer that contained marijuana plant matter.

It appeared that Thomas and Larisa were unusually over-achieving stoners, but that wasn't the case. Thanks to a combination of football injuries and a degenerative spinal condition, Thomas suffers from migraines and back pain. He can't stand prescription narcotics, especially since they leave him too doped up to run his home-improvement business. The only thing that seems to help is marijuana, which dulls his pain and thins his blood, leading to fewer migraines. The medicine, as Thomas and Larisa call it, works so well that the two moved from the Washington, D.C. area to Colorado in 2001 because of the Centennial State's more lenient medical marijuana laws.

The year before, Colorado passed Amendment 20, which allows people to become licensed to use marijuana to alleviate debilitating conditions including cancer, AIDS, severe pain and seizures. The law allows a licensed marijuana patient to usually possess no more than six marijuana plants and two ounces of usable marijuana – much less than what the authorities found in Thomas and Larisa's house.

But Thomas wasn't just growing for himself, he was providing for other patients. Word had gotten around that Thomas was growing some good medicine, and many patients specified Thomas as their state-certified caregiver. Frank had been one of Thomas' patients; albeit one with whom Thomas had severed all ties because of a disagreement long before the cops came knocking on his door. At the time of the raid, Thomas estimates he was providing medicine for 11 licensed patients and about 20 more who were in the process of getting licensed – more than enough, he says, to legally justify his ganja garden.