But Schulz says he couldn't get his superiors to focus on creating a quality pot-ID program. The word from those superiors, he says, was, "'Don't talk to me about that -- it's the lowest priority.'"
So Schulz, a former college anthropology instructor who had worked in the DPH's disease control division for the previous five years, says he went about fashioning a program on his own, sans supervision. This task was difficult; the issuance of medical marijuana IDs had been shunted to the department's vital records counter, an area run so inefficiently that employees feared a furious customer might come in and shoot the place up, an area so disorganized it was known in the department as "hell."
Aaron Farmer
Related Content
More About
Mail requests for birth or death records, for instance, typically took six months.
"They had a person whose job it was to open the mail, take the check off the order, put the order aside, then process the check. The check would come through, or the credit card would come through, and the documents wouldn't come," Schulz recalls. "Talk about making people angry."
Even within the Siberia of vital records, the medical marijuana ID program was given lowest priority, Schulz says. So he and his fellow vital records clerks began dealing with obvious needs. Though plenty of potheads and street people came to the window, some customers were elderly cancer patients, or young people with AIDS. They were squares, straights -- people ignorant and nervous about the possible implications of toking up.
"They'd come in paranoid, asking, 'Is this going to get us addicted?' We ran such a spectrum of people to help that people would come in crying at times, all upset, questioning and wanting information. At the doctors' level -- doctors will only give their patients a recommendation. What they all did was say, 'Go to your health department.'"
So when people asked questions about medical marijuana, Schulz tried to offer answers.
"We had a script that said, 'Don't smoke it outside. Don't share it with friends,'" Schulz recalls. "In actuality, when it was all said and done, I wasn't supposed to do that."
The AIDS sufferers and chemotherapy patients who medical marijuana advocates believe benefit from the drug tend to be shut-ins. So Schulz began making house calls during his off hours, bringing a laptop computer and camera to create medical marijuana IDs.
To obtain IDs, patients submitted doctor recommendations that were often quite detailed. Patients were also required to fill out questionnaires that asked for detailed medical information; as a result, the program produced reams of sensitive medical records. The department's policy was to have the records destroyed, so there would be nothing for federal agents to subpoena in the event of prosecution.
But Schulz says the records were routinely left on employees' desks, despite his complaints. (Though Schulz ran the medical marijuana ID program day to day, the vital records division had its own boss who was ultimately responsible for physical records.) "For three years, I complained; we're leaving these records scattered all over our desks where 25 people could get hold of them. That's very bad for a health agency," Schulz says. "About three months ago they gave me a lockbox. It was used for two nights in a row, and never used again."
Around that time, the San Francisco District Attorney's Office asked for a Health Department official to appear in court supporting the marijuana-ID program. Schulz says he asked for permission to testify, which was denied.
The medical marijuana ID program "kind of became an issue. We were no longer allowed to tell the patient anything," Schulz says. "When the district attorney issue came up, they choked up all our ability to give information. They continued to cut our hours to only several hours a day on a random schedule.
"For three years, because I was never given any direction, I created a program based on need. Little by little, as they found out what I was doing, I was chastised and reprimanded."
A month and a half ago, Schulz says, he used a department photocopy machine to print 25 fliers saying the building he worked in wasn't earthquake-proof and distributed them to co-workers. He was fired, he says, for inappropriate use of DPH equipment. Bamberger would not comment on Schulz's firing.
But one doesn't have to believe Schulz is the moral equivalent of Karen Silkwood to think his story raises an interesting question or two. How could a San Francisco program whose administrator was fired after complaining about mismanagement -- a program that is now "in transition," to use the words of a woman who answered the Health Department's pot-ID telephone line -- possibly be held up as a model worthy of copying statewide? What has the Legislature been smoking?
