Three years of probation ended last week for Steven Joe McWilliams, and the medical marijuana activist isn't wasting any time testing the limits of law.

He plans to resume providing the pain-relieving but illegal drug to terminally sick patients in San Diego this Sunday, even though federal agents have been cracking down on cannabis clubs across California.

If McWilliams makes good on the pledge he delivered at the San Diego City Council meeting Tuesday, his Shelter from the Storm cannabis club will become the only place south of Los Angeles – other than the street – that deathly ill patients can get marijuana.

"Our intent is to make their last days and moments on this earth a little more gentle," he said.

McWilliams, 47, was arrested in Valley Center in 1998 on felony charges of growing and transporting marijuana, activities he claimed were legal under Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996.

But faced with up to four years in prison, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor cultivation 14 months after his arrest.

The three-year probation order he received in lieu of prison specifically forbade McWilliams from distributing marijuana. But that condition did little to stem his activism.

Rather than dispense the drug, he set up a collective garden and taught patients to grow their own. The coffee house/cannabis club he now runs offers a place for patients to smoke, but not share, their marijuana. He will provide the herb on Sunday afternoons only with supplies from his personal garden. He plans to charge $5 a gram – an amount he says is well below market rates and barely enough to cover expenses.

"This is not something we're doing to make money," said McWilliams, a medical marijuana patient who suffers chronic pain resulting from a motorcycle crash. "We're doing it because no one else will."

Rod Johnson of Chula Vista, a 62-year-old chemotherapy patient who said he is dying of prostate cancer, wandered into the club last week in search of an alternative to buying marijuana from strangers. He said the drug reduces nausea and other side effects of the cancer treatment.

"On the street, it's not a good place to buy it," he said. "You get ripped off, and you can't do anything about it."

It remains to be seen how local and federal law-enforcement officials will greet this latest cannabis club, which has opened and closed under several formats – and addresses – in recent years.

The state code allows patients to grow and smoke marijuana for medicinal purposes, but does not specify how many plants are allowable or how medicine is to be transported. No fewer than eight other states have adopted similar laws, all of which conflict with federal drug rules, and courts have yet to resolve the disagreements.

In the meantime, major marijuana clubs in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles have all been raided by federal agents and shut down. Smaller clubs still operate in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

San Diego police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said they enforce all laws, state and federal. But both agencies hedged when asked if they would stop McWilliams from providing marijuana at his 33rd Street club.

"Our job is to enforce the law, plain and simple," said Donald Thornhill Jr. of the San Diego DEA. In the same conversation, however, Thornhill said his office has more pressing challenges. "The reality is we don't have the time to focus on that level of traffic," he said.

Three years ago, San Diego police dismantled the Hillcrest club run by McWilliams, saying 400 plants for fewer than 10 patients was too many. The group reopened in Kearny Mesa months later, but the landlord threw them out when he learned what they were growing.

Another cannabis club in Hillcrest was allowed to remain open until April 2000, when police moved in and put the California Alternative Medicinal Center out of business. Charges in that case were eventually dismissed.

McWilliams moved his cooperative garden to Normal Heights in late 1999, but that center fizzled when the building owner became worried about breaking the law.

Shelter from the Storm no longer grows marijuana on-site. Also, McWilliams was appointed to a city task force studying how to make Proposition 215 work. Those changes satisfied the Normal Heights landlord, and McWilliams moved back into the same offices last month.

Police have mostly left McWilliams alone since the Hillcrest raid, in part because prosecutors refused to file charges. They even returned grow lights and other equipment seized three years ago.

Local governments across the state have been moving forward with policies to implement the 1996 law, albeit largely independent of one another.

In February, on the same day federal agents raided a San Francisco cannabis club, the San Diego City Council approved plans to issue identification cards to medical marijuana users. Up to 3,000 AIDS, cancer and other patients here may begin applying for the I.D. later this year.

"It took the city five years to form a task force, and we've done more in the few months we've been in existence than the city or the county ever has in bringing the issue forward," task force chairwoman Juliana Humphrey said.

The task force has taken no stand on McWilliams' plan to start providing medical marijuana to dying men and women. But Humphrey said she supports the effort.

"Anybody who wants to help terminally ill people, certainly the (state) law allows that," said Humphrey, who gets several calls each week from doctors who want to prescribe marijuana and patients who want to smoke it.

Dale Gieringer, who runs the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws office in San Francisco, said he frequently receives calls from San Diego residents hunting for places to find medical marijuana.

"I tell them to call Steve McWilliams," he said. "I always have."