Marijuana is indelibly associated with food, whether it is chemotherapy patients using the drug to try to develop an appetite, or, farcically, a couple of stoners with an overpowering case of the munchies in “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle.” Secret “herb dinners” with appetizers, entrees and desserts are reported in newspaper food sections. One restaurant chain, CHeBA HUT, is based on a marijuana theme. And patrons of the World Famous Cannabis Cafe in Portland can get a burger or lasagna packing a pot punch in between choruses of karaoke.

But restaurants where marijuana is the focus have had trouble gaining traction. The customer base is, after all, limited to medical marijuana cardholders. And any enterprise associated with medical marijuana will quickly come under scrutiny.

At the Earth Dragon Edibles Restaurant & Lounge in Ashland, Wallace and Shea are trying to bring Mongolian barbecue dosed with medical marijuana to a higher level, though they are still feeling their way through the fuzzy legalities of it all.

An Oregon medical marijuana card is required to get in the door. Inside, the place looks and operates pretty much like any other little Asian-style restaurant, with the smells of teriyaki and sounds of the grill filling the air. A wall hanging at the back depicts ganja guru Bob Marley. Diners go through a check list of vegetables, sauces, meats and tofu, and whether their bowl will be regular, large, or unlimited. One difference is the boxes to check for medicated or unmedicated. If medicated, there are three strengths. Cheesecake, candies and cookies, medicated or not, are also available.

While they wait, diners can use the hash bar, choosing from an assortment of glass pipes, a vaporizer, or a bong, hashish or bud. Marijuana donations are encouraged.

Operating under the theory that it is no crime for one patient to share medicine with another, all the marijuana — whether in the food or at the hash bar — is free. And unlike the marijuana cafes in Portland, there is no membership fee.

“I know it’s a little weird,” said Shea.

Ashland itself could be considered a little weird. Close to the California border and home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it is an outpost of liberalism in conservative southwestern Oregon. Think of it as a little Berkeley in the middle of Orange County. It is also within the Green Triangle, one of the nation’s best marijuana-growing climates. This corner of Oregon has the higher per capital rate of medical marijuana use in the state.

Wallace and Shea render their medical marijuana into hashish, infuse that into oil or glycerin, and eat it, believing that is healthier than smoking. With few patients able to do that, they felt they should share their skills to help others.

“That’s how Mommy raised me,” said Wallace.

Wallace, 45, was a carpenter until a 4-by-4 fell on his head, compressing his spine. He remains on disability, but marijuana got him off conventional painkillers. Shea, 52, taught at his wife’s preschool. He uses marijuana to treat pain from an old neck injury. Wallace already had a business license in nearby Medford making candies and chili dosed with hashish.

At the grand opening a week ago, staff had to ask one patient to put out his blunt — marijuana rolled in a tobacco wrapper — because it violated Oregon’s law against smoking in restaurants.

Otherwise, there was no heat until the city sent back their business license request, saying a local ordinance barred licenses for anyone violating state or federal law.

Police chief Terry Holderness said busting Earth Dragon Edibles is not a top priority.

“Nobody’s life is at risk here,” said Holderness. “We will prioritize this appropriately. But ultimately, if they are in violation of the law, they will be shut down.”

The owner of Denver’s Ganja Gourmet knows the feeling. Steve Horwitz said when he opened in 2009, people passed around a bong while dining on eggplant parmigiana and pizza made with cannabis. But Colorado changed its medical marijuana law, and he had to scale back to takeout and groceries.

“It was the future about five years before its time,” he said.

Wallace and Shea remain open while appealing. They hope that if they keep separate bottles of hashish-infused oil on hand for each member/patient, rather than sharing their own stash, the city will no longer object.

Christine Totten, 24, came in with two fellow volunteers from The Greenery, a local medical marijuana resource center.

“I like to support the cannabis community we have going on,” said Totten. “It’s kind of cool to have a place to hang out.”

After a couple hits off the bong at the hash bar, she sat down to a medicated bowl of beef and broccoli, pronouncing it delicious.

“You can’t really taste it that much,” she said of the hashish oil.

“Tio, look what’s coming over there,” Vasquez recalled saying in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. “We felt happy, because we thought they were coming to rescue us.”

The ship didn’t stop, and the fishing boat drifted another two weeks before it was found. By then, Vasquez’s two friends had died.

“I said, ‘God will not forgive them,’” Vasquez recalled. “Today, I still feel rage when I remember that.”

That same day, March 1, birdwatchers with powerful spotting scopes on the promenade deck of the luxury cruise ship Star Princess saw a little boat adrift miles away. They told ship staff about the man desperately waving a red cloth.

On Thursday, Princess Cruises, based in Santa Clarita, Calif., said a preliminary investigation showed that passengers’ reports that they had spotted a boat in distress never made it to Capt. Edward Perrin or the officer on duty.

If it did, the company said, the captain and crew would have altered course to rescue the men, just as the cruise line has done more than 30 times in the last 10 years. The company expressed sympathy for the men and their families.

The fishermen had set out for a night of fishing Feb. 24 from Rio Hato, a small fishing and farming town on the Pacific coast of Panama that was once the site of a U.S. Army base guarding the Panama Canal. There are plans for a new airport to bring in tourists. Vasquez had lost his job as a gardener at a local hotel, and Oropeza invited him to come fishing to make a little money. The night before, they had no luck, so they were very happy to have a load of fish to sell, Vasquez said.

By the time they started to drift, Adrian had eaten his lunch of rice and beef. They only had five gallons of water to start with, and much of that was gone. There was raw fish to eat, but no one liked it very much, and it soon rotted after the ice melted in the coolers. Sometimes Vasquez went over the side to probe passing rafts of debris, and sometimes came up with coconuts for them to eat. At one point, they caught a turtle, but decided they couldn’t eat it and put it back in the water. As they were, they found a jug of water that they drank “with tremendous anxiety.”

One night they saw a ship far in the distance, and lit a rag on a stick that they waved, but the ship didn’t come for them.

On the Star Princess, birdwatcher Jeff Gilligan from Portland, Ore., was the first to spot the boat, something white that looked like a house.

When Judy Meredith of Bend, Ore., looked through the scopes, she could plainly see it was a small open boat, like the kinds they had seen off Ecuador. And she could see a man waving what looked like a dark red T-shirt.

“You don’t wave a shirt like that just to be friendly,” Meredith said. “He was desperate to get our attention.”

Barred from going to the bridge herself to notify the ship’s officers, Meredith said she told a Princess Cruises sales representative what they had seen, and he assured her he passed the news on to crew.

The birdwatchers said they even put the representative on one of the spotting scopes so he could see for himself.

Meredith went to her cabin and noted their coordinates from a TV feed from the ship, booted up her laptop and emailed the U.S. Coast Guard what she had seen. She said she hoped someone would get the message and help.

She sent a copy to her son. When she returned to the promenade deck, she could still see the boat.

But nothing happened. The ship kept going. And the little boat with the waving men disappeared.

“We were kind of freaking out, thinking we don’t see anything else happening,” Meredith said.

Gilligan could no longer bear to watch.

“It was very disturbing,” he said. “We asked other people, ‘What do you think we should do?’ Their reaction was: ‘Well, you’ve done what you could do.’ Whether something else could have been done, that’s a bit frustrating to think about.”

After Oropeza and Fernando Osario died, Vasquez was eventually picked up by a fishing boat off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, more than 600 miles from where they had set out.

Vasquez said he slipped their bodies into the sea after they began to rot in the heat. Before he was rescued, a rainstorm gave him fresh water to drink, helping him survive. Throughout the ordeal, the thought about his eight brothers, and never gave up hope.

Safe at home, Vasquez said he recognized their boat, the Fifty Cents, from the photos Gilligan had taken with his 300 mm lens.

“Yes, that’s it. That’s it. That is us,” he said. “You can see there, the red sweater I’m waving and, above it is the sheet that we put up to protect us from the sun.”

Vasquez mentioned the ship in his first statement to Panamanian authorities when he returned to his country.

Back at home in Oregon, Meredith couldn’t sleep, wondering what happened to the men. Reading a news story about a Panamanian rescued off Ecuador after 28 days in an open boat, she figured that was the boat they had seen. She pestered Princess Cruises, the Coast Guard, and even the Panamanian embassy.

“We were all just sick about it, and just wanted to believe the ship notified someone,” she said.

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Barnard contributed to this report from Grants Pass, Ore.

NOAA Fisheries informed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that they are likely to jeopardize half the 26 salmon populations on the West Coast protected by the Endangered Species Act, and suggested restrictions like no-spray buffers to keep them out of salmon streams.

Trifluralin is the most toxic of the three, and deforms fish backbones even at low concentrations. It is used on soybeans, cotton, lawns and road shoulders.

Oryzalin is the least toxic, and is harmful to aquatic plants that make up salmon habitat. It is used on shrubs, lawns and golf courses.

Pendimenthalin is toxic to aquatic plants and insects that salmon eat. It is used on soybeans, cotton, corn and peanuts.

Heather Hansen of Washington Friends of Farms and Forests, which represents commodity growers, said the proposed restrictions were less dramatic than those suggested for other pesticides. However, they were still unnecessary, because the levels found in salmon streams have never reached more than a fraction of the levels considered safe, she said. Any alternative herbicides will cost more, she added.

Aimee Code of the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides said one delay after another has blocked imposition of restrictions since EPA started putting them forward in 2008.

The agency has 11 more pesticides to evaluate from the original list of 37, and should be done by the end of June 2013, said Therese Conant, deputy director of NOAA Fisheries for the Endangered Species Act division. The most dangerous chemicals were evaluated first. The chemicals remaining pose a lesser risk.

The public has until April 30 to comment on the draft evaluation, which is called a biological opinion. It should become final by the end of May.