Medical marijuana is no hoax

I should be dead. That’s what doctors recently told me after
completing extensive medical tests at the University of Southern
California’s School of Medicine. According to Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, a
USC professor and world authority on adrenal cancer, my blood shows
lethal levels of adrenaline.

That’s really not surprising, since everyone who has ever had my
disease has died within a few years. Except for me. Thanks to medical
marijuana, I’m now entering my 23rd year of survival, something
DeQuattro considers a “medical miracle.”

Dr. DeQuattro even wrote a letter advising that I could suffer a
heart attack or stroke if deprived of marijuana and that no other form
of therapy is available.

Unfortunately, none of this seems to matter in Placer County, Calif.,
where 20 armed officers from four different agencies stormed our Squaw
Valley home four months ago. Armed with laser guided automatic weapons,
body armor and a battering ram, a SWAT team blocked off our street,
raided our home and confiscated almost everything of value we own.

Besides taking my plants, gardening equipment and medicine, they
seized all of our electronic publishing equipment. That action
effectively killed our on-line magazine, Alpine World, which had been
rated as the 25th top electronic magazine in the world. This raid
destroyed our primary source of income, forcing us out of our home and
into bankruptcy.

All of these officers believed that medical marijuana is a hoax and
that we deserved to be destroyed. None of the officers had read or been
briefed on the new medical marijuana law.

The Task Force confiscated our passports and social security cards.
They stole our company’s petty cash and then went through our safe
deposit box. They even took the cash out of our wallets. Then they
arrested us, handcuffed us, and took us away to jail for three days.
After taking everything we own, they arbitrarily set bail at $200,000.
Fortunately, our attorneys were able to persuade a judge to drop all
bail and release us on our own recognizance.

Although both my wife and I are legal patients with doctor
recommendations we face a 19-count criminal indictment, just for the
crime of using a medicine which is not government-approved. Absolutely
none of our medical marijuana was ever sold or illegally distributed.

The City of Oakland is the only jurisdiction in California that has
set guidelines since the passage of Proposition
215 — a statewide initiative that legalized
marijuana for medical purposes — in 1996. We carefully kept our
home-grown medicine within the parameters set by The Oakland Guidelines
— which also happens to be lower than the 7.1 pounds of marijuana our
federal government currently sends to each of the eight patients on the
Compassionate IND program each year.

Those eight federal medical marijuana patients are doing very well,
thank you. They work, travel and even drive while using their medication
and there are no problems. In fact, each of the federal patients is
doing much better than their counterparts on conventional drugs,
enjoying a productive and reasonably comfortable life.

Unfortunately, the Compassionate IND program was suspended years ago
and no one, no matter how desperately ill can qualify. The program has
become such an embarrassment to the Clinton administration that they
refuse to acknowledge that these federal standards for medical marijuana
already exist.

While the feds love to argue that federal law supersedes state law,
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently disagreed. In a unanimous
decision, a three member panel of judges found that seriously ill
patients should be exempt from federal laws regarding marijuana. The
federal court has sent the case back to District Court where the case is
scheduled to be heard on Oct. 29 in Oakland.

No one can dispute that there are basic legal, medical and human
rights issues at stake here. Sick, disabled and dying people are being
dragged out of their beds, frightened, threatened, arrested, jailed and
exposed to deadly opportunistic infections. Innocent, law abiding sick
people are being vilified and persecuted simply because they rely upon a
politically incorrect medication. Worst of all, the police we pay to
protect us against violent criminals are out raiding sick and dying
people instead.

We hope our case will achieve in the jury box what we were supposed
to have won at the ballot box — the right for medical patients to not
be treated as criminals. Medical marijuana is not a hoax. It’s time to
stop arresting sick and dying people.

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Steve Kubby was the Libertarian
candidate for California governor in 1998 and played a key role in the
campaign for California’s medical marijuana initiative, Prop. 215. He
has written two books about drug policy reform, “The Politics Of
Consciousness,” and “Why Marijuana Should Be Legal,” both of which are
available at Amazon.com