Pubdate: Thu, 22 Jun 2000
Source: Reason Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2000 The Reason Foundation
Contact:  3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90034-6064
Website: http://www.reason.com/
Author: Jacob Sullum

FATAL CONDITION

"The Drug War doesn't need another martyr," Peter McWilliams wrote last 
November. "It has too many already." McWilliams, a best-selling author and 
activist who was arrested on federal marijuana charges in 1998, was 
explaining his decision to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of 
the court.

Mercy was not something that U.S. District Judge George King seemed to have 
in abundance. King had prohibited McWilliams, who used marijuana to fight 
the nausea caused by his AIDS medications, from presenting a "medical 
necessity" defense at his trial in Los Angeles.

That meant that neither McWilliams nor his lawyer could so much as mention 
his disease, marijuana's usefulness as a medicine, the program under which 
eight patients were receiving marijuana from the federal government, or 
Proposition 215, the 1996 California ballot initiative that sanctioned the 
medical use of marijuana. King had also refused to let McWilliams smoke 
marijuana while he was free on bail, even though McWilliams said it was the 
only way he could keep down the drugs that were keeping him alive.

Still, McWilliams hoped the judge would allow him to serve his sentence 
under home confinement. Because of his weakened immune system, he felt 
certain he could not survive prison.

It seems McWilliams could not survive the conditions of his bail, either. 
On June 14, two months before he was scheduled to be sentenced, the 
50-year-old writer was found dead on the floor of his bathroom. Friends 
reported that he appeared to have choked to death on vomit.

Without marijuana to treat the nausea brought on by his AIDS pills, 
McWilliams had developed a regimen that included Marinol (a prescription 
drug containing a synthetic version of THC, marijuana's main active 
ingredient), various herbs, hot baths, bed rest, and electric massage. "The 
procedure of keeping down the medications is agonizing, exhausting, 
debilitating, and I must do it three times a day," he wrote in February. 
"It [would be] entirely unnecessary if I could use medical marijuana."

Although McWilliams' ordeal seems to be exactly the sort of thing that 
medical marijuana activists want to prevent, his case aroused ambivalence 
within the movement. He and Todd McCormick, a friend who used marijuana to 
relieve chronic pain resulting from childhood treatments for bone cancer, 
were charged with raising some 6,000 plants at four different locations.

That's a bit more than they needed for their own use. McCormick said he was 
growing the plants as part of his research for a book on medical marijuana 
that McWilliams was publishing. The Drug Enforcement Administration said 
the two planned to supply marijuana to "buyer's clubs" serving patients 
authorized to use the drug by Proposition 215.

Whichever version you believe, there's no question that McWilliams and 
McCormick broke federal law, which does not recognize any legitimate reason 
to grow marijuana. Indeed, their operation was not even legal under 
Proposition 215, which allows cultivation for a patient's personal use but 
not for research or for sale to others.

The McWilliams/McCormick case called attention to the absurdity of 
classifying marijuana as a Schedule I drug under federal law, signifying a 
high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Although 
scientifically groundless, that classification is self-perpetuating, since 
any use of a Schedule I drug is "abuse" by definition and no Schedule I 
drug can be legally used as a medicine.

The case also illustrated the problems caused by legalizing medical 
marijuana, as Proposition 215 ostensibly did, without authorizing anyone to 
supply it. Since relatively few patients are prepared to grow their own 
pot, most have to rely on the black market.

In other words, marijuana is not really a legal medicine, even in 
California. By highlighting that fact, McWilliams embarrassed the quieter, 
more discreet activists who are trying to make medical marijuana 
respectable--especially because (unlike pharmaceutical companies?) he was 
accused of a profit motive.

It probably did not help that McWilliams was not only a medical marijuana 
advocate but an outspoken opponent of drug prohibition. Indeed, as a 
prominent member of the Libertarian Party and the author of the 1993 book 
Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, he called for the repealof all 
consensual crime laws.

McWilliams' baggage made medical marijuana supporters reluctant to claim 
him as a poster boy for their cause. But now he is "another martyr" of the 
war on drugs, no matter how much they (and he) might have preferred otherwise.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart