Pubdate: Sun, 02 Jul 2000 Source: St. Petersburg Times (FL) Copyright: 2000 St. Petersburg Times Contact: http://www.sptimes.com/ Forum: http://www.sptimes.com/Interact.html Author: Robyn Blumner, Columnist, St Pete Times GOVERNMENT PROTECTING US TO DEATH McWilliams never got a satisfactory answer to his question. Instead, he was made a martyr to it. Fifty-year-old McWilliams died on June 14 at his home in Los Angeles. Press reports say he died by choking while vomiting in the bathroom. I hold the government largely responsible. No doubt, so would he. During the last days of his life McWilliams was waiting to be sentenced by a federal judge for conspiracy to distribute marijuana plants that federal prosecutors said were going to supply California's medical marijuana cooperatives. He was waiting to see whether he would be one of those jailed for helping people commit a consensual crime, the kind he wrote about with such acerbic wit in his book. The fact that he was arrested well after Californians passed Proposition 215, legalizing medical marijuana, didn't seem to matter to federal prosecutors. They came after him anyway and charged him with a crime that carried a possible sentence of 10 years in prison. For McWilliams that kind of time was a death sentence. He had AIDS and non- Hodgkin's lymphoma, though it was in remission, and had been using marijuana as medicine himself. It helped him keep his pills down and control the nausea that came with his medical treatment. It appears the federal government targeted McWilliams because of his political activism. Juan Ros, executive director of the Libertarian Party of California, has seen it before. "The government seeks these outspoken medical marijuana users and goes after them," he said. The federal government has been so blinded by its slavish devotion to an unwinnable drug war that it refuses to act proportionately toward marijuana. Substantial anecdotal evidence suggests that marijuana use eases the suffering of people with AIDS, multiple sclerosis, cancer and glaucoma. But the government has done everything in its power to deny science the tools to confirm this. Despite a much ballyhooed "liberalization" of research guidelines, it is still tougher to get approval for a clinical trial on the medical benefits of marijuana than on any synthesized pharmaceutical. Through popular referendums and legislation, eight states and the District of Columbia have now legalized the use of medical marijuana, but the federal government isn't admitting defeat quietly. Congress has barred the District from implementing its referendum on medical marijuana, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has threatened to yank the prescription-writing privileges of physicians who recommend the medical marijuana to patients, and in an effort to shut them down, federal prosecutors have sued a number of California's cannabis buyers' clubs. McWilliams' prosecution was part of this pattern of harassment. In defending himself against the charges, McWilliams had wanted to use the "medical necessity" defense, but U.S. District Judge George King in California refused to allow it. That meant McWilliams was barred from mentioning to a jury that his fellow Californians had legalized medical marijuana or anything about his infirmities and the relief he got by using marijuana himself. So McWilliams gave up and pleaded guilty. His bail was set at a whopping $250,000, an astounding amount for a man who was such a small flight risk. To make bail, his mother had to put up her home as security. While awaiting sentencing, the judge explicitly barred McWilliams from using medical marijuana and forced him to undergo weekly drug tests. McWilliams complied so that his mother wouldn't lose her home, which meant he was unable to control his nausea. He died while vomiting. How can this be an American story? How has our government gotten its priorities so out of whack that it's actively punishing people who are only trying to heal themselves and others? In his book, McWilliams wrote: "It is not the law's job to protect adults from the risks of their own consensual activities." Too bad our government isn't willing to let us all live by this simple prescription for personal liberty. Instead, the government insisted on protecting McWilliams from his own choices, right into the grave. --- - --- MAP posted-by: greg