Pubdate: Wed, 12 Oct 2005
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA)
Copyright: 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Contact:  http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/408
Author: Gene Johnson

JUDGE RELEASES MEDICAL MARIJUANA PATIENT ARRESTED IN B.C. HOSPITAL

SEATTLE -- A U.S. Army veteran who fled to Canada to avoid prosecution
because he grew marijuana to help control chronic pain was yanked from
a hospital by Canadian authorities, driven to the U.S. border with a
catheter still attached, and turned over to U.S. officials - who
provided him with no medical treatment for five days, his lawyer said.

Steven William Tuck, 38, was still fitted with the urinary catheter
when he shuffled into U.S. District Court for a detention hearing
Wednesday, said his lawyer, Douglas Hiatt.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James P. Donohue ordered Tuck temporarily
released so that Hiatt and Sunil Aggarwal, the president of Washington
Physicians for Social Responsibility, could take him to Harborview
Medical Center for treatment.

"The guy comes into the jail with a catheter sticking out the end of
his (penis), you'd think they'd do something about it!" Hiatt said,
launching into a profanity-laced tirade after the hearing. "This is
totally inhumane. He's been tortured for days for no reason."

Tuck is a veteran who said he suffered debilitating injuries in the
late 1980s, when his parachute failed to open during a jump. He spent
a year at Walter Reed Army Medical Center undergoing surgeries to fuse
discs in his back, Hiatt said. His injuries were exacerbated in a car
crash that killed his brother-in-law in 1990; over the years, he has
had more than a dozen surgeries, his friends said.

In 2001, he was living in McKinleyville, Calif., when his marijuana
grow operation was raided for the second time. He fled to British
Columbia to avoid prosecution, and sought asylum status, which was
recently denied.

Last Friday, he checked himself in to St. Paul's Hospital in
Vancouver, British Columbia, because he had a cyst on his prostate and
was having difficulty urinating, Hiatt said.

In a phone interview from Vancouver, Richard Cowan, a friend of Tuck's
who runs the Web site marijuananews.com, said he was with Tuck at the
hospital when Canadian authorities arrived and arrested Tuck on a
departure order.

"I would not believe it unless I had seen it," Cowan said. "They sent
people in to arrest him while he was on a gurney. They took him out of
the hospital in handcuffs, put him in an SUV, and drove him to the
border."

He was turned over to Whatcom County Jail officials, who, after being
flooded with phone calls from activists, called federal marshals from
Seattle to pick him up. The marshals brought him to the King County
Jail in downtown Seattle.

Though Tuck had taken morphine - as prescribed by doctors - for about
16 years to help with his pain, he was given no painkiller or
treatment at the jail other than ibuprofen, Hiatt said. Tuck, who
appeared emaciated as he cried in court Wednesday, has been sick from
the morphine withdrawal, Hiatt said.

A message left with the public relations officers at the King County
Jail was not immediately returned Wednesday, and a spokesman with the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver said he could not
immediately comment on the case.

Tuck is charged federally with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Donohue released him on the condition that he face the charge in the
Northern District of California upon his release from the hospital.
The U.S. attorney's office in Seattle did not oppose his release.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt Elrod