MICHELE KUBBY TESTIFIES THERE WAS NO INTENT
TO GROW MARIJUANA FOR SALE

Michele Kubby took the stand in her own defense Tuesday, denying that
there was any intent by either her or husband, Steve, to grow pot for
sale.

Kubby also testified that a hallucinogenic mushroom stem and peyote
buttons found during a January 1999 search of the couple's Olympic
Valley home weren't hers and weren't meant for their personal
consumption.

Both the Kubbys had doctor's recommendations to grow and smoke
marijuana under Proposition 215 - a law Steve Kubby played a major
role in getting on the 1996 ballot. Michele Kubby's recommendation was
to treat the symptoms of irritable bowel disorder.

The Kubbys are charged with 16 drug-related counts as a result of a
raid on their home that netted 265 pot plants growing in an indoor
garden.

"I am not a criminal nor is my husband," Michele Kubby testified at
one point. Her husband has yet to testify in a trial that started in
early October and will now stretch into early December.

"Let's ask the obvious," defense attorney David Nick said. "Was Steve
selling the marijuana he was growing?"

"No," replied Michele Kubby.

Kubby also answered questions about the psilocyben and peyote. The
mushroom stem were kept by her husband for years - not for eventual
use but to show the similarities between the magic mushroom and
coriander and their Christian religious significance, she said.

Days after they met, Steve Kubby pulled out the coriander and mushroom
to reflect on the skin of the mushroom and the seed, Kubby said.

Steve Kubby never offered the mushroom for consumption, she
said.

"If he did I would have laughed - it was really, really old,"
Michele Kubby said. "And it was too small ... there wasn't enough."

She testified that she would have tossed the mushroom piece in the
garbage.

Peyote buttons were discovered in a dresser drawer in what Michele
Kubby described as the guest bedroom. She testified that she didn't
clean the room other than to change the sheets and her home averaged
four or five visitors a month, with as many as seven people over at
one time. Kubby said she never saw a peyote button in the bedroom or
in the film canister they were found in.

Earlier in the day, one of the leading experts on the rare form of
cancer Steve Kubby suffers from told the Placer County Superior Court
jury hearing the case that he had no objections to the 1998
Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate's use of pot because it
apparently kept the disease in check.

Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, an internationally respected hypertension
expert, treated Kubby when he was first diagnosed with the rare form
of adrenal cancer in the 1970s. DeQuattro, a University of Southern
California professor of medicine, said he re-connected with Kubby in
1998 after learning he was running for governor.

"It was amazing to me," DeQuattro replied when asked by defense
counsel Nick to describe his reaction to discovering Kubby was still
alive. Patients with Kubby's form of malignant cancer usually live
five to 10 years after diagnosis, he had said.

DeQuattro said he was equally amazed when Kubby told him that
marijuana had controlled the cancer and its symptoms.

DeQuattro said he approves of Kubby's marijuana use but wouldn't
prescribe pot for any other of his patients.

"I don't want to come out in favor of marijuana for helping blood
pressure," he said. "I'd be run out of town."

DeQuattro said he ran a barrage of tests on Kubby that indicated the
marijuana was helping him "accommodate" a malignant tumor. There are
other ways to control the cancer but DeQuattro testified he was afraid
to demand Kubby go on them. Twenty years earlier, he told the jury,
Kubby's relationship with his first wife had deteriorated when he went
on a more conventional medical regimen.

"I didn't want to take him off something that would keep him alive,"
DeQuattro said.