MEDICAL MARIJUANA BILL PASSED

PROVIDENCE -- Pamela Bailey sat quietly on the wooden bench inside
State House Room 212 as the politicians approved the bill named for
her son.

She would say later that she was grateful, but that she didn't need a
state law to remember her firstborn.

"We didn't have to have it in the limelight. He'll always be with me,"
she said of Edward O. Hawkins, whose name will forever appear on the
title of the state's medical marijuana law. It was Bailey's sister,
Sen. Rhoda E. Perry, D-Providence, who suggested the name.

Hawkins, who spent the last months of his life in Rhode Island
hospitals and a nursing home, died from complications related to AIDS
in 2003. He was 41.

"It was a terrible, terrible death. Absolutely horrible," said his
mother. "He was skin and bones. Nobody could even realize."

While the bill to permanently extend the medical marijuana law passed
the House and Senate earlier in the month, the legislation cleared its
final procedural hurdle yesterday after the full House passed the
identical Senate version. The Senate Health and Human Services
Committee also voted yesterday to approve the House version of the
bill, although the House vote makes subsequent Senate action
unnecessary.

The Edward O. Hawkins and Thomas C. Slater Medical Marijuana Act is
now headed to the governor's desk, where it will be vetoed, according
to the governor's spokesman, Jeff Neal. But there is sufficient
support in the House to override the governor -- 51 of 75 members
endorsed the measure yesterday. Forty-five votes, or three-fifths, are
required to overturn a veto.

"I expect that Governor Carcieri will veto the latest medical
marijuana bill," Neal said. "The use of marijuana is still illegal
under federal law. Additionally, the bill provides no legal method for
obtaining marijuana. As a result, the bill could potentially subject
Rhode Islanders to federal prosecution while also promoting the
illicit drug trade."

Perry, chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, said she was
open to amending the law next year.

The bill would allow a patient diagnosed as having a debilitating
medical condition to possess up to 12 marijuana plants and 2.5 ounces
of marijuana. A caregiver -- an adult who has agreed to assist an ill
person's medical use of marijuana -- could have 12 plants and 2.5
ounces of marijuana for each of up to five qualified patients. The
state Health Department would supervise the process.

Bailey said her son was in severe pain before his death, but did not
smoke marijuana.

"He didn't really use it because he was afraid it was illegal," she
said. "Anything that can help somebody in pain I think it should be
available."