POT CRUSADE COSTS MAN HIS MARRIAGE

Marie Krieger is angry, disenchanted and hurting.

"This has cost us so much more than the money," says the woman who for
28 years has been married to renowned pot crusader Grant Krieger.
"This has cost us our marriage. We're getting a divorce."

And then tearfully she adds: "I still love this man enormously. This
is the man I've spent most of my life with. We'll always be friends as
far as I'm concerned."

Does her husband agree?

"He's a man of few words," she chuckles, and right now her husband, a
multiple sclerosis sufferer, is not around to talk for himself.

"We've been talking about a divorce for about a year. I've lost jobs
over this. Even though it's legal aid, the monetary costs are soaring.
Our family has been discriminated against because of this. I'm tired,"
says the woman who has stood resolutely beside her husband since he
took up his legal battle to first take and then provide pot for
medicinal purposes in the mid-90s.

"It's just that Grant thinks that the time has come when I should be
protected from the costs and everything else that will continue in the
future," she says.

And in that one statement comes confirmation that the business of
providing marijuana to those who suffer from such illnesses as
multiple sclerosis, AIDS, cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(ALS) will continue across Canada, courtesy of eight far-flung
branches of the Krieger Foundation.

"We have something like 315 members across the country who are relying
on us to help alleviate their pain. The foundation, which is now
bigger than any one individual, even Grant, will carry on -- even in
the knowledge there will be more court cases to come," she says from
the foundation's HQ in Calgary.

She and her husband are living apart, she says, but she's still
involved with the foundation, though for the moment she doesn't know
for how long.

She's speaking about 12 hours after her husband's latest court
appearance resulted in a jury returning a guilty verdict on a charge
of trafficking marijuana.

In unusual circumstance, Court of Queen's Bench Justice Paul Chrumka
demanded they return a guilty verdict, even though he personally had
to instruct and admonish two jurors who pleaded to be dismissed
because in all conscience they could not see their way to a guilty
verdict.

The judge was administering the letter of a law that, while it says it
is legal for an individual to take marijuana for medical reasons, it
is decidedly hazy when it comes to the matter of others in similar
circumstances being supplied or provided with the drug.

Amid accusations that he took the matter out of the hands of the jury,
Chrumka, the jury finally having returned a guilty verdict, sentenced
Krieger to one day in jail without actually having to go to jail.

Thursday morning's conversation with Marie Krieger gets off to a very
rocky start.

"John Gradon?" she ponders and breaks down in tears. "You're the guy
at the Herald who criticized Grant so badly a few years back. That
hurt us so much. It was cruel. It was just so typical of people not
understanding what this all about."

After a mea culpa and an apology not so much as for what was written
as for the deep and long hurt the criticism so evidently caused,
Krieger gracefully carries on with the chat and the personal
revelations and statements of intent on behalf of the foundation come.

It's about compassion, she insists.

She had helped ensure that as many sufferers of debilitating and
terminal illnesses had been in court Wednesday to put a human face on
the issue for the judge and the jury about to decide her husband's
eventual fate.

She talks of the bizarre sight of two jurors -- a woman, first, and
then a man -- being instructed by the judge on their reluctance to
return a guilty verdict.

She'll never forget the man in particular, she says.

"He was a big burly man with a beard," she says. "And he was in tears
because he could not find it in his heart to convict Grant. God bless
him for coming out there and showing his true feelings."

And she asks two questions.

"Why the heck was there a jury at all?"

And . . .

"Where's the compassion? There's got to be room for it in the law,"
she says.

The woman with a long memory and a shattered life has every right to
ask.