MEDICAL POT ADVOCATES ARRESTED

Two high-profile American advocates of medicinal marijuana, who fled
California on drug charges and took up residence on the Sunshine Coast,
were arrested by RCMP and immigration officials at their homes yesterday.

Steve Kubby, 56, and Steve Tuck, 35, who came to Canada because they feared
they would be jailed in the U.S. under that country's harsher drug laws,
were arrested without incident and taken to the Sechelt RCMP detachment.

They were later moved to Vancouver where they face an immigration hearing
on an allegation they entered Canada illegally.

Their wives are angry because their husbands were not allowed to take along
their medicinal pot with them.

"What's taken me aback is that my husband's life is in danger," Michelle
Kubby said yesterday. "They wouldn't let him medicate before he left."

She said her husband, who played a key role in winning a California
referendum that supported the use of pot for medicinal purposes suffers
from a rare and always fatal cancer - adrenal - and the marijuana he's been
taking stops the disease from metabolizing.

"It protects his heart. It shrinks the tumour in his body. This is not
for pain that he is taking it. It is literally to hold the cancer at bay."

She said her husband is appealing a California charge of possessing a half
gram of a mushroom stem and four quarter-sized peyote buttons - charges
that would not be laid in Canada.

Officers searched the Tuck residence mistakenly believing there was a
marijuana garden on the premises, said Steve Tuck's wife, Lucy Tuck.

"Steve told the officer, he said, 'I will go to Europe. I will leave. You
people don't have to arrest me.'

"They didn't say anything and he said, 'So, is this my welcome to Canada?'"

Marijuana keeps her husband from vomiting when he takes morphine for pain
associated with a serious spinal injury, she said.

There were three RCMP officers, an immigration officer and an unidentified
man who may have been a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency representative, she added.

Her husband, who came to Canada last July, was told he was wanted for
marijuana charges in California. She believes another factor in the arrest
was that her husband had overstayed the allowable six-month visit.