'POLITE' KNOCK PUTS COUPLE IN MEDICAL MARIJUANA DEBATE

ALEXANDER CITY - The Tallapoosa County Narcotics Task Force took care
not to alarm Tammie Smith when they arrived at her home with the drug
warrant.

The officers knew Mrs. Smith, 37, was a heart-transplant patient in
delicate health. But an informant had bought marijuana inside her
home, and her husband, William Smith, was the suspected seller. As
they looked at Smith, 54, officers could tell he too was in poor
health.

"He's lost a bunch of weight. He looked pretty dried up," said Jay
Turner, a Tallapoosa County Narcotics Task Force investigator who led
the June 11 search.

Once the family's primary breadwinner and his wife's caretaker, Smith
has been battling stomach cancer for two years.

Most of his stomach has been removed. Marijuana is the one drug that
stimulates his appetite, he told police. And he said selling it
seemed like the best way to cope with the family's huge medical bills
in the face of his inability to work manual labor, the only kind of
job he's had.

Police charged both with first-degree possession of marijuana and
with possession of drug paraphernalia. Their teenage sons also were
charged, along with two other young men. Police say they found
several ounces of marijuana on a brown, wooden kitchen table.

From their small blue house set back from a rural road in this
Alabama mill town, William and Tammie Smith quietly embody national
controversies over the medical use of marijuana and the soaring costs
of prescription drugs.

Quietly, but illegally, police say.

"I understand about her medical bills, and I feel sorry for her, but
there are other ways to make money," Turner said.

Not only that, but police believe many of Smith's customers were teenagers.

"I don't see why, just because he has that problem, anybody should
have sympathy. Because he's ruining a lot of other people's lives,"
Turner said. "Two or three years down the road, they're going to be
the crackhead on the corner."

Third Felony Charge

This isn't Smith's first drug arrest. In 1992, he was given probation
for a marijuana possession conviction, a felony. He also has a 1984
manslaughter conviction that arose out of a fight in his native
Walker County. Smith claims it was self-defense, but it also was a
felony.

If he's convicted on the new charges, his third felony, Alabama's
habitual offender law will require a prison sentence of 15 years to
life, stomach cancer or not.

As this was Mrs. Smith's first arrest, Turner predicted there is a
strong chance she will get probation, if convicted.

The couple are raising her sons, who are 18 and 15. They have also
adopted a 6-year-old girl from a relative who could not care for the
child.

Prison time for her husband would leave Mrs. Smith without the
support she's relied on since 1997. That's when her heart became
dangerously enlarged, a combination of genetic weaknesses and
extremely high blood pressure.

Doctors at University Hospital in Birmingham ordered a transplant,
but Mrs. Smith was not a typical patient. While awaiting a donor
heart, she survived nearly three years on a heart pump. The time she
spent waiting benefited hundreds of other cardiac patients, doctors
said at the time, because she proved that a temporary device could be
stretched into long-term service.

Mrs. Smith received a transplanted heart in 1999, and returned home
to a husband with cancer.

Now married 14 years, they joke about how their medical maladies make
them a great match. "It's like we were meant for each other," William
Smith said.

Debts, Desperation

With a high school diploma and a year of technical school, Smith held
a series of jobs until the cancer came - in a chicken plant, in two
textile mills and as a welder. Immediately before his surgery, Smith
worked at Avondale Mills. The job came with health insurance. But
with two-thirds of his stomach gone, he hasn't been able to return to
work and has lost the insurance.

Weak and gaunt, Smith moves with a teenager's fidgety energy in a
cancer patient's withered body. His weight has dropped from 160
pounds to about 100 pounds at 5 feet 9 inches. Doctors tell him not
to lift more than 10 pounds. He does occasional mechanical work, and
collects aluminum cans.

They have disability checks, his $860 a month, hers $536. The
payments put their income too high for Medicaid.

William Smith needs glasses and a hearing aid. But those are on hold,
with their combined medical bills topping $100,000.

"We get bills in the mail every day. Ain't one thing we can do with
them," he said.

They are six years away from paying off the mortgage on their house,
and they're determined to make the $459 monthly payments. Because the
heart transplant operation was so expensive, Medicaid paid. It also
covers some of the continuing medications connected to the new heart,
Mrs. Smith said, sorting through an insulated cooler that holds the
regimen.

But her blood pressure medicines are not covered by the federal program.

The marijuana sales were not bringing in much, but it helped, Smith said.

"They try to make it look like a big-time drug operation," Smith
said. "If it was, don't you think we would've had something?"

Their house is modest, but nicely furnished with a leather living
room set purchased before the illnesses. The couple drove back and
forth to their Birmingham doctors in a 10-year-old Ford Crown
Victoria until May when the car fell into disrepair. They replaced it
with a 1999 Ford Explorer.

The home furnishings and late-model vehicle worked against the couple
as they tried to explain their financial crisis to police. "To be in
debt, they were living above their means," Turner, the investigator,
said.

Police found no other illegal drugs at the Smiths' house. "We hardly
ever come across someone just selling marijuana," Turner said.

Smith said cancer is the main reason he began selling marijuana
instead of only using the drug. He said he needed extra income to
keep himself supplied with marijuana.

During his stay at UAB, Smith was given medication for pain, nausea
and infection control. "They gave me drugs to try to make me eat that
don't work. This is a drug that's not approved, but it works," he
said.

Since 1996, eight states have enacted laws that allow patients to use
medical marijuana despite federal laws that ban it. Alaska,
California, Colorado, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii
allow medical marijuana. Several courts upheld a voter-approved
California law that protected clubs who distributed the drug to
patients with doctor's approval. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court
reversed the lower court ruling, the most recent blow to medical
marijuana efforts.

In June the American Medical Association rescinded its 1997 position
opposing a "compassionate use" medical marijuana program. The group
fell short of endorsing the program, as its Council on Scientific
Affairs had proposed.

'Polite' Drug Bust

Smith has recovered fairly well. Doctors have told him, "whatever
you're doing, keep doing it," he said. He will return to UAB later
this month for a checkup to determine whether the cancer has
returned. His monthly medications now run about $400. They've lost
track of Mrs. Smith's drug costs.

Now out of jail on bond, the Smiths have not yet secured a lawyer,
and don't know how they will pay for one.

They're scheduled to appear in court July 26.

Though they wish police had never come, the Smiths don't fault the officers.

"They was just doing their job. I respect them for that. I give them
an A-plus," Smith said. "Although they have a hazardous job, they
were very polite."

Added Mrs. Smith: "They're supposed to bust down the door, but they
knocked on the door. They didn't want to give me a heart attack."