FATAL CONDITION

"The Drug War doesn't need another martyr," Peter McWilliams wrote last
November. "It has too many already." McWilliams, a best-selling author and
activist who was arrested on federal marijuana charges in 1998, was
explaining his decision to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of
the court.

Mercy was not something that U.S. District Judge George King seemed to have
in abundance. King had prohibited McWilliams, who used marijuana to fight
the nausea caused by his AIDS medications, from presenting a "medical
necessity" defense at his trial in Los Angeles.

That meant that neither McWilliams nor his lawyer could so much as mention
his disease, marijuana's usefulness as a medicine, the program under which
eight patients were receiving marijuana from the federal government, or
Proposition 215, the 1996 California ballot initiative that sanctioned the
medical use of marijuana. King had also refused to let McWilliams smoke
marijuana while he was free on bail, even though McWilliams said it was the
only way he could keep down the drugs that were keeping him alive.

Still, McWilliams hoped the judge would allow him to serve his sentence
under home confinement. Because of his weakened immune system, he felt
certain he could not survive prison.

It seems McWilliams could not survive the conditions of his bail, either.
On June 14, two months before he was scheduled to be sentenced, the
50-year-old writer was found dead on the floor of his bathroom. Friends
reported that he appeared to have choked to death on vomit.

Without marijuana to treat the nausea brought on by his AIDS pills,
McWilliams had developed a regimen that included Marinol (a prescription
drug containing a synthetic version of THC, marijuana's main active
ingredient), various herbs, hot baths, bed rest, and electric massage. "The
procedure of keeping down the medications is agonizing, exhausting,
debilitating, and I must do it three times a day," he wrote in February.
"It [would be] entirely unnecessary if I could use medical marijuana."

Although McWilliams' ordeal seems to be exactly the sort of thing that
medical marijuana activists want to prevent, his case aroused ambivalence
within the movement. He and Todd McCormick, a friend who used marijuana to
relieve chronic pain resulting from childhood treatments for bone cancer,
were charged with raising some 6,000 plants at four different locations.

That's a bit more than they needed for their own use. McCormick said he was
growing the plants as part of his research for a book on medical marijuana
that McWilliams was publishing. The Drug Enforcement Administration said
the two planned to supply marijuana to "buyer's clubs" serving patients
authorized to use the drug by Proposition 215.

Whichever version you believe, there's no question that McWilliams and
McCormick broke federal law, which does not recognize any legitimate reason
to grow marijuana. Indeed, their operation was not even legal under
Proposition 215, which allows cultivation for a patient's personal use but
not for research or for sale to others.

The McWilliams/McCormick case called attention to the absurdity of
classifying marijuana as a Schedule I drug under federal law, signifying a
high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Although
scientifically groundless, that classification is self-perpetuating, since
any use of a Schedule I drug is "abuse" by definition and no Schedule I
drug can be legally used as a medicine.

The case also illustrated the problems caused by legalizing medical
marijuana, as Proposition 215 ostensibly did, without authorizing anyone to
supply it. Since relatively few patients are prepared to grow their own
pot, most have to rely on the black market.

In other words, marijuana is not really a legal medicine, even in
California. By highlighting that fact, McWilliams embarrassed the quieter,
more discreet activists who are trying to make medical marijuana
respectable--especially because (unlike pharmaceutical companies?) he was
accused of a profit motive.

It probably did not help that McWilliams was not only a medical marijuana
advocate but an outspoken opponent of drug prohibition. Indeed, as a
prominent member of the Libertarian Party and the author of the 1993 book
Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, he called for the repealof all
consensual crime laws.

McWilliams' baggage made medical marijuana supporters reluctant to claim
him as a poster boy for their cause. But now he is "another martyr" of the
war on drugs, no matter how much they (and he) might have preferred otherwise.