DA DROPS MEDICAL MARIJUANA CASE

JACKI RICKERT, the 48-year-old Mondovi woman who smokes marijuana to help
ease the pain of debilitating bone and tissue diseases, will not face
criminal charges for the marijuana confiscated from her home by police last
month.

Buffalo County District Attorney James Duvall decided last week not to file
charges because of "the particularly unusual facts of the case.''

"It's incredibly good news,'' Rickert was saying this week from her home in
Mondovi, southwest of Eau Claire. "I couldn't be happier.''

Rickert uses a wheelchair and told me recently that she hadn't been on a
scale because she feared that without the appetite that marijuana gives her,
she had lost weight. In March she weighed 90 pounds. She said she had been
approved into a federal program that provided medical marijuana a decade
ago, but not officially enrolled in the program when it was canceled.

If any good has come from the events of the last six weeks, Rickert said,
it's the "incredible outpouring of support that I received from people from
all over.'' It's probably a pipe dream (heh, heh), but maybe the politicians
will take note and rethink the wisdom of keeping medical marijuana out of
the hands of desperately ill people who gain from it some small increase in
their quality of life. ...

(snip)