WHEN DRUG TIPSTERS SNITCH ON MOM AND DAD

TAKOMA PARK, MD. If the movement to legalize medical marijuana needs a
poster family, here it is.

They live in Takoma Park, a mostly middle-class suburb of Washington,
D.C. The mother, a lawyer, suffers from migraines and a chronic muscle
pain disorder that is hard to pronounce and even harder to spell:
fibromyalgia.

It is a condition that is severe enough for her to be considered
totally disabled by the Social Security Administration, according to
her attorney, Steven Kupferberg.

To relieve her suffering, according to police reports, this mom
planted and cultivated her own private marijuana garden under plant
lights in the basement of the family home.

That was before her 16-year-old daughter took photographs of the
plants to local police.

The police came to the home, smelled marijuana and returned with a
search warrant, according to a police report. The officers found the
plants and charged each parent on Aug. 30 with the manufacture and
distribution of marijuana, possession of marijuana and conspiracy to
manufacture and possess marijuana.

The parents, Robert Jason Alvarez, 54, and Kathleen Marie "Kitty"
Tucker, 55, turned themselves in to the Takoma Park police station and
were released on their own recognizance.

Because of the controversy, the father, a political appointee, was
fired from his job as a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Energy Department.

The parents also lost custody of their daughter, Kerry Tucker. A judge
ordered her into the care of family friends, an order attorney
Kupferberg is working to overturn.

"This is a family that is loving and caring," Kupferberg told me in an
interview. "There is no acrimony between parents and child. Everybody
understands where everyone else stands. This is a family crisis, a
tragedy of cataclysmic dimensions. Even if the allegations are not
true, it leaves scars. People just remember what they read in the paper."

Before the incident, both parents were widely known among anti-nuclear
activists. The wife helped bring national attention to the 1974 car
accident that killed lab analyst Karen Silkwood when she was on her
way to meet a reporter to discuss alleged safety problems at the
Kerr-McGee Corp. plutonium plant in Oklahoma. Her story became
"Silkwood," the popular movie starring Meryl Streep and Cher.

Perhaps someone will make a movie out of the Alvarez-Tucker story,
too. It contains the sort of compelling and tragic irony Hollywood
loves. It illustrates the tragic consequences that come from treating
marijuana as a law-enforcement problem instead of a health and medical
issue, even while a growing body of medical evidence endorses the
medical benefits of marijuana for some patients.

It also illustrates the tragic consequences of our "war on drugs" that
empowers kids--who are too young to comprehend fully the consequences
of their actions--to inform on their parents in the fashion of
Stalinist Russia.

Alan St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which favors decriminalization, told me
he can recall about 20 similar cases of youthful tipsters informing on
their parents since assuming his post in 1990. Many have involved
teenagers who, angered by some dispute with their parents, decided to
get even by telling police that their parents had marijuana.

In an earlier era, "We might have held our breath or run away, but
today teens really have the option to drop a dime on their parents,"
St. Pierre said.

But not everywhere. Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and
Washington state have passed referendum measures to legalize marijuana
for use by seriously ill patients. Maine votes on a similar measure in
November.

A few blocks from where the Alvarez-Tucker family lives, the District
of Columbia voted on a medical marijuana issue in November, but a
measure introduced by Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), while he was not busy
prosecuting President Clinton, blocked the vote from being counted.
Had it passed and the family moved into the district, Tucker easily
might have been prescribed marijuana the same way doctors prescribe
other pain relievers.

After all, even the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National
Academy of Sciences, announced earlier this year that marijuana eases
pain, nausea and other symptoms in some patients.

But the zero-tolerance crowd, led by folks like Barr, does not want to
hear about that. Sometimes politicians say they care about "family
values." Sometimes that talk just goes up in smoke.