MARIJUANA AND MIRACLES

I should be dead. That's what doctors recently told me after completing
extensive medical tests at the University of Southern California's School
of Medicine. According to Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, a USC professor and world
authority on adrenal cancer, my blood shows lethal levels of adrenaline.

That's really not surprising, since everyone who has ever had my disease
has died within a few years. Except for me. Thanks to medical marijuana,
I'm now entering my 23rd year of survival, something DeQuattro considers a
"medical miracle."

Dr. DeQuattro has even written a letter advising that I could suffer a
heart attack or stroke if deprived of marijuana and that no other form of
therapy is available.

Unfortunately, none of this seems to matter in Placer County, where 20
armed officers from four different agencies stormed our Squaw Valley home
four months ago. Armed with laser guided automatic weapons, body armor and
a battering ram, a SWAT team from the North Tahoe Narcotics Task Force
blocked off our street, raided our home and confiscated almost everything
of we own.

Besides taking my plants, gardening equipment and medicine, they seized all
of our electronic publishing equipment. That action effectively killed our
on-line magazine, Alpine World, which had been rated as the 25th top
electronic magazine in the world. This raid destroyed our primary source of
income, forcing us out of our home and into bankruptcy.

The Task Force confiscated our passports and social security cards. They
stole our company's petty cash and then went through our safe deposit box.
We still don't know what they stole from our box, they have the keys. They
even took the cash out of our wallets. Then they arrested us, handcuffed
us, and took us away to jail for three days. After taking everything we
own, they arbitrarily set bail at $200,000. Fortunately, our attorneys were
able to persuade a judge to drop all bail and release us on our own
recognizance.

Although both my wife and I are legal patients with doctor recommendations
we face a 19 count criminal indictment, just for the crime of using a
medicine, which is not government approved. Absolutely none of our medical
marijuana was ever sold or illegally distributed.

The City of Oakland is the only jurisdiction in California that has set
guidelines since the passage of Proposition 215. We carefully kept our
home-grown medicine within that one set of The Oakland Guidelines - which
also happens to be lower than the 7.1 pounds of marijuana our federal
government currently sends to each of the eight patients on the
Compassionate IND program each year.

We hope our case will achieve in the jury box what we were supposed to have
won at the ballot box -- the right for medical patients to not be treated
as criminals. It's time to stop arresting sick and dying people.