MEDICAL-MARIJUANA FIGHT IS ABOUT POWER, NOT MEDICINE

From Olympic Valley

One thing government can do is crack down on crime. By making more things a
crime, that's how government is able to expand its power.

Steve Kubby, Libertarian Party candidate for governor, in an interview in
September

For more than an hour, the candidate had sat in a Fresno coffee shop,
merrily lobbing one rhetorical hand grenade after another. Steve Kubby was
against the death penalty and for an open border.

He regarded speeding tickets as literal "highway robbery," thought Central
Valley farmers should be growing hemp, opposed seat-belt laws and
gun-control laws alike. His most passionately held position, however,
involved the nation's "war on thugs."

For Kubby, a 52-year-old electronic-magazine publisher, this issue was
personal. More than 20 years earlier, he had been diagnosed with an
extremely rare and typically fatal cancer.

To the mystification of medical authorities, Kubby discovered that
marijuana alleviated his symptoms and apparently kept the cancer in check.
He became a proponent of medicinal marijuana, and in 1996 played a major
role in the successful campaign for Proposition 215, which theoretically
made pot legal medicine in California.

Now, with the interview winding down, the otherwise free-wheeling
politician asked to go off the record. Kubby confided that he was concerned
about drug-police payback. He had received a tip: A stakeout of his Lake
Tahoe residence was under way.

Specifically, he had been warned to watch out for a green Jeep Cherokee
with tinted windows. He wasn't sure whether to believe this, and he did not
want to come across in a campaign interview as a caricature of pot-induced
paranoia. Still ...

Jump ahead now to a Tuesday morning in mid-January. Kubby's wife Michelle -
who also takes marijuana, with a doctor's endorsement, for a chronic
stomach ailment - was playing with her 3-year-old daughter. She saw a green
Jeep drive by. A few minutes later came the knock on the door.

"We have a search warrant," the lead officer announced, and in trooped a
dozen or more investigators.

They moved to the basement, where Kubby was growing the marijuana that he
says keeps him alive. In the well-equipped "growing rooms," the officers
found about 130 mature plants and an equal number of seedlings. The
discovery should not have come as a surprise; Kubby had not exactly been
covering his tracks. In fact, since the tip about the stake-out, he had
been placing "attention law enforcement" notes in the trash, explaining his
medical condition and acknowledging the cultivation of marijuana. He had
guessed - accurately, it turned out - that the garbage would be searched.

According to law enforcement files, the investigation was triggered in July
by an unsigned letter. It accused Kubby of growing more than 1,000 plants
and selling pot to finance his political campaign. Investigators began
surveillance, peering through his back windows from the woods behind the
house. After they observed Kubby showing a plant to a man they believed to
be a customer - he was, Kubby would say, a correspondent for High Times
magazine - they obtained the search warrant.

Four hours into the search, Steve and Michelle Kubby were handcuffed and
loaded into a vehicle for the ride to jail, where they would be booked for
investigation of cultivation and possession of marijuana for sale. Before
they left, Kubby asked if he could take some of his "medicine" with him.
No, the investigator said, the jail had a "no-smoking policy."

The Kubbys have pleaded not guilty, contending that they never sold
marijuana and their crop was not excessive. Among medical-marijuana
proponents, there is hope that a trial might shine needed light on what
they see as a refusal by law enforcement authorities to accept and abide by
Prop. 215.

For his part, the Placer County prosecutor handling the case has told
reporters that "if a jury decides that 265 plants are all right, then that
is justice. But if the jury decides it's just too much, justice is done
then, too."

While Kubby was in jail, awaiting release on his own recognizance, his
original physician urged the judge by letter not to deprive the prisoner of
his marijuana. Dr. Vincent DeQuattro of USC Medical Center noted that
Kubby's condition - malignant pheochromocytoma, or adrenal cancer - was
almost always fatal. In fact, the doctor added, until he received his voter
pamphlet last fall, he'd assumed that Kubby, whom he had not seen for more
than a decade, was dead.

"Faith healers," wrote DeQuattro, "would term Steve's existence these past
10-15 years as nothing short of a miracle. In my view, this miracle, in
part, is related to the therapy with marijuana."

Unfortunately, the fight over medical marijuana never has seemed to have
much to do with medicine. It's more about power, about who gets to make the
rules, and the passage of Prop. 215, it would seem, settled nothing.