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Freedom Fighters of the Month

WISCONSIN MARCHERS WHEEL INTO MADISON

Madison, WI - Fifteen medical-marijuana patients spent a week last
September marching 210 miles from the small town of Mondovi to the state
capitol here, in a follow-up to last May's "Journey for Justice" in Ohio.

The march's arrival on Sept. 18 coincided with the introduction of a
medical-marijuana bill in the state legislature by Rep. Frank Boyle
(D-Superior). Boyle's bill would reschedule cannabis as a Schedule III drug
- - equating it with Tylenol/codeine, rather than with heroin - and create a
medical-necessity defense for patients with "acute, chronic, incurable or
terminal" illnesses, if their doctors say conventional treatment "is either
not effective or is causing severe side-effects."

Rep. Boyle says he decided to sponsor the bill because medical-marijuana
patients "convinced me this was more than worth the political risk." He
argues there's "absolutely no rational" to deny people medication that
improves their lives, especially when drugs like steroids, barbiturates and
codeine are legal and frequently prescribed.

However, Rep. Gregg Underheim (R-Oshkosh), chair of the Assembly Health
Committee, says the bill will not get a hearing. "It's not about medicine,
it's about intoxication," he says of the medical-marijuana movement. The
movement, he adds, will not have any credibility until it presents "sound
intellectual rationales, not aging hippies."

As the marchers passed through Black River Falls, Elroy, the Wisconsin
Dells and Sauk City, the reaction was "ninety-nine percent positive," says
Steve Wessing of Madison. "We had people running out to greet us in every
town." Wessing, 36, has spinal-process bifida, a back deformity, and uses
cannabis to prevent muscle spasms that could seriously damage his vertebrae.

"It was one of the biggest highlights of my life. I never realized there
was so much support out there," says Jacki Rickert of Mondovi, where the
march began on Sept. 11. Rickert, 47, suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome,
a connective-tissue disorder in which her joints - including shoulders,
thumbs, knees and ankles - become dislocated very easily. If the
dislocation isn't reset within 20 minutes, she says, the muscles around the
injured area get so tight that "they're more like cable than muscle." But
if she smokes a joint before then, they relax in time.

Rickert, an active swimmer, horseback rider and gymnast before she was
diagnosed with the syndrome at 21, thought marijuana's muscle-relaxing
effect was a fluke the first time she discovered it. She was waiting in a
hospital emergency room when a friend invited her to step outside for a
toke. "It was a strange time to be lighting up a joint." She recalls. "I
never thought in my wildest dreams that this was a medicine."

By 1987, she was unable to sit up for more than 15 minutes at a time. She
smoked to get high occasionally - and "stumbled across" the effect again.
"I was playing Pac-Man, of all things," she tells HT. "I realized I'd been
sitting up for one and a half hours, and my score kept getting higher and
higher." She soon discovered that cannabis could help her control the
dislocations and keep her other medications down.

In 1990, Rickert was approved to receive cannabis under the now-defunct
Compassionate IND program, but the federal government has refused to
provide her with any. They urged her to take Marinol instead, when she says
made her tongue swell up so much she could barely fit a straw into her
mouth. Before her doctor died in 1993, she says, "he went through every
channel, he met every specification they asked for." Says march organizer
Kay Lee, "She's as legal as Elvy Musikka."

Rep. Boyle says that despite his medical-marijuana bill's imminent death,
getting the issue on the table is still worth the effort. "We have an
obligation to promote change," he tells HT. "The long term says we'll win."