TERRY PARKER SAYS WEED CONTROLS HIS EPILEPSY BETTER THAN PRESCRIPTION DRUGS
AND HE HAS EVIDENCE FOR THE JUDGE

Terry Parker, the unlikely hero on whose slight shoulders this country's
medical marijuana hopes squarely rest, answers the door in that
everpresent psychedelic sunburst Tshirt, ponytail and the affectionate
"Hey, bud" he often uses.

His Parkdale digs high above the lake on the 22nd floor haven't changed
much since my visit last July except that the cops haven't been through
and left everything turned upside down.

And the landlord still hasn't got around to fixing the front door they
bashed in before hauling 73 plants out of Parker's place. He was charged
with possession for the purpose of trafficking and cultivation after
someone spotted some of the green growing on the balcony.

The circa70s photos of Parker here surrounded by pot plants, there in
an afro and brown tuxedo at his younger brother's wedding "Those were my
Jamaican days," he says are still the first things you see when you come
in.

The most striking portrait among them is of Parker Sr. standing at
attention in full firefighter uniform. That was before his untimely death
from a heart attack some years ago. He was 42, the same age Parker is now.
Like his eldest son and namesake, he had his own demons to contend with.
Only they came out of a bottle, while Parker's, who suffers from a serious
form of epilepsy, have lived in some dark, haunted space in his mind ever
since childhood.

Next month, judge Patrick Sheppard is scheduled to hand down a decision
that Parker hopes will end up allowing him and others who swear by pot's
healing properties to grow the leaf as medicine.

Parker discovered in his early teens that smoking pot helped ward off the
bodycontorting seizures that, for him, made simple pleasures like riding a
bike or driving a car every teen's dream impossibilities.

Sheppard's decision was supposed to be delivered this past Tuesday
(November 18), but he called Parker's lawyer, Aaron Harnett, a few hours
after our interview Friday (November 14) to say he needed more time.

By Harnett's account, the trial went very well, judging by, among other
things, the perfect strangers who would show up during the two weeks of
testimony to relate stories of relatives with cancer using pot to allay the
effects of chemotherapy.

The testimony of the arresting officers this goround was not what one
might call impressive, either especially since the trafficking charge
comes out of a "throwaway line" of Parker's, says Harnett, that he
sometimes gives pot away to friends and others in medical need.

Parker also has the benefit of a 1987 decision allowing him to possess pot
for medicinal purposes going for him not to mention the strength of
clinical trials in the U.S. pumping pot's therapeutic benefits.

NEWS DAMPER

But news of Sheppard's delay puts a damper on Parker's day. It's like that
sometimes with Parker.

The 1,050 milligrams of prescription dilantin and priandon he still takes
daily to control his seizures cause depression and mood swings. They make
the world Parker inhabits one of emotional extremes.

When the tides of torment really start swirling inside his head, things
seem overwhelming, even out of control.

Back in 69 and 72, Parker had two separate bouts of brain surgery. Doctors
told him and his mother it would make him better. Parker says it has only
made his epilepsy worse.

He has continued to search for answers about the entire mindboggling
episode. It has become an obsession.

For a period ending in 95, he picketed the Hospital for Sick Children,
where the surgeries were performed, for 410 days. It was Parker's way of
saying that all he wanted was some sort of explanation.

Pot has been his only saving grace.

"I don't know if I can take much more of this waiting anymore, or these
doctors who play bogus experts," he says.

Terrence Leslie Frederick Parker was four when he first began developing
the symptoms of epilepsy. That was after being hit on the head with a
swing. Things got worse when, at age six, he was hit by a car.

The seizures became a daily disruption, even with the heavy doses of
dilantin, mysoline and librium doctors prescribed to control them. It got
to the point where his teachers and the Etobicoke board recommended he be
institutionalized.

Then, on the advice of his neurosurgeons, Parker underwent a right temporal
lobectomy. He was 14. It was hoped the procedure, which involved removing
brain matter, would improve his condition. The seizures, though, only got
worse. He experienced what's called a grand mal, the most serious type of
seizure, right in the recovery room.

Shortly after the surgery, Parker became extremely depressed and suicidal
and was hospitalized in various psychiatric institutions.

His doctors performed a second temporal lobe cortical resection three years
later, but to no avail. He still continued to experience debilitating
seizures.

It was around that time, during a stint at Lakeshore psychiatric hospital
"It was like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," he says that an
orderly there turned Parker on to pot. He began to notice that the more he
smoked, the less frequent and intense his seizures became.

His mother, Helen Cork, who now lives in Lakefield, noticed it, too. She
says in her affidavit filed in court that she was "shocked" to find out
about it because she considers herself a lawabiding citizen, but she
nevertheless grew to understand Parker's need and has even risked arrest to
purchase pot for him a few times.

MOTHER'S SUPPORT

"My only concern for my son is that he be as healthy and happy as
possible," Cork says in her affidavit. "It is my sincere belief, not as a
doctor but as a mother who has cared for him, that marijuana helps to treat
his seizures."

Parker reported the phenomenon to his then physician, Michael Rachlis, and
on his instruction began keeping a diary, while continuing to take his
prescription medication.

During one threemonth period in 1980, Parker noted a total of 12 grand mal
seizures all of them on days when he did not smoke pot.

In another threemonth period in 81, when he was smoking pot with his
prescription, he experienced no grand mals at all, though he did suffer
some less serious petit mals.

"When I feel a seizure coming on, I smoke a couple of joints, and boom,"
Parker says, "everything is under control."

Pot, he says, also comes without the sideeffects of depression and loss of
appetite associated with his prescription medication.

When he doesn't smoke, however, Parker says he can experience anywhere from
three to five grand mals and up to a dozen petit mals a week. Things can
also become very scary.

Once, during what's called a psychomotor seizure, which causes
hallucinations, Parker mistook the end of a subway platform for the back of
a truck and jumped off. Only the sound of an approaching train brought him
to his senses, and he was able to scramble to safety.

On a more recent occasion, Parker felt a seizure coming and tried to hop a
bus on Weston Road to get to relative safety, when he was hit by an
ambulance and had to be hospitalized. He figures he's ended up in the
hospital more than 100 times because of injuries he's sustained during
seizures.

"When I'm treated only with prescription medicine, my life is very
difficult to live and at times truly miserable," Parker tells the court at
his most recent trial. "When I can consume marijuana daily, I'm able to
enjoy my life, free from seizures, and carry on in a relatively normal way."

Valerie Corall, an epileptic from Santa Cruz, California, who testified on
Parker's behalf, started her own marijuana buyers' club a few years ago
complete with charitable status and corporate donations to help
sufferers of epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and AIDS/HIV. Her condition, like
Parker's, was brought on by an accident in her case, when a plane buzzed
the car she was riding in.

The costs of buying pot for her club became so prohibitive that she started
growing the stuff on her farm.

State authorities wanted to shut Corall down and charged her with
cultivation. She launched a constitutional challenge similar to Parker's,
based on medical necessity. The charges, along with a second set laid
later, were dropped.

"At first they thought we were just trying to get high and put something
over on the state," Corall testifies. "It took a long time to educate and
many more conversations to obtain credibility and legitimize it."

California is one of two U.S. states, the other being Arizona, where
doctors can recommend marijuana be used for medical purposes. Thirtyfive
other state legislatures have passed laws recognizing marijuana's use as
medicine. Six states also recognize the medicalnecessity defence in cases
where people have been charged.

In Canada, meanwhile, pot charges continue to climb, to a total of 29,562
in 1996, the last year for which stats are available, from 28,330 in 95 and
27,662 in 94.

Other medical marijuana experts at Parker's trial, including John Morgan,
professor of pharmacology at the City of New York Medical School, testified
that the prescription drugs like dilantin used by epileptics to control
seizures cause a long list of possible sideeffects, including blood
abnormalities and liver and brain damage.

When Parker was charged with pot possession back in 87 the first time he
used the medical necessity defence and won both Rachlis and Douglas
Sider, another physician he was seeing, noted pot's beneficial effects on
his seizures.

Sider wrote in a letter submitted as evidence then that, "From a medical
and qualityoflife point of view, it is medically necessary, in order to
obtain optimal seizure control, that Parker regularly use marijuana in
conjunction with his other medications."

The arresting officer in that case offered to release Parker on his own
recognizance at the scene if he signed a release agreeing not to smoke pot.
Parker refused "To me, it's matter of life and death," he says and
ended up spending a week in the Metro West detention centre that ended up
being interrupted by a stay in hospital after he experienced another of his
seizures.

Parker won that case. But being allowed to possess pot, and growing it for
medicinal purposes are two different things.

TOO BROAD

Parker's lawyer, Harnett, argued that the current laws against cultivation
are too broad and an infringement of Parker's constitutional right to
life and liberty because they don't allow people who need pot to grow it
for medicinal purposes.

More harmful drugs like heroin, percodan and amphetamines, for example, can
be prescribed by a physician.

And technically, so can marijuana, but there is no exception in current law.

THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, is currently available in
synthetic form as marinol and nabilone but doesn't, according to Morgan and
other medical experts, contain the active ingredients shown to demonstrate
the anticonvulsant properties of smoked pot.

The Crown attorney, Kevin Wilson, argues, despite Morgan's testimony, that
marinol and nabilone are viable alternatives. And he claims that a
mechanism does exist whereby an application can be made to Health Canada
for approval of new drugs, even pot, for medical use, the suggestion being
that Parker hasn't exhausted all alternatives.

SCIENTIFIC STUDY

Harnett points out, though, that the cost of the scientific study necessary
to get approval for any new drug is prohibitive between $100,000 and
$200,000 for the average person.

Wilson also argues that the criminalization of marijuana, in any event, is
a matter not for the courts but for parliament, and should be dealt with
there, if at all.

In his final summation, Wilson goes on to suggest that Parker was not
administering his prescription medicines properly and that that's why he
feels the need to smoke pot to calm his seizures.

It's at that point that Parker says he began to experience the "tingly
feeling" he gets before a seizure. He ended up collapsing on the courtroom
floor. The fire department and ambulance were called, but the timing of the
seizure, Harnett says, had some in the courtroom wondering whether Parker
was trying to pull a fast one.

To Parker, it was more personal.

"He kept calling me a phony," he says.

Over a cup of coffee back at Parker's place, my mind floats back to all
those times over the years that Parker's called during one of those fits of
depression or maybe desperation to offer his own conspiracy theories
about his illfated brain surgeries.

I got tired of listening even hung up on him once or twice but I
realize now that it was just his way of searching for some comfort, and
maybe an explanation.

"To this day," he says, "and for the complications I was suffering,
nobody's ever told me jack shit. All I get is people ducking their heads."

The caged budgie overlooking the balcony from atop the stereo cabinet
begins fluttering up a fuss.