OTTAWA'S UNDERGROUND NETWORK FOR MEDICINAL MARIJUANA

Dr. Don Kilby recommends that Jean Charles Pariseau smoke marijuana to
relieve some of his AIDS symptoms. Aubert Martins makes sure Mr. Pariseau
can get his hands on the illegal drug. Jeremy Mercer reports.

When Jean Charles Pariseau fell sick with the AIDS virus last fall, Aubert
Martins felt compelled to help his dying friend.

The roughly 30 pills Mr. Pariseau takes each day to fight the HIV made him
nauseous and destroyed his appetite. By last October, Mr. Pariseau, who at
5 foot 2 inches once weighed 115 pounds, had dropped to a gaunt 82 pounds.
Doctors gave the Hull man three months to live.

Near the end of October 1996, Mr. Martins visited Mr. Pariseau at the
hospital. The old friends had often shared marijuana cigarettes together,
and they lit one up together for old times' sake the first joint for Mr.
Pariseau since he had become severely ill. To his surprise, after smoking,
he ate a full meal and kept it all down.

"The doctors told me 'You have to eat, you have to eat,' " says Mr.
Pariseau, 30. "I was sick so I couldn't. But when you smoke, you get the
munchies and you eat. So I started to smoke all the time."

Thus began Mr. Pariseau's extensive, illegal and doctorapproved
marijuana diet.

Not only had Mr. Pariseau found a marijuana grower to provide him with the
drug to alleviate his AIDS symptoms, but he found a doctor, Don Kilby, who
recommended he continue using.

"In this case, my recommendation was to smoke a few joints because it
stimulates his appetite and keeps his weight up," Dr. Kilby says.

Smoking four or five joints a day, Mr. Pariseau's weight slowly began to
climb and within months he was up to 100 pounds.

Mr. Martins, an Ottawa marijuana grower, saw an opportunity to help. Mr.
Pariseau could neither afford to pay street prices for marijuana nor could
he trust the quality of the drug off the street.

So Mr. Martins, 40, decided he would take responsibility for providing Mr.
Pariseau with marijuana.

For the first few months, he would drop off 20 or 30 grams a week to his
friend. Later, he set Mr. Pariseau up with 50 marijuana plants and two
lamps in one of the apartment's closets.

"He was sick and he needed the marijuana," Mr. Martins says. "How could I
not do something?"

Three weeks ago, all that came to an end.

On Oct. 15, while Mr. Pariseau sat on the couch swallowing the last of his
afternoon pills and his wife, Sylvie, prepared a dinner of pork chops,
mashed potatoes and gravy, there was a knock on their door.

According to Mr. Pariseau, 10 police officers, acting on a tip, swarmed in
and seized his modest marijuanagrowing setup. Both he and his wife were
charged with drug offences and will appear in Hull court Nov. 20.

Mr. Martins was outraged.

"Why Charles? Who was he hurting? He needs his marijuana to live, even the
doctors will tell you that. But still they take away his crop and his
equipment. It's not right."

Mr. Martins felt compelled to act again.

For the past year, Mr. Martins has been involved in a network of doctors,
marijuana growers, and cancer and AIDS victims whose goal is to provide the
illegal drug to patients in need.

Despite the fact that possession of marijuana is punishable by as much as
seven years in prison, and trafficking can mean a life sentence, Mr.
Pariseau's arrest has made Mr. Martins angry enough to take his mission
public.

"What I am doing is not wrong," Mr. Martins says.

"These people need their smoke. They need to make sure they get good
quality and shouldn't have to go to the street to get it. What I want to do
is be able grow marijuana and set up as many people who need it with their
own growing operations."

Mr. Martins is not alone.

Informal networks have been formed in most major Canadian cities to provide
marijuana to medical patients.

Advocates of medical use of marijuana contend that it promotes appetite and
suppresses nausea making it a potential lifesaver for patients
undergoing chemotherapy for cancer or battling the wasting syndrome caused
by the human immunodeficiency virus.

And there is no doubt there is support for the legalization of marijuana
among the public.

In a poll of 1,515 Canadians conducted by Angus Reid in the last week of
October an incredible 83 per cent of those asked supported the legalization
of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Fiftyone per cent supported the total
legalization of the drug.

Mr. Pariseau believes the drug should be legalized for his use.

"If a doctor says it helps, why shouldn't I be able to have it?"

Mr. Pariseau's doctor has recommended he continue to use marijuana.

Dr. Don Kilby, who works at the University of Ottawa health clinic, was not
surprised that Mr. Pariseau had been wasting away from his sickness.

"As it happens with a lot of patients with advanced cancers or advanced
AIDS, you get to a point where one of the things that kill them is the
malnutrition and the wasting stage at the end of their disease," Dr. Kilby
says. "You do whatever you can to stimulate their appetite."

Usually Dr. Kilby prescribes the drug Megace as an appetite stimulant.

But Megace is not available for AIDS patients under the Quebec health care
plan and costs between $2,000 and $3,000 a month for the dose an AIDS
patient needs.

Mr. Pariseau and his wife, Sylvie, could not afford that. After he got
sick, Mr. Pariseau had to leave his job as a carpet layer and now the
couple depends on social assistance.

When Mr. Pariseau told Dr. Kilby he was using marijuana to keep his food
down, Dr. Kilby approved.

"Without the marijuana he didn't have the appetite and without the appetite
he wasn't eating. Without the eating he wasn't able to take the 20some
pills a day that I was trying to give him. So this way, with the appetite
improved, the weight gaining and the better digestion and the nausea
reduced, he was able to take his medication and the treatment was working,"
Dr. Kilby says.

And both Dr. Kilby and Mr. Pariseau are thrilled with the results,
considering that a little more than a year ago, doctors told Mr. Pariseau
he had three months to live.

"His prognosis for living, although he is going to be permanently
handicapped because of how sick he got, right now it looks pretty good if
we can keep him on his medications and keep his weight up," Dr. Kilby says.

"I'm not going to say he's going to live until he's sixty, but at least
instead of looking at a prognosis of three months we're looking more at a
prognosis of three years."

It is cases like Mr. Pariseau's that strengthen Dr. Kilby's support for the
legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

"Even though I can't prescribe and don't grow it and don't give it out, I
don't have any qualms about telling people that if you're using it
medicinally I cannot say you're doing a bad thing," he says.

"I think that people that fit the criteria of wasting and malnutrition
secondary to disease, or induced by the treatments or chemotherapies used
to treat the disease, I can't see why we wouldn't allow them to use
marijuana if it was going to extend their lives."

There have been several court cases in Canada over exactly what Dr. Kilby
recommends the legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

In the most recent case, Lynn Harichy, who has multiple sclerosis,
challenged the law by trying to smoke a joint on the steps of the London
police station in October. She was arrested and charged with possession of
a narcotic.

Ms. Harichy, 36, is being defended by Alan Young, an Osgoode Hall law
professor who recently lost a highprofile constitutional challenge to the
marijuana law. He was defending London hemp shop owner Chris Clay, who was
charged with trafficking and possession of marijuana. Mr. Clay was
convicted and fined $750.

"There are groups of people providing marijuana for medicinal purposes from
the west coast to the east coast," says Mr. Young, whose goal is to have
the marijuana law struck down.

"It's about time we took this underground activity and legitimized it and
created some quality control. We have a situation where people with
debilitating illnesses venture into the black market and risk the jeopardy
of criminal sanctions."

Mr. Young himself was part of a group that tried to start a marijuana
buyers club for cancer and AIDS patients in Toronto, but the effort failed,
partly out of fear of police repercussions.

Mr. Young says he believes Ms. Harichy will win her case, but is not
confident such a decision will lead to changes in the law.

"I tell people that these medical necessity case are important, but let's
not delude ourselves into thinking it will change the law. Any decision
will be appealed," Mr. Young says. "What we must do is push the government
to make changes to the law."

When told about Mr. Pariseau's arrest, Mr. Young was surprised.

"The government is aware these people are doing it and they rarely
intervene because the optics of it would be very bad.

"It would be the big, bad government depriving seriously ill people of
something that would make their lives more bearable."

The Cannabis Compassion Club in Vancouver is a case in point, providing a
safe spot for cancer and AIDS patients to buy and smoke marijuana.
Vancouver police have said they are not concerned about the club's
activities unless it starts selling to minors or recreational users.

Mr. Martins hopes authorities here in the Ottawa area turn a similar blind
eye to his own missions of mercy.

On a sunny day last week, Mr. Martins packed 100 grams of marijuana into
the glove compartment of a friend's car and made his rounds in Hull.

His first stop was the Pariseau's apartment on Mont Bleu Boulevard. Mr.
Martins dropped off a bag of marijuana and rolled a few joints as the
Pariseau's dog Coquette ran circles around the table.

Mr. Martins has been growing marijuana for two decades and his experience
is evident in the quality of the marijuana.

He says he had offers from various organized crime groups who want him to
oversee their growing operations. And needless to say, he could make a
fortune by selling his product on the street.

But Mr. Martins says he is not the marijuana business for the money.

He lives a relatively humble existence, with no car and only rented rooms
in the basement of an Ottawa house.

"I do it because I love to grow, simple as that."

Mr. Martins has ended up on the wrong side of the law, though. This spring,
police seized more than 500 marijuana plants and growing equipment from his
basement. He ended up pleading guilty to drug charges and received a 90day
jail sentence, which he serves on weekends.

The spring bust did change the way Mr. Martins worked. Instead of growing
the marijuana himself, he set up smaller growing operations around the
city. The deal he offers is simple: he'll set someone up with the plants
and equipment and when it comes time to harvest the marijuana, half of the
crop goes to sick people he serves and the host keeps the other half.

Using these satellite crops, he sells to a few friends to provide the
basics and distributes to a loose circle of people with AIDS, cancer, and
other serious illnesses. And he also sells to some doctors in Quebec who
provide the marijuana for their patients.

Mr. Martins will not disclose the names of the doctors to whom he sells
because they fear prosecution. He will not say how many people he provides
to, but the network continues to grow through word of mouth.

"Anyone who is in a situation like that, give me a call and I'll set them
up," says Mr. Martins. "I'll help them."

His dream is that marijuana be legalized for medicinal purposes, so he can
set up a business to provide the drug and installing marijuana growing
units in the homes of those in need.

"It's clean that way," says Mr. Martins. "If you buy marijuana on the
street, you don't know what's in it, you don't know what you're getting."

As the joint made its way around the Pariseau table, Mr. Pariseau talked
about his illness.

He believes he contracted the virus in 1984, when as a teenager, he had a
sixmonth addiction to cocaine, which he injected with friends.

He didn't even realize he was infected until he collapsed last August with
a mysterious illness. His days now are spent either in his apartment or at
the hospital.

His wife Sylvie is constantly by his side.

"I accept the sickness but I don't accept the laws," says Mrs. Pariseau.

"He's dying and the marijuana helps, the doctors even say so. But they
won't let him have it. It's just a plant."

In one small miracle, despite eight years of physical intimacy when Mr.
Pariseau didn't realize he carried the virus, his wife was not infected.

After dropping off marijuana to Mr. Pariseau, Mr. Martins travelled a bit
further to drop off another bag to a second young man with AIDS who did not
want his name in the paper.

His last stop was the home of Gerard Konning in a quiet suburb of Hull.

Mr. Konning suffers from Crohn's disease and had a brain tumor removed last
year.

"It keeps me from jumping off the bridge, really," Mr. Konning said as he
served Mr. Martins coffee.

This day Mr. Martins is giving Mr. Konning about 30 grams of marijuana for
$100, enough to make about 100 joints. The money, less than $4 a gram, goes
to cover Mr. Martins' expenses. On the street, a gram of marijuana costs
between $10 and $15.

The combination of stress and pain from his various illnesses keeps Mr.
Konning from sleeping at night. He was prescribed more than a dozen types
of sleeping pills and tranquilizers, everything from Valium to Prozac, but
nothing worked. He couldn't sleep, his head spun and his life was miserable.

Last fall, Mr. Konning was in the same hospital ward as Mr. Pariseau.

The two got to talking and Mr. Pariseau told Mr. Konning how pleased he was
with the marijuana.

"I was totally against it before," Mr. Konning says. "I used to be 500 per
cent against anything to do with drugs. But when you smoke and you head
stops spinning and you can sleep at night, you change. The first 49 years
of my life, I never tried a drug. Now, I don't know where I'd be without it."

After leaving Mr. Konning's home, Mr. Martin sprayed deodorizer in his car
to mask the smell of marijuana. He shrugs.

"Is what I do so bad?"