Source: Miami Herald

AIDS patient: Make pot legal for ailing

Constitution panel visits Broward

By TOM FIEDLER
Herald Political Editor

Before Greg Scott left his Fort Lauderdale home Thursday morning, he
picked up all his marijuana and drug paraphernalia and gave it to
friends.

``I didn't want to have anything in the house in case the police
decided to raid it after today,'' he said.

This was not an act of paranoia. Scott, 35, was among a parade of
people who gathered at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts for
the opportunity to address the 1998 Constitution Revision Commission
on a subject he said has been a matter of life and death: legalizing
marijuana for medicinal purposes.

His testimony was unique, however, in confessing to a crime.

``My name is Greg Scott, and I have AIDS,'' he told the citizens'
panel, which is charged with reviewing Florida's 29yearold
constitution and recommending changes to voters next year. ``Because I
smoked pot, I lived.''

Scott told the commission that he tried conventional treatments for
AIDS for several years, but gradually fell victim to its progress. He
dropped to 130 pounds, developed purplish skin and was so wasted he
frightened people who happened to sit next to him on local buses.

Scott said the daily marijuana, taken with the approval of his
physicians, enabled him to eat and endure the regimen of antiAIDS
drugs that have helped him snap back from the disease. He has since
gained 50 pounds and returned to work as a copywriter.

The commission's hearing in Fort Lauderdale, one of several across
Florida, was intended to focus on proposed changes to the state
Legislature.

Mallory Horne, who has served as both a House speaker and a Senate
president, urged the commission to change the socalled ``eight is
enough'' termlimits law.

He said the eightyear limit means that the next generation of
legislative leaders would take office after just six years in office
not enough to serve effectively. Horne said the limit should be 12
years, if at all.

Horne also proposed that the House term be extended to four years and
a Senate term to six.

The idea of altering the term limitation so soon after it was
implemented by voters in 1992 drew a warning from one of its
proponents. Jon Sowinski, executive director of the EightisEnough
campaign said the commission would provoke a hostile reaction from
voters by changing it.

Some of the most dramatic testimony in the daylong hearing, however,
came from people who shared intensely personal tragedies with the
commission. Two witnesses described the deaths of their mothers from
questionable circumstances during hospitalizations.

But in each case, although the situation appeared to indicate medical
malpractice, the women said they were barred from taking action by a
state law. The law holds that only children under age 25 can recover
damages in malpractice cases.

As a result, they said, hospitals that treat older patients with grown
children have no fear of malpractice awards.

``It's like they can get away with murder,'' said Paige Hackman, a
33yearold Boca Raton woman whose mother died after hipreplacement
surgery. Several on the hospital staff blamed the treating nurse for
the death, Hackman said, but she was barred from acting.

She asked the commission to add a provision to the constitution
prohibiting discrimination because of age. That would enable even
older children of patients to go to court in such cases.