HE MADE THE CASE FOR POT by CAROL M. OSTROM; SEATTLE TIMES STAFF REPORTER
Copyright (c) 1997, The Seattle Times Company

THE STATE SUPREME COURT COULD RULE any day now in a case
that would allow doctors to prescribe marijuana for
medical purposes. Ralph Seeley, the attorney who argued
the case for marijuana, is also the plaintiff, a cancer
patient whose doctor says he'd prescribe it for him if he
could. Ralph Seeley searches for words. Once, he had more
than he could use, sharpedged words that more often than
not made things happen his way. Now, heavyduty
prescription drugs dull his brain along with the pain, and
the words don't come as easily.

For a lawyer, that's frustrating. But after radiation,
four rounds of chemotherapy and 12 surgeries that resulted
in the loss of some of his spine, one lung and a part of
the other, and several nerves in his back, Seeley is
learning to be more patient. Ten years with cancer can do
that.

Ten years with cancer also pushed him to court. In
Pierce County Superior Court in 1995, Seeley argued that he
had a right under the state constitution which decrees
that government exists to "protect and maintain individual
rights" to smoke marijuana.

Painting a vivid picture of himself lying on the floor
after chemotherapy treatment, covered in his own vomit and
excrement, Seeley told the judge that smoking marijuana was
the only way he could control his nausea and that he had a
right to have the medicine he needed.

The judge agreed with him stunning Seeley, the state's
lawyers and observers. Now, the case is in front of the
state Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Seeley waits. Life now is a sort of waiting
game: trying to stay alive until someone, somewhere, comes
up with a cure for his cancer before it kills him.

The surgeons' slicing and snipping have taken their toll
on his body, now a lanky 6 feet twisted into a sort of
corkscrew. His hair, once bushy, is short and sparse thanks
to chemotherapy. The surgeons tell him there is no more
hope the tumor on his spine can be excised.

Seeley has never talked to his doctor about his death,
about how he wants to die. He has been too busy fighting
"this damn disease."

Last week, Seeley was in the hospital, trying a new kind
of chemotherapy, just approved, with no track record, but
he's optimistic. Along with pain medication, he brought to
the hospital his little brass pipe and his stash of
marijuana. After the court decision, he figures his
possession is at least a gray area, although he smoked
before that, he freely concedes.

Hours after he was admitted, his music instructor
arrived to give him a cello lesson. The rental and lessons
were an inspired gift from his mother, he says.

"Aesthetics is a big part of staying positive, staying
out of the doldrums with this damn disease. And man, when
you get four notes in a row just right on a cello. . . . I
mean, you practically wear the thing, it touches both legs
and your chest as well as your hands. It's just incredibly
beautiful."

Now, at 48, Seeley is doing a lot of things that are new
for him, but then, he has always done that.

An Air Force "brat" who joined the Navy, he once tended
a nuclear power plant on a submarine. Later, he enrolled at
freespirited Evergreen State College, and worked as a
columnist for a couple of Northwest daily newspapers. He
backpacked and fished for trout, rode horses and flew a
plane, and now he's learning to walk again after his most
recent surgery paralyzed a leg. Now the tumor itself is
cutting off nerves he needs to walk. Most times, he walks
with crutches with arm braces.

In December, he married again. Judith Tuffias Seeley,
51, is as tough and intense as her husband and, like him,
is a cancer survivor, having been diagnosed with breast
cancer four months after she opened a familylaw office in
1995. She had a double mastectomy and finished chemotherapy
in July.

Lawschool classmates at the University of Puget Sound's
night school, where Ralph got his law degree in 1993,
Seeley & Seeley forged their partnership from a friendship.
Judith, like others in Seeley's class, was well aware of
this fiery man who was quick to include lawyers among those
he termed "scuzzbuckets" or "sleazeballs." Seeley had
enrolled in law school after becoming outraged at a case he
had written about: a daycare operator wrongly sent to
prison, he contends, on the basis of flimsy testimony
bolstered by bad lawyering and overzealous prosecution.

By the time he had his first lung surgery, just a few
weeks into the first semester, Seeley had built a
reputation as an iconoclast. During his absence, Judith
remembers, lawschool classmates took turns invoking his
name in answers to questions posed by the professor. "I'd
like to make the Ralph Seeley hypothetical,' " someone
would say. "It's because the lawyers are sleazy."

Early last year, Judith and Ralph Seeley moved to a
comfortable rental house in North Tacoma. Like the lawyers
they were, they agreed they should look into the tax
consequences of marriage. But one night, Ralph reordered
his priorities. "Ralph turned to me and said, I don't care
what the tax consequences are. Let's get married.' "

Both of them say cancer his or hers wasn't an issue.
His cancer, chordoma, is a rare bone cancer. When he was
diagnosed 10 years ago, his doctors gave him a 17 percent
chance of living five years, he recalls.

The only time he thought about killing himself, he says,
was when both the pain of his disease and the stupor of the
painkilling drugs whacked him. "I'm thinking: If I had to
live like this, I would rather die. When it's so
excruciating, there's no sense in living like that."

He laughs, a mirthless laugh, when he recalls the jokes
people make about his smoking marijuana. He gets his from a
group that supplies the illegal substance to people whose
doctors like Seeley's say they would prescribe it if it
were legal.

"People think it's fun to be high, and it is, but not
all the time and not in the wrong places," he begins, his
voice breathless from his lack of lung power. "It's fun to
be high and watch the sun go down, and eat good food and
make love. But nobody wants to be high 24 hours a day.

"What people don't understand is that the prayer of the
cancer patient is, I just want to be normal.' " That is one
big issue with marinol, the synthetic "marijuana pill" that
doctors can legally prescribe to patients like Seeley. He
tried it, and quickly found that a queasy patient most
often vomits up any pill. If one of the $ 12 pills finally
stays down, Seeley says, it takes two hours to kick in.
Then "it makes you extremely high higher than I've ever
been from smoking marijuana, higher than I want to be. And
it lasts 12 to 14 hours."

The next morning, perhaps arguing a case before a judge,
he'd still be high.

Before the pain medication muddled his memory, Seeley
was having considerable success at civilrights law, which,
he says, he learned while working with Tacoma lawyer Neil
Hoff and his associate, Paul Lindenmuth.

Seeley's first jury trial resulted in a $ 9 million
award for his client; later reversed by the appeals court,
the case is pending review in the state Supreme Court.

Now he is on leave from Hoff's office. In his one
remaining case, another lawyer checks his work because of
the drugs he takes. The drugs include some heavyduty
painkillers that make him forgetful and affect his
judgment. As a lawyer, he may have taken a turn for the
worse. But as a human being, Seeley insists, he has
improved and is "more likable." He says he's slower to
become angry or offended, or to jump to conclusions.

That doesn't mean he has quit referring to those on the
official Ralph Seeley Wrong Side as "sleazeballs" or worse.
And he huffs himself into indignation when he considers the
"lies and misinformation being slung around" about
marijuana.

Opponents of legalizing marijuana for medical
purposes say it's addictive, he scoffs. Seeley says he
knows what addiction is: After only nine days on a narcotic
prescription drug, he says, he quit and for three days
suffered chills and illusions of cockroaches climbing his
legs.

In contrast, he smoked marijuana every day for almost
three months during one semester of law school. Not only
did he make the dean's list, he had no symptoms when he
quit, he says.

On the other side of the issue, Assistant Attorney
General Melissa BurkeCain argued to the courts that no
scientific evidence exists to prove that smoking marijuana
helps control nausea; there are legal drugs that can do the
job. Seeley, she said, has no fundamental right to choose
which drugs should be legal. And the Legislature, she
argued, was within the power given it by the state
constitution to accept the federal classification of
marijuana as a Schedule I drug, like LSD and heroin,
considered to have no therapeutic use and a high potential
for abuse.

If the judges decide for Seeley, doctors would be
allowed to write prescriptions for marijuana for medical
reasons. But in California and Arizona, where restrictions
on marijuana have been relaxed for medical use, the
federal government has warned doctors that they could be
prosecuted, stripped of drugprescribing licenses and
barred from Medicare and Medicaid programs for prescribing
drugs the federal government considers illegal, no matter
what state laws say.

In Seeley's view, the Washington Constitution, with its
strong protection of individual rights, tips the balance to
the patient.

When asked by a justice during the September court
arguments what fundamental right he was advancing, Seeley
answered: "My right to be free from needless suffering."

Now, more than six months later, he's still passionate
about the subject, and still using marijuana to quell his
queasiness. This isn't, after all, an academic issue for
him. "Tell me," he demands, challenging his invisible
adversary, "if I don't smoke marijuana, what is the benefit
to the state?" Tell me, he taunts, "and I'll throw up on
myself and will not smoke marijuana."