He made the case for pot

by Carol M. Ostrom
Seattle Times staff reporter

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."

Copyright 1997 The Seattle Times Company