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Denise Smith was not especially surprised when her blood
test came back positive. The father of her child, after
all, died of AIDS. Nevertheless, it was devastating.

"It was really hard, scary," she told me in her Monroe
County home, accompanied by her present husband and her
mother. The terrible news that she was HIVpositive came
about six years ago. A couple of years later, she developed
the first painful symptoms of fullblown AIDS.

By last summer, Smith was in agony and her normally slim
5foot3 frame was starting to look skeletal.

"Twenty pounds I lost! I'm back up to 100 pounds now,
but I got down to 87," she said.

Food became her enemy, causing almost immediate vomiting
or diarrhea. Along with other wretched maladies associated
with AIDS, she was starving to death.

"We tried everything to keep (the food) down, and
nothing helped," Smith said, referring to nausea and
diarrhea medications, including Zofran, prescribed by
doctors.

"I was afraid to eat. Every time I eat, up it comes or
out it comes. ... I thought, oh, I was dying."

She also suffered from high fever, weakness, dizziness,
hair loss and horrible reactions to prescription drugs,
especially those to treat MAC, a disease similar to
tuberculosis and common in advanced AIDS cases.

Then Smith tried marijuana, and she was able to eat
again. It also seemed to help her sleep better and to
lessen her awful nightmares.

Now, Smith uses the equivalent of about two marijuana
cigarettes a week, and that's enough to get her appetite
back and to keep the food in her stomach. She smokes a
pinch of pot at a time in a little pipe. Why, I asked, are
you telling me

all this? Aren't you afraid of getting in trouble with
the law?

"Not at all," she said. "I don't see myself as being a
criminal. It (pot) makes me feel better. I know it's
illegal, but it makes me feel better."

At that point, her husband, Al Smith, spoke up in
response to her acknowledgment that pot is illegal. "So was
harboring slaves," he noted.

He did not come by such attitudes on an ad hoc basis.
Apart from wishing to ease his wife's suffering, he twice
ran for Congress as the Libertarian Party candidate
challenging U.S. Rep. Joe McDade. (The Libertarians oppose
our draconian drug laws, along with any other law that lets
authorities intrude into personal behavior that's not
harmful to others.)

Anyway, Al Smith, who works as a carpenter, has formed
an organization to fight for the legalization of the
therapeutic use of marijuana. He calls it Dee's Dream
(Denise's nickname is Dee) and the address is P.O. Box 41,
Analomink, Pa. 18320. Email can be sent to
alsmith@bigfoot.com.

I know what you're thinking. You saw the story in the
paper last month. It said area doctors see no need to
prescribe marijuana, because other medications work just
fine.

Some doctors, the story said, suspect "ulterior motives"
behind the legalization philosophy. "The people who want
this are, frankly, potheads," Allentown eye surgeon Harold
Goldfarb was quoted as saying.

I, frankly, should like to see if Goldfarb has the guts
to look Denise Smith in the face and say that. And speaking
of ulterior motives, how much money will the medical
establishment make if people are allowed to use something
that is effective, does not come in a pill, and cannot be
controlled through prescriptions? The prescribed medication
Smith was given to ease some of her most gruesome symptoms
is Zofran, which costs $ 10 per pill. She had to take three
pills a day, and it didn't work nearly as well as
marijuana.

The legal system often makes people suffer, but nowhere
more unjustly than here. I'll get to some of the legal
questions at another time. For now, the key question is
this:

If you were in Denise Smith's place, vomiting every bite
of food you tried to swallow and down to 87 pounds, what
would your philosophical position be then?