SHORE MAN RECALLS WIFE'S MEDICAL-MARIJUANA FIGHT

On her deathbed in 2003, Cheryl Miller made her husband James promise
her that he would not give up their fight to have the use of
marijuana for medical purposes legalized.

Having suffered from a debilitating form of multiple sclerosis since
1971, Miller used marijuana to ease the painful symptoms of her disease.

Together, the Toms River couple engaged in carefully crafted acts of
civil disobedience that culminated in 1998 with chomping down a piece
of marijuana outside the office of a congressman opposed to
legalization of the drug for any reason.

So when the Legislature on Monday approved a bill that would make New
Jersey the 14th state to allow chronically ill patients access to
marijuana for medical reasons, the occasion was bittersweet for James
Miller, 57, who still lives in Ocean County.

"I didn't hear the name Cheryl Miller mentioned. It's not why I went,
to hear my late wife's name mentioned," Miller said Wednesday, during
a speech at the Red Bank Public Library.

"You'd think maybe somebody who stood there in the beginning,
virtually by herself . . .," he continued, before stopping himself.
"When I say stand, she couldn't move her arms or her legs by herself
at all -- I mean that figuratively. So why do I think that was an oversight?"

Though Cheryl Miller is credited with helping bring down former U.S.
Rep. Bob Barr's re-election bid in 2002 over the issue, a position
that Barr has since reversed, the controversial, in-your-face tactics
of the Millers have not exactly endeared them to the protocol and
image-conscious political establishment.

But in the 1990s, when the legalization of medical marijuana was seen
largely as a backdoor, slippery slope effort to decriminalize
cannabis altogether, unorthodox means were the only way the Millers
could gain any attention.

"The press wouldn't come to our house," James Miller recalled. "So
she had me push her wheelchair across Seaside (Heights) to Trenton,
58 miles in 25 hours . . . that's all I had do in '93 to get
television stations, radio stations and newspapers to show up. They
didn't care this could save a woman's life; they didn't care if it
was a medical miracle. They cared to see a dog and pony show. But
I've kind of learned how to do that ever since. Give them what they
need when they show up."

James Miller said the power of his late wife's advocacy was inversely
proportionate to the destruction of her body by the disability.

"The worse she got, the stronger she got as an advocate," he explained.

Law enforcement officers were reluctant to charge and therefore be
forced to process a dying woman in so much visible agony that she
needed either to lie down or be immobile in a wheelchair.

Despite having heard it countless times, the story of the Millers
still gives goose bumps to Colleen Begley, 29, of Moorestown, a
volunteer with the Coalition for Medical Marijuana -- New Jersey, who
is now moving on to work with Students for Sensible Drug Policy in
Pennsylvania, one of a handful of states where the battle lines move next.

Begley said the bill would not have passed the Legislature at this
time if it were not for the work of Cheryl and James Miller, and that
promise he made to his wife more than six years ago. "He's really
become such a wonderful, powerful speaker. . . . He has helped us so
much here in New Jersey," Begley said. "It was Jim who said, "Let's
get a medical marijuana bill here in New Jersey to help people like
my dying wife.'"

Miller said he is writing a book about the fight that he and his wife
waged over two decades from the Statehouse in Trenton to Capitol Hill
in Washington, and even in front of the White House. Miller has been
arrested more than once.

He said American society developed a completely unreasonable
perspective on marijuana in the 20th century, in which the drug was
erroneously lumped into a category of dangerous substances in the
absence of any legitimate science to support that position.
Nevertheless, the stigma persists to this day.

"To say "medical marijuana,' some, I don't know how many hundreds of
thousands of times over the years, people start to kind of separate
it, almost like, well, that would be OK, rather than "marijuana for
the sick.' Because then, it's "Oh no, not marijuana!'

"I could go to a mall, right now, and say any one of George Carlin's
seven dirty words as loud as I want or say "marijuana,' and marijuana
is going to get me kicked out of there quicker and get more people to
look, because it's that word."