A THREAT TO SOCIETY

In a Small East Texas Town, One Man Fights for His Right to Medical
Marijuana-and Suffers the Consequences.

Off of a dead-end street in the lush woodlands of East Texas, Chris
Cain rides his motorized wheelchair to his trailer's front door and
pushes it open with his wrist. With his barking Chihuahua trailing
behind, he spins and leads me toward his office space, excusing the
place's appearance. "It's been through two hurricanes and two police
raids. It's had it," he drawls. In his living room, worn couches face
a big-screen television. With a goatee and shoulder-length hair,
Cain, 41, calls himself a "rocker."

Cain has been paralyzed for 25 years. When he was 16, he dove into a
shallow creek on a school canoe trip and injured his spinal cord. He
was rushed by helicopter to a hospital, but he hasn't walked since.
The accident left him doubly determined to succeed, he says. He
graduated valedictorian of his high school class and earned a
computer science engineering degree. With his limited hand movement
and adaptive equipment, he is competitive in that field.

But the side effects of his injury threaten to derail his career
track. Cain suffers from violent, painful muscle spasms that have
grown worse. His mom, Esta, 68, has spent years rising five or six
times a night to care for him, often sitting on his legs so he
wouldn't throw himself off of his bed. "He is very strong," she says.
"I feel like one of those rodeo guys having to hold his legs down."

Cain tried prescription drugs for his spasms, but found the
medication had debilitating side effects such as rapid heart rate,
shortened breathing and his sense that the drugs made him a "drooling
idiot." Cain developed a tolerance to pain medicine and muscle
relaxers, so he needed more and more to stop the spasms-all the while
becoming more sedated and less functional. "When you have muscles
contracting all the time, you can't think, you can't work," he says.
"You're just focused on this pain. If you take muscle relaxers or
pain killers, you're drugged out. Then you say, OK, as long as [my
body is] sedated, I don't care if I'm drugged out. But then after a
while you need more drugs to stop the muscle spasms. Then you're
totally messed up. And you just say, I can't do this anymore."

He saw his future on these drugs: dependence on his family,
difficulty working and thinking, and an IV tube pumping muscle
relaxers into his back. Then he discovered that smoking marijuana
relieved his symptoms without the side effects. If all he wanted to
do was get high, Cain says, he had legal access to a cornucopia of
narcotics. The point of smoking marijuana was that he felt less out
of it than he did on prescription drugs. Plus, he says, it worked
better. His mother attests to its effectiveness. "When he smokes his
medicine, I can sleep at night. His legs lay relaxed," she says.

Cain knew forgoing prescription drugs in favor of marijuana in Texas
was risky. But he didn't realize how far local authorities would take
their zero-tolerance drug policies. As he saw it, he was just a disabled guy.

Scientific evidence has begun to support what patients like Cain and
their families have been saying for years. According to an article
published in the journal Nature in 2005, cannabinoids in marijuana
can be effective in treating spasticity. A cannabis-based drug called
Sativex has received approval in the U.K. for treatment of spasms in
multiple sclerosis patients. Five European countries, Canada, 14 U.S.
states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical cannabis.
Texas has not.

Cain's condition would be covered by medical marijuana laws in any of
the 14 states. But he lives in Hardin County, where drug laws are
enforced rigidly. Texas counties can't make their own drug laws, but
they do enforce them in radically different ways. "It is so
individualized," says Jerry Epstein, co-founder of the Drug Policy
Forum of Texas. He says some parts of the state take a
"compassionate" stance, in the language of advocates, toward medical
marijuana users. In Amarillo in 2008, Tim Stevens, a man with AIDS,
won a case for using marijuana based on "necessity." Necessity
defenses are difficult, as the defense must prove that less harm was
done by breaking the law than by complying with it. A jury in
Amarillo acquitted Stevens in 11 minutes. But it's often the personal
attitudes of elected officials that determine who will be arrested,
prosecuted and convicted, Stevens says. In conservative counties like
Hardin, sheriffs are elected on tough-on-crime platforms.

Founded as a lumber town and a juncture of several railroad lines,
Hardin's county seat, Kountze (population 2,115), lies in a tangle of
pine and cypress forest. It is not much more than a cluster of gas
stations, a Dairy Queen and a county courthouse. The town calls
itself "The Big Light in the Big Thicket." But Kountze has a dark
side, too, with a methamphetamine problem and 21 percent of its
residents living below the poverty line. Others who live here work in
the nearby "Golden Triangle," the industrial strip along the Gulf of
Mexico bordering Louisiana.

Cain's problems with the Hardin County sheriff's department began in
1999, he says. The police came by his house and said they wanted to
talk to him, he remembers. They had heard that people had been
smoking marijuana at his place. "I let them come in my house and
search," he says. "They uncovered a pipe and gave me a paraphernalia
charge, and that was that. From then, it's been nonstop."

At 9:03 a.m. on July 18, 2003, deputies from Hardin and from the
Jefferson County drug task force raided Cain's home and music studio.
Aside from an incident report, other information about the raid has
been destroyed. After agents broke down Cain's door, a woman who was
arrested with Cain but asked not to be identified in this article
says she kept asking for a search warrant. Officers declined to show
it to her. She recalls one of the deputies yelling, "Shut up. If you
ask again, I'll staple it to your fucking forehead."

Cain had just built his studio. "I guess, to them, it looked like I'd
moved in a crystal meth lab, because they were, like, asking where
the crystal meth was. This couldn't be further from the truth. I gave
them the misdemeanor amount of weed I had," he says. According to the
police report, the raid turned up just under 2 ounces of marijuana,
including "marijuana stems" and "partially burned marijuana cigars
(blunts)" on Cain's property. They confiscated a kitchen scale and
$2,125 in cash, which Cain says was money to pay a contractor who had
built a handicap ramp at his house. At the time, Chris was learning
to brew beer and says he used the scale to weigh ingredients. Cain's
lawyer proved the money was legal, and the police returned it.

Officers also seized thousands of dollars worth of Cain's computer
equipment. "I watched them literally chuck everything into the back
of a truck," he says. The affidavit states that while Coy Collins, a
Hardin County deputy, was executing a marijuana search warrant, he
observed "numerous devices affiant knows are used in the fraudulent
creation and programming of satellite receiver cards ... in order to
fraudulently obtain satellite service."

Cain calls the accusation "bullshit." He was using the equipment, he
says, as part of his work researching the use of smart cards for
event-ticketing, so he had several card readers around. He was never
charged with any crime related to the seizure, but it was a year
before his lawyer obtained an order for the sheriff's office to
return the property, which was Cain's livelihood. Most of the
equipment and hard drives were damaged, Cain says. "I've spent every
year since that 2003 raid trying to build my company back to where it
was," he says.

After the raid, Cain was arrested and booked into a holding cell at
the county jail. The cell was not handicapped-accessible, and he had
no one to help him relieve his bladder or bowels, he says, though he
asked for help. Around 5 p.m., after being held for seven hours, a
jail nurse arrived to evaluate his needs. He told her he needed help
relieving himself, that he couldn't eat without adaptive equipment
and that he needed sedatives to calm his spasms. The nurse told him
he could take care of himself. Late that night, he was released. He
spent days recovering from an extended bladder and bleeding around
his catheter, he says.

The raid enabled Hardin County to prove just how tough it could be on
recreational users. Investigator Ernest Sharp reminded citizens in
the Silsbee Bee, "If you are caught with illegal drugs, no matter the
amount, you will go to jail."

Cain's marijuana case never made it to court. A "big wig came to
town," Cain says. Greg Gladden, who formerly presided over the ACLU
of Texas, dashed in from Houston and told a county judge if the
county prosecuted Cain, Gladden would establish that officers hadn't
had probable cause to execute the warrant. The county decided to drop
the charges. "The information was 'stale' at the time it was
presented to the judge," Gladden says. "There is no information in
the four corners of the affidavit rising to the level of probable
cause to [indicate] there was dope on the premises at that time."

Still upset, Cain wanted to file a civil suit against the county for
the loss of property and income, but his lawyer discouraged him.
Gladden was satisfied the criminal charges had been dropped, and he
was not optimistic they could win the civil suit. "Those are hard
cases," he says.

Seven years later, Cain still feels the social fallout from the raid.
When he became paralyzed, all of Kountze stood behind him, he says.
"They support you. They say, 'This is a supersmart kid,'" He says.
When people heard he was using marijuana, and his name appeared in a
drug bust article in the local newspaper, his reputation sank. "They
see a guy that, 'Oh, he graduated good, went to college, but he must
have given up because of his injury,'" he says. "They don't see me as
someone that's educated, that's using marijuana so that I can live a
normal life, have a business. I've been very successful, but to this
small town I'm just a drug user."

Hardin County Sheriff Ed Cain (no relation) doesn't understand what
the big deal is. "Why are you interested in a misdemeanor case?" he
asks. The sheriff knows that Chris Cain says he uses the drug for
medical purposes, but has implied this is an excuse to get stoned. In
May 2009, the sheriff told the Beaumont Enterprise, "I just don't
think marijuana has any role whatsoever except to make you high."

The sheriff says, "It is our belief that they are selling marijuana
out of that residence, or out of that area." According to the public
record, though, officers have never found more than a misdemeanor
amount of marijuana on him, despite the fact that Cain says police
have searched his car, home or person more than a dozen times.

Even if Chris isn't selling, Sheriff Cain says the county operates
under a "zero tolerance" policy. "I don't know how to describe it any
better: zero," he says. "Hardin County residents want zero drugs.
That's what I have, zero drug tolerance." Asked about his pursuit of
Chris Cain, he says, "We do hit hard, very hard. I won't apologize
for that. I've arrested friends. I've arrested supporters. If you
check around, that's what you'll find."

The Legislature could pass a medical marijuana law and make Cain's
problems go away. So far, however, every effort to legalize marijuana
for medicinal purposes has withered and died. In 2001, former state
Rep. Terry Keel, an Austin Republican, introduced a medical marijuana
bill. Similar legislation has been introduced every two years by
state Rep. Elliott Naishtat, an Austin Democrat. The proposal
received a hearing in 2005, but has never reached a vote.

This session, lobbying groups are drafting two bills. Stephen Betzen,
director of the Texas Coalition for Compassionate Care, a
Dallas-based medical marijuana advocacy group, says, "We are drafting
a bill that we think can pass. We've talked to sheriffs, community
leaders, citizens," he says. The bill would allow Texas doctors to
recommend marijuana to patients. Law enforcement would still be able
to arrest someone for possession, but that person could use an
"affirmative defense," citing their doctor's recommendation, and have
the charges dropped. Patients and designated providers could grow their own.

Medcan University, another medical marijuana lobbying group, is
drafting a different bill, and is in the process of presenting it to
legislators. Both groups say it is too early to say which legislators
may introduce a bill. Medcan's version would tax medical marijuana,
taking advantage of the state's huge estimated budget shortfall for
the next biennium. "There's a $25 billion budget deficit," says Dante
Picazo, president of Medcan. "It's a horrible burden for our
legislators." The bill calls for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage
Commission to regulate marijuana and disburse cannabis to eligible
patients at holistic "wellness centers" throughout the state. Like in
California, counties would determine the number of centers. Medcan
estimates the program would create 200,000 jobs, and by putting a
10-percent sales tax on the herb, could generate $952 million in
revenue in the first year.

Taxation would mean acknowledging an illegal trade to the federal
government. But Picazo doesn't think a proposed sales tax on
marijuana will scare away legislators from backing the bill. He
points out that cities have begun taxing the substance with lucrative
results and with no backlash from the federal government. During its
first six months of taxation, Denver generated $1.2 million in sales
tax from its dispensaries.

In most of the country, voters appear more apt than legislators to
approve medical marijuana programs. Nine states have legalized
medical marijuana through ballot initiatives or statewide referenda.
In Texas, neither ballot initiatives nor statewide referenda exist.
Betzen says, "Getting a bill passed through the Legislature is the
only way in Texas." And in the current political climate, marijuana
reform faces an uphill climb in the Texas Legislature.

In March 2009, six years after the raid, Chris Cain was at a park in
Kountze having a picnic with family and friends. Driving by, police
saw him in a group of about 30 people and asked him if they could
search the backpack on his wheelchair and his van. They didn't search
anyone else. Cain says he has learned that if he resists a search
like this, officers will say they smell marijuana, which gives them
probable cause to search him. He admitted to having a misdemeanor
amount of marijuana. They didn't arrest him. Instead, they told him,
"Today is your lucky day," he remembers.

In May, Cain went to Austin to speak at a rally sponsored by the
Texas Cannabis Crusade and other medical marijuana advocacy groups.
Soon after that, his luck again ran out: He received a possession
charge in the mail from his "lucky day" at the park. Cain decided not
to hire a lawyer and instead pay a fine and take six months of
probation. "I thought, hey, maybe they just want me to quit fighting.
They want me to quit testifying, going to the news," Cain says. "I
was going to find some alternative to marijuana so I could test clean
and they could see that I wasn't using it, so they would leave me alone."

On probation, though, the police did not need a warrant to search
him. "They pursued me more relentlessly than they had before," he
says. He had stopped medicating himself with marijuana. Because he
had no effective sedative, constant shearing and sliding in his
wheelchair from all-day muscle spasms injured Cain's legs and
buttocks. A pressure sore developed, and he was bedridden for five
months. "I wasn't able to get in my wheelchair," he says. "I wasn't
able to get on my computer. My consulting work came to a halt, and
medical bills soared."

His mother cared for him. "You would think I was under house arrest,"
she says. "I couldn't leave the house. I didn't go to church." His
father Eldon, 70, ran errands and did the chores. At that point, Cain
couldn't begin using marijuana again; he was being drug-tested
regularly under the terms of his probation.

While Cain was bedridden at his parents' place, the police came to
his office, the building he and his friends also use as a music
studio, and conducted a narcotics search. "I had told all the people
that had access to my computer and studios that marijuana cannot be
around me, because I was on probation," Cain says. "But it looks like
someone didn't obey the rules."

Standing at the foot of Cain's bed, deputies told him they had found
a pinch of marijuana in his office, he remembers. The officers wanted
to arrest him, but he couldn't be cuffed, and he was under a doctor's
care. "They said, 'Until you heal, we won't take you in. When you get
back in your chair, turn yourself in,'" Cain recalls. The officers
returned several times to see if he had healed. "I felt like a murder
suspect, a person of interest," he says. Once Cain could sit in his
wheelchair, he rolled into the police station to turn himself in.
Cain's trial has been set for Jan. 11.

Cain has thought about leaving Kountze. "If I were in Austin or
Houston, they wouldn't care about me," he says. He's thought about
moving to another state, but says he can't afford to leave Kountze,
where his parents look after him.

In Kountze, Cain says he lives in a state of fear. But he continues
to attend rallies, testify before legislative committees, and share
his story with reporters. "It's crazy when you're sitting there
hurting," he says, "and you've got this little herb, this plant, and
you smoke it and your [muscles are] finally relaxed. It's kind of
barbaric that you can't stop your pain."