PATIENTS WORRY ABOUT COUNTY'S CHALLENGE TO COMPASSIONATE USE ACT

The deep furrows in Craig McClain's brow slowly ease as he feels the
first effects of the marijuana smoke he has just inhaled. His
pain-wracked body relaxes, as he sits gingerly on the special bed in
his Vista home.

"I'm already feeling better," McClain, a Vista business owner,
husband, father, and spinal-cord injury victim, said this week. "Just
after a couple of hits. I can take just a couple of hits and feel my
spinal cord relax.

"I don't know why they (the federal government) can say there is no
merit to marijuana," he said. "So many doctors know it. But yet, the
federal government doesn't want to recognize it."

McClain is just one of several seriously ill or disabled residents
who have pleaded with San Diego County supervisors to withdraw the
lawsuit they have filed to try to overturn California's medical
marijuana law, on the ground it should be pre-empted by federal law
which says that all marijuana use is illegal.

Since voters approved the "Compassionate Use Act" in 1996, California
law has said it is legal for people such as McClain to use marijuana
as medicine.

But San Diego County supervisors, asked late last year to create a
medical marijuana identification card and registry system to support
the 9-year-old law, instead decided to sue the state to try to
overturn it. The suit, which was switched this week from federal to
state courts and has not yet had its first hearing, is the first to
try to overturn any of the medical marijuana laws that voters have
approved in 11 states.

People who have opposed the idea of medical marijuana have worried
that it would increase abuse of the drug, tell children that drug use
is "OK," and give "potheads" with imagined illnesses a legal route to
use an illegal drug.

Pain Is Evident

One look is all it takes to recognize that Craig McClain is in
constant, unrelenting pain.

His spine crushed by falling steel girders in a construction-related
accident in 1990, McClain stands these days with the help of a cane
and brace for his left leg, bent stiffly at the waist - where inside
his back, six long screws hold his spinal cord together.

Early this week, arriving home after his morning physical therapy -
where a therapist applied acupressure in his spinal area to try to
reduce the twisting that now naturally occurs around his injured
spine - McClain inched his way from his car into his home, groaning
openly with each movement.

The X-rays he gingerly held up to the light showed the six screws,
along with a pump that delivers drugs into his system to help combat
the pain and spasms he continually battles.

When the accident happened, McClain said, doctors told him he would
never walk again, and that his working days were over. But today he
owns his own store, the "Old Toy Soldier Home" in Vista, where he
sells figurines that he has hand-painted, a hobby he turned into a
new life after his accident.

In the early days of his injury, McClain and his doctors discovered
that he was allergic to many of the traditional pain relievers,
including morphine.

"That's why I have to wear this medical alert medallion," he said. "I
can die if I go into a hospital and they give me morphine or
Dilaudid. Vicodin, codeine ... I'm allergic to all of those."

'Medical' Marijuana

Two years after his accident, when his spasms - which have sent
McClain into hospitals twitching uncontrollably and curling into a
fetal position - had gotten to the point he could barely function, a
Stanford doctor suggested he try marijuana.

It was 1992, four years before Prop. 215 made "medical" marijuana
legal in California.

"I thought he was joking with me," McClain said. "Because, you know,
that's a party thing. I had never thought of it in terms of a medicine."

Seeking a legal alternative, McClain first tried Marinol, a
synthetically created form of tetrahydrocannibinol - THC, the active
ingredient in marijuana.

Ironically, the federal government says that synthetic marijuana is a
legal drug with recognized medicinal value - but says that grown
marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug, without medicinal value and on par
with heroin, LSD and mescaline.

But McClain and others say the synthetic drug is extremely unreliable
- - although he still uses it at night - sometimes taking hours to take
effect, sometimes never taking effect.

Eventually, McClain ended up at the Cannabis Cultivators Club in San
Francisco, the first marijuana "dispensary" in California.

He said that since he started smoking it, marijuana has helped him
control his wracked body.

"If I don't have pot, then I go into severe spasmodic attacks," he
said. "And they're extreme - to where I have to go to the hospital to
get it under control. Sometimes these attacks last for five hours.
Sometimes they can be 10 days. If I burn a joint, then it will relax
enough to where possibly I get a hold of the situation."

He became an advocate when Prop. 215 was placed on the ballot in
1996, collecting signatures and speaking before state legislators.

When Prop. 215 passed with 55 percent of the vote, McClain said he
felt safe. That, he said, has disappeared with the county's decision
to try to overturn the measure.

"When Prop. 215 went through, I said, 'Oh, thank God. Now I'm just a
regular person again. I'm not a criminal,'" McClain said. "The safety
thing was being OK in my state. Now I don't believe there's any safety."

He said he smokes marijuana - "a couple of hits off a joint" -
sporadically during his day. Often, he does so before the physical
therapy that he attends five days a week, sometimes during the day,
and always before he tries to sleep. McClain said taking Marinol,
smoking "part of a joint," and taking Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, he
gets three to five hours of sleep a night.

McClain said coming forward to speak out again about his marijuana
use - he took part in a protest of the county's Prop. 215 lawsuit and
testified before county supervisors last month - was not easy. He has
a business, a wife and son to protect.

He said he feared that his 12-year-old son, who attends a Lutheran
school and belongs to a Mormon Boy Scout troop, could take "flak"
from outsiders. He said he doesn't smoke around his son, and that he
and his wife have explained that the marijuana he smokes is medicine.

But he said the county's lawsuit left him no choice. He had to speak out.

"I thought after this long a time, the controversy over this thing
(medical marijuana) would have gone away," he said. "It's a step backward."

Other Patients

Like McClain, La Mesa resident Rudy Reyes has pain that is all too evident.

Reyes, 28, was burned over 75 percent of his body, including nearly
all of his upper body, during the October 2003 Cedar fire that killed
14 people in San Diego County. Reyes said last week that he spent
eight months, two in a drug-induced coma, in a hospital after the fires.

Like McClain, Reyes said his body also rejected morphine, and that
his doctors tried several different kinds of drugs to help ease his
constant pain. Some of the drugs had terrible side effects.

Then, one day, Reyes said, a doctor asked if he had ever tried
marijuana. He said no. The doctor, he said, suggested that he have
his friends bring in some "special" food with marijuana in it.

"And they started bringing me in the cookies and the brownies," he said.

In two weeks, Reyes said, the doctors told him they saw improvement
in his condition - that his muscles were contracting less and that
his blood pressure had dropped - helping his torched body recover.

Now out of the hospital, Reyes said he no longer eats marijuana, but
uses it as a cream to spread on his wounded body.

Reyes said the burns exposed the nerves on his skin, leaving him with
a "constant throb and itch that never goes away."

The marijuana tincture, he said, eases his problems. If he didn't
have it, he would probably be put back on such as Oxycontin or
Vicodin - strong drugs with side effects.

" I use it as a cream," he said. "I don't smoke it. I don't use it that way."

A Dying Patient

San Diego resident Pamela Sakuda is dying. Sakuda was diagnosed with
terminal colorectal cancer three years ago, and was given six to 14
months to live, she said last week.

Despite the terminal prognosis, Sakuda said she wanted to fight her
illness, to stay alive as long as she could. That has entailed a
continuous barrage of chemotherapy, a treatment that basically
consists of having patients drink down anti-cancer poisons in an
effort to kill off cancer cells, without killing the patient.

Sakuda said the result was nausea, vomiting and a diminished
appetite, all of which threatened to leave her so weak she could no
longer take chemotherapy treatment.

She said she uses marijuana, inhaling it through a vaporizer, or
sometimes eating it, to stimulate her appetite and soothe her nausea.

She said the drug has helped keep her alive and spared her husband,
her caregiver, emotional pain.

"I don't think people like me, who are suffering from an illness,
should be in jeopardy of being put in jail," she said. "The people of
California voted for this ... it was an act of compassion."