MEDICAL POT ADVOCATE LOSES BID TO BAR DEPORTATION FROM CANADA

SACRAMENTO - A judge in Canada on Friday rejected an eleventh-hour
appeal by a California medical marijuana refugee trying to avoid
deportation to the United States, five years after fleeing to avoid a
short jail stint he called a death sentence.

Steve Kubby, a former Laguna Beach resident who was a 1998
Libertarian candidate for governor and one of the authors of
California's watershed medical marijuana law, suffers from a rare
form of adrenal cancer that can cause blood-pressure spikes that his
doctors say are controlled by smoking cannabis.

Canadian Federal Justice Yvon Pinard ruled that Immigration Canada
may now proceed with its order to return Kubby to the U.S. - along
with his wife, Michele, and two young children - as soon as next week.

Kubby was sentenced in March 2001 to four months in jail by a Placer
County judge for possession of a peyote button and a hallucinogenic
mushroom after jurors acquitted him of more serious charges that he
was selling pot grown in his basement medical marijuana garden.

The peyote and mushroom were in his possession, Kubby said, for an
artist's rendering to be used in a book he wrote on the drug war
while living in Olympic Valley, just north of Lake Tahoe.

Amid wrangling with authorities over his sentence, Kubby moved with
his family to British Columbia in May 2001.

If jailed and not allowed to use marijuana, Kubby contends, he will
die behind bars. Jailhouse use of medical marijuana is not allowed in
California, where voters in 1996 approved the nation's first law
allowing the use of cannabis as medicine with a doctor's recommendation.

Around the time Kubby moved to Canada, judges in Placer County
ordered his original misdemeanor convictions converted to felonies.
Kubby, who says he now could face up to three years behind bars, has
appealed those rulings, which he calls a miscarriage of justice.

Kubby also worries that prosecutors will attempt to extend his jail
stay because he left the country and later was declared a fugitive.

"They don't want to admit it's political," Kubby said of officials in
Placer County. "I committed the unpardonable sin of helping pass a
medical marijuana law that police and prosecutors hate."

Authorities in Canada "were sold a bill of goods" by counterparts in
the U.S., Kubby said, adding, "There's this failure on the part of
Canadian officials to accept that there could be this much animosity
and determination to harm me on the part of officials in Placer County."

Placer County Dist. Atty. Bradford R. Fenocchio could not be reached
for comment.

Michele Kubby, who has been representing her husband in court,
expressed hope after Friday's ruling that she could push their case
to the Canadian Supreme Court.

"I've got to do whatever I can to keep Steve away from Placer
County," she said. "No one believes that removing his cannabis will
kill him. But I'm the one who will be left a widow.