MEDICAL-MARIJUANA ADVOCATE RELEASED FROM JAIL FOR TREATMENT

An American medical-marijuana advocate who says he was arrested at a
Canadian hospital while waiting to be admitted for prostate surgery,
turned over to U.S. authorities and held for several days without
having his catheter removed was released from a Seattle jail to seek
medical care Thursday.

"The whole time I was in jail, they put a blood-pressure cuff on me.
That was all," Steven William Tuck, crying and shaking, said after his
release.

His lawyer, Douglas Hiatt, and the president of Washington Physicians
for Social Responsibility, Sunil Aggarwal, brought him to Harborview
Medical Center, where he was being evaluated in the emergency room
Thursday night.

Canadian Border Services agents took Tuck, who fled from California to
British Columbia in 2001 to avoid prosecution on charges of growing
and distributing marijuana, from an admitting-room gurney at St.
Paul's Hospital in Vancouver on Friday, he and a witness told The
Associated Press. Tuck's bid for asylum in Canada had failed, but he
said he was trying to appeal the decision.

The agents drove him to the border, where he was turned over to U.S.
officials. After a night in the Whatcom County Jail, he was brought to
the King County Jail, where he was held to face a federal charge of
unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

On Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Donohue ordered him released
so he could go to the hospital, on the condition that when his
treatment was over, he return to California to face the federal charge.

But Tuck wasn't immediately released, because jail officials had
received a detention request from the Humboldt County, Calif.,
District Attorney's Office.

The DA's office agreed late Thursday to drop the detention request,
clearing the way for Tuck's release