AILMENT-RIDDEN WOMAN AT CENTER OF MEDICAL POT BATTLE

OAKLAND - Traditional drugs have done little to help 39-year-old Angel
Raich.

Beset by a nightmarish list of ailments that includes tumors in her
brain and uterus, seizures, spasms and nausea, she has been able to
find comfort only in the marijuana recommended by her doctor.

It eases her pain, allows her to rise out of a wheelchair and promotes
an appetite that prevents her from wasting away.

Her Berkeley physician, Frank Lucido, said marijuana "is the only drug
of almost three dozen we have tried that works."

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that will
determine whether Raich and similar patients in California and 10
other states can continue to use marijuana for medical purposes.

At issue is whether states have the right to adopt laws allowing the
use of drugs the federal government has banned or whether federal drug
agents can arrest individuals for abiding by those medical marijuana
laws.

California passed the nation's first so-called medical marijuana law
in 1996, allowing patients to smoke and grow marijuana with a doctor's
recommendation. The Bush administration maintains those laws violate
federal drug rules and asserts that marijuana has no medical value.

"I really hope and pray the justices allow me to live," said Raich,
39, as she crammed a blend of a marijuana variety known as "Haze X"
into a contraption that vaporized it inside large balloons.

She said the outcome of the case will determine whether her "husband
will have a wife," her "children a mother."

The case will address questions left unresolved from the first time
the high court considered the legality of medical marijuana.

In 2001, the justices ruled against clubs that distributed medical
marijuana, saying they cannot do so based on the "medical necessity"
of the patient.

The ruling forced Raich's Oakland supplier to close and other cannabis
clubs to operate in the shadows.

The decision did not address whether the government can block states
from adopting their own medical marijuana laws.

Nevertheless, the federal government took the offensive after the
ruling, often over the objections of local officials. It began seizing
individuals' medical marijuana and raiding their suppliers. Nowhere
was that effort more conspicuous than in the San Francisco Bay area,
where the nation's medical marijuana movement was founded.