CONTROVERSIAL TREATMENT:

WIFE, MOTHER OF TWO SAYS SHE OWES HER LIFE TO MEDICAL MARIJUANA

A rabbit's foot, a wedding ring, a photo of the kids - the little things in
life that people keep close by. For Angel McClary Raich, it's a blue- and
gold-flecked glass pipe packed full of sticky green marijuana.

"My whole life depends on cannabis," the gaunt 37-year-old says
unapologetically, the thin pipe held tight between her bony fingers. "It's
my medicine. I would die without it."

Raich, the wife of a prominent Oakland attorney and mother of two
teenagers, is a medical marijuana patient. Every two hours, she either
smokes, eats or inhales marijuana through a vaporizer, consuming more than
eight pounds of cannabis a year. She cooks with thick green marijuana olive
oil and is massaged with a creamy hemp balm.

Though she says she hates it, the dank smell and earthy taste of the drug
now permeate every aspect of her life. It's come to be her sustenance and
her lifeblood, and without it, both Raich and her Berkeley doctor say she
would become gravely ill.

Diagnosed with a laundry list of ailments, including an inoperable brain
tumor, scoliosis, wasting syndrome, seizures and chronic pain, Raich has no
choice but marijuana, he says.

"She has tried essentially all other legal alternatives to cannabis, and
the alternatives have been ineffective or result in intolerable side
effects," says her physician, Dr. Frank Lucido, explaining that most
medicines make Raich vomit violently or induce hot and cold flashes,
shakes, itching or nausea.

Though she eats at least 3,000 calories a day, she's emaciated, carrying
only 97 pounds on her 5-foot-4 inch frame. She's in constant agony and is
often so weak that she can't get out of bed or even take herself to the
bathroom. On a recent "good day," she couldn't pull out a dining room chair
to sit down without the help of her husband, Robert.

But, before the marijuana, it used to be worse, Raich says. She was
partially paralyzed on the right side of her body and had to use a
wheelchair for four years. The cannabis - "my medicine," as she calls it -
is the only treatment that's ever worked for her. It gave her ability to
walk again and relieved the paralysis.

"Marijuana is my miracle," Raich says. "I just wish the federal government
and (Attorney General) John Ashcroft would see it that way."

Such is the clash between California's medical marijuana law, which allows
people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs, and the
federal government's rejection of the state's 1996 voter-approved
initiative supporting such acts.

A high-profile federal crack down on the treatment has resulted in the
closure of cannabis clubs throughout the state - including Raich's club,
the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative - raids on growers and arrests of
activists like Oakland's "guru" Ed Rosenthal, who was convicted of
cultivating marijuana but spared a prison sentence last month.

And who's left in the middle as the state and the federal government duke
it out? About 30,000 patients like Raich, who say they need marijuana to
cope with chronic pain, improve their appetite or otherwise soothe the
effects of cancer, HIV and AIDS, and degenerative diseases like multiple
sclerosis.

So Raich has taken an unusual step. Instead of idly waiting for a raid on
her or her two anonymous suppliers, she's gone on the offensive, seeking an
injunction that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting her
for using the plant she calls her "life-saver." While she lost the case in
March, she and her husband/lawyer have appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals.

Robert Raich, who in 2001 argued unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme
Court in another medical marijuana case, says he expects his wife's case to
make it before the high court as well. He and other medical marijuana
advocates hope that Angel's case will be the Roe v. Wade of the cannabis
debate, deciding once and for all that using cannabis as a medication is
protected by the Ninth Amendment.

Angel hopes so, too.

"I feel like the government wants to execute me for being sick," she says.
"Well, I'm not going to let them do it. I'm not going to give up on my
life. I have two children, and I promised them while I was in that
wheelchair that I would fight to stay alive, and I'm certainly not going to
give up on that promise now when I can move. I love my children too much to
allow Ashcroft to take away their mother."

As Raich slowly shuffles around her sunny Oakland house in blue booty
slippers, taking deliberate, small steps to move, her determination is
clear. Though each step hurts - "my pain level is either on high or
overload 24 hours a day" - she refuses to allow it to keep her down on days
when she has enough energy to be active.

She loves crafts and cooking. Her home is decorated with ceramic animals
she made in high school, and she bakes her own hemp zucchini bread and
carrot cake, as well as separate dinners for her family.

But her real passion is gardening, and Raich is turning her back yard into
a "sanctuary." The plot of land is filling in with sweet-smelling jasmine
and bougainvillea, and plans for a small pond and waterfall are in the
works. But it's a slow moving process since it takes so much out of Raich.
The last time she worked on it was almost a month ago.

"I love it, but it just kills me," she says. "I'm down for weeks after I do
anything so it's going to take me a lot of stages. But I need to have a
meditation and gardening is my outlet for that. There's something kind of
healing about having your hands in the dirt."

Though she's visibly frail - her cheek bones and large, sunken in brown
eyes are her most striking features - Raich shows strength most people
could never dream of. Just breathing causes pain. Sometimes, on real bad
days, if her husband or her kids just brush against her, her body will jerk
and convulse in pain. But she persists.

"Angel has one of the strongest spirits I've ever seen," says her husband,
Robert. "That's one of the things that initially attracted me to her."

The couple met three years ago through the Oakland Cannabis Buyers'
Cooperative, where Raich used to go to get her drugs and where Robert is an
attorney. Though activism brought them together, the pair are more silly
and sweet together than militant.

In baby talk voices, they call each other "Moosey," a pet name referring to
Robert's college days at Harvard.

"We wanted our own thing, not like honey - we wanted something special,"
Angel Raich says, laughing. "Moosey just kind of fit. We're the Mooses."

Their house is decorated appropriately. The living room is overrun with
moose stuffed animals - they even have a plush "mooseskin" rug, with a big
Bullwinkle head on it - and statues and dolls of angels.

For their wedding, a storybook affair that took place last summer at
Oakland's Dunsmuir Historic Estate, they even had a special pillow made for
the rings - a moose in a tuxedo with golden angel wings. "I still pinch
myself," says Robert Raich. "I can't believe things have worked out so
perfectly. Since the day we met, I've never looked back. I immediately fell
in love with her."

Which is why Angel's illnesses take such a toll on him, she says. "He's my
hero, my knight in shining armor," Raich says, her eyes tearing. "I learn
more and more about unconditional love from him every day."

But it was her own unconditional love for her children, a 14-year-old
daughter and a 17-year-old son, that first brought Raich to medical
marijuana. Raich has faced serious illnesses since adolescence. Now that
she had children, she began to see it take a toll on them.

"My daughter used to cry so much because her mom was in a wheelchair and
she didn't understand why her mother couldn't do all of the things that her
friends' mothers did," Raich says, her voice low and shaking. "It was
breaking my heart - I couldn't do anything to comfort them. I couldn't even
hug them sometimes because it hurt so much."

And then, a few weeks later, on Aug. 3, 1997, Raich's and her children's
lives changed forever. She was at a hospital in Stockton, where she grew up
and was living at the time, when a nurse who had been working with her for
a while approached her. The nurse saw that no treatments were working on
any of Raich's conditions and that she was depressed and miserable.

"So she pulled me aside and asked me about medical marijuana," Raich
retells. "And I was totally offended. I was really mad at her for even
suggesting it because I was totally against drugs."

But when she went home that night and her daughter was in tears yet again,
Raich made up her mind to start reading up on the issue. Soon she was
seeing a doctor to get a prescription. It was then that she says her life
shifted for the better.

Still, there's not a day that goes by that Raich doesn't wish she could
find relief from another source, she says.

"I hate that I have to take cannabis. If I had a choice, I'd take the
choice in a heartbeat," she says. "But I don't have an alternative.
Cannabis is my only alternative."

With each puff she takes, Raich breathes in new life, she says. And even
more importantly to her, she exhales new life and longevity into the time
she has left with her children.

"I promised my kids I would fight to be alive and I'd do anything I could
to be here for them," she says. "I won't go back on that promise."

Until she dies or finds another miracle, then, inhale and exhale will be
Raich's only medication.