POT-SMOKING CANCER VICTIM WOULD BE PROSECUTED IN U.S. - JUDGE

VANCOUVER - A man seeking asylum in Canada because he smokes pot to fight a
rare form of cancer would do well to stay out of the United States, where
the "corrupt system" would prosecute him, a California judge testified
Thursday.

"His chances would be overwhelming, I regret to say, of being tried and
convicted," Judge James Gray of the Orange Country Superior Court said by
phone at a refugee hearing for Steve Kubby. Kubby, a former California
resident who now lives in Sechelt, B.C., said between puffs on a joint
outside the hearing that he suffers from adrenal cancer and would die
within four days if he didn't smoke marijuana.

Health Canada granted him permission last August to grow and smoke pot for
medicinal purposes.

Although California's Proposition 215 allows for the medical use of
marijuana, patients are still prosecuted by the federal court, whose laws
trump state laws, Gray said.

And those who face a judge in federal court can't provide any evidence of
medicinal use so the jury doesn't get to hear they aren't drug dealers,
Gray said from Santa Ana, Calif.

"Mr. Kubby, I believe is in real serious legal trouble if he were to find
himself back in California," Gray said under questioning by Kubby's wife
Michele, who is not a lawyer but is representing him at the hearing.

Kubby was convicted in the United States of possessing peyote and one magic
mushroom stem and found not guilty of any marijuana offences.

Kubby, who met almost Gray three years ago at a public function, said
outside the hearing that he was placed on probation and doesn't want to
return home because he'd immediately be arrested and put in jail, where he
wouldn't survive.

Federal law enforcement officials are getting more "extremist" with
medicinal pot users and have gone so far as to arrest dying patients in a
hospice, Gray said.

In one case, an ill woman who couldn't stand up was handcuffed to her bed,
he claimed.

"I love my country deeply ... but what I've seen here in the federal
government is appalling," Gray said under questioning by lawyer Gordon
Starr, opposing Kubby's refugee bid on behalf of Canada's Citizenship and
Immigration Department.

The federal court makes no distinction between people who smoke pot for
medical reasons and those who traffic drugs because marijuana is seen as
having no medicinal purpose in the United States, Gray said.

The American government is specially keen to convict high-profile
individuals like Kubby, the judge said of the man who once ran for governor
of California as a Libertarian candidate.

Proposition 215, the California initiative that approved medical marijuana
use, has made no difference to the federal government.

Gray said anyone who profits from trafficking marijuana should be sent to
jail, but that there's a place for the medicinal use of cannabis for ill
people, the same as in Canada.

Angel McClary Raich, a medical marijuana advocate from Oakland, Calif., and
one of several witnesses who testified by phone, said she smokes marijuana
to combat 15 serious medical conditions including endometriosis and an
inoperable brain tumour.

But McClary Raich said she fears for her life if she's arrested because
without the pot "it would be a torturous death for me."