POT USE COSTS CANCER SURVIVOR AN APARTMENT

She's half-reclining in a corner of the couch, leaning into the cushions to
take the pressure off stitches running across her abdomen.

Her two teenage daughters lounge around her, one sketching a tiger from a
picture in a magazine, one playing a video game with a teenage boy.

"I had cancer surgery," she said, and her daughters' eyes flick up to her.
"And I smoke pot because the pain gets bad.

"I'm trying to avoid the pills. They mess with your mind more than the
joints. They cause such major physical addictions. I don't want that. I've
got daughters to raise."

Jean Woods also has to find a place to live.

Woods feels she has been discriminated against by managers of her
Parksville apartment building, because of her marijuana use, since being
diagnosed with cervical cancer in September.

The owner of Pacific Manor says he's received a stack of complaints about
the smell of marijuana coming from her apartment and just wants to protect
his tenants.

"Our job is to provide 48 people with a quiet place to live," said Nicolas
Denux.

"We're just following the tenancy act," he said. "We don't make the rules.
Whether it's medicinal or not -- and I'm not going to get into that -- it's
disturbing other residents.

"If she really needs it she can go out and smoke it on her walk," he adds.

After being served an eviction notice for Dec. 31, Woods' mother offered
her a house for the end of January. Scheduled for a hysterectomy and
bladder surgery on Dec. 30, Woods was allowed to stay another month, says
Denux, when she said she lined up a place for the end of January but would
be recovering from surgery until then. The eviction was cancelled and Woods
gave her notice for the end of January.

"We didn't act on (eviction)," said building manager Debbie Parrinson. "I
was showing compassion by letting her stay another month."

But Woods returned home from the hospital to find her mother had changed
her mind and Denux and Parrinson would not allow her to stay, saying the
apartment had already been rented. She feels she was pushed into giving
notice with threats of eviction. Denux would have been "likely" to proceed
with eviction had she not given notice, he says.

An eviction could be fought through arbitration, says Kathy Brereton, the
acting director of the residential tenancy branch in Victoria. But, having
given notice, Woods has no legal recourse.

The Residential Tenancy Act doesn't address medical marijuana. Brereton
says two clauses may apply -- one about illegal activity and one about
activity that disturbs other tenants. The illegal activity clause could be
disproved if Woods produced paperwork supporting the medical use of the
drug -- paperwork Woods says she gave a previous manager but Denux says
he's never seen it. A prescription for marijuana sits on her coffee table.

"That's neither here nor there," Denux said. "Why should the other people
be disturbed?"

"If there was a very strong smell of marijuana and it is disturbing other
tenants, that may be grounds," said Brereton. "But it isn't just that they
are disturbed. It has to be unreasonably disturbed."

She adds that previous medical marijuana eviction cases are still under review.

Woods' eviction notice was based on complaints over pot smoke and noise
complaints from visitors to her apartment. She scoffs at the suggestion
that a cancer patient would have a noisy social life.

"I don't know where we're going to go," said Woods, rubbing her face with
her hands. "If I have to move, or get up and try to find a place to move, I
can only imagine how far it will set me back."

Denux says Woods would be allowed to return if she agreed to abide by the
house rules.

"That would include not smoking pot -- or not disturbing other tenants with
it."

Dr. Stephen Noble, the Parksville doctor whose name appears at the top of
Woods' marijuana prescription, would not comment.