Editorial:
An
Injustice
in
California
(Top)
8/14/98
In November of 1996, California voters approved Proposition 215, allowing for the cultivation and use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, by a margin of 56 to 44%. Today, and for the past three weeks, best-selling author and cancer and AIDS patient Peter McWilliams sits in a federal cell in Los Angeles in lieu of $250,000 bond. McWilliams is under indictment on nine counts, which boil down essentially to growing marijuana with the intent of providing it to patients. And there is little proof of that intent on which the charges hinge. In 1997, McWilliams, who is also a publisher, paid a literary advance to Todd McCormick (himself a long-term cancer-sufferer, whom the feds allege is a co-conspirator and who has also been indicted), to write a comprehensive book for patients on the proper way to grow marijuana for medical use. In addition, McCormick was determined to find out which of the many strains of marijuana works best for each of the particular conditions (e.g. AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, spasms, etc.) that patients use marijuana for. Clearly, such research, carried out by a patient, would not have passed muster with the National Institutes of Health. But the fact is that tens of thousands of Californians, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other Americans are currently using marijuana, and it will be years, if not decades, before the government gets around to asking the questions to which McCormick is determined to find the answers. Proposition 215 says that a patient or a caregiver may cultivate and possess marijuana for medical use. And while it does not specifically endorse such endeavors as buyers clubs, neither does it limit the amount of marijuana that can be grown for medicinal use. Todd McCormick, "financed" by Peter McWilliams, was busted in his rented Bel Air home with more than 4,000 plants of dozens of different strains. No effort had been made to hide the plants. In fact, many were growing outdoors in plain sight. And there is absolutely no evidence that anyone had ever sold any of it. McCormick’s bust was carried out by the state, under the authority of attorney general Dan Lungren. Bond for McCormick, who vowed to stand and fight the charges and who was not a risk for flight, was set at an astounding $500,000. In fact, McCormick, who has suffered with a rare form of cancer nearly since birth (he’s 27 now), would be in jail today if not for the generosity of his friend and fellow activist, actor Woody Harrelson. McCormick and everyone around him were confident that he would beat the state’s charges at trial. After all, there is nothing about the current law that makes what he did illegal. Apparently the feds agreed, and felt the need to spend taxpayers’ money on an investigation and indictment of both McWilliams and McCormick, along with four others, for the same offense. These federal charges supersede the state charges and the crux of the matter is so tenuous as to border on the absurd. Peter McWilliams is charged with intent to distribute marijuana based upon the allegation that he had one conversation with the director of the Los Angeles buyers’ club regarding the possible sale of McCormick’s marijuana for use by the club. McWilliams strenuously denies this allegation. But even if it were true, Peter McWilliams faces the prospect of spending most of the rest of his life in prison for the "intent" to engage in a transaction that the Los Angeles club, and clubs around the state, are already engaging in on a regular basis: procuring marijuana for the seriously and terminally ill patients who have won the legal right to dictate the terms of their own treatment. It is not surprising that the federal government has sunk to this level in its obsessive persecution of anyone and everyone who dares participate in the compassionate distribution of medicinal marijuana. First the feds threatened doctors who discussed marijuana with their patients. When a federal court enjoined those threats they went after the buyers’ clubs. Now they have Peter McWilliams and Todd McCormick in their sights, on flimsy evidence of a "crime" that is, by any standard of justice, no crime at all. At the very worst, assuming that all of the federal allegations were true, the marijuana in question would not have entered the general market, no child, nor even any healthy adult would have come into contact with it. This prosecution is underway simply because of the number of plants involved, and perhaps due to the high-profile status of the defendant. Period. A few miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, in Oakland, the city council has taken the bold step of "deputizing" the local buyers’ club as a city agency. This unprecedented move is a last-ditch effort to protect patients and the club’s operators from the talons of the federal law enforcement bureaucracy that has threatened their health and their freedom. The feds claim that their law trumps the state law, and technically, they are right. But the people and the government of Oakland also know that compassion, freedom and the right of self-determination in so personal a decision as medical treatment deserves to be protected from unjust law and an intrusive sovereign. But in L.A., where the city has not been so bold and innovative in its efforts to protect its most vulnerable citizens, the inquisition continues. And a man who suffers from both AIDS and cancer, a long-time resident with a business and a home who poses no risk of flight, sits in a cell in lieu of an excessive and punitive bond, facing charges which could rob him of the rest of his life. This is the way the federal government spends our money to deal with those who dare to question its drug war orthodoxy. It is cruel and unjust, especially if one’s conception of justice has anything to do with punishments that befit the crime. But it is a perfect example of the message our government wants to send to those wayward citizens who are attempting to carve out a small exception to the Zero-Tolerance madness. And justice has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adam J. Smith
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