The Crimes of Pot Justice - When marijuana arrests might be death sentences

Last week a man was shivering and vomiting in a cold cell in Auburn, California, at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas in Placer County, his urine bloody, the medicine he needs denied him.

His name is Steve Kubby. He was the Libertarian Party's 1998 gubernatorial candidate, and a major player in the crafting and passing of California's Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that legalized medical marijuana in the state.

Kubby did not enjoy the protection of the law he helped pass. Prompted by an anonymous tip, police in California's Placer County began surveilling Kubby's home near Lake Tahoe in 1998, including digging through his garbage. Eventually on January 19, 1999, 12 armed officers raided his home and arrested him and his wife, claiming to have found 265 pot plants. (More than half, Kubby insists, were unsexed seedlings, and California law does not have a specific numerical limit on personal use marijuana growth for medical marijuana patients.) The warrant was obtained partially on the basis of claims that a journalist who had been seen visiting the Kubbys' home was in fact a known Jamaican drug smuggler, according to a DEA report later found not to exist; Kubby is certain his prominence in the pro-marijuana movement made him a target.

Kubby is struggling with a rare and usually fatal form of adrenal cancer, pheochromocytoma, which he has suffered from since the late 1960s. A doctor who helped treat him for the condition in the 1970s, Vincent DeQuattro of the University of Southern California, was amazed, upon seeing Kubby's name in California's voter guide during his gubernatorial race, to discover that his old patient was still alive. As High Times reported:

Kubby insists the only treatment he's taken in a long while for the cancer—whose effects include sudden rushes of adrenalin and noradrenaline, resulting in high blood pressure spikes, headaches, and panic attacks—is marijuana; that it, and only it, had kept him alive this long; and that without it, as he now is in Placer County lockdown, he'll likely die.

Is he right? Even with the grim reports of his vomiting, chills, and bloody urine this past week in jail, it's hard to be sure. He's merely one anecdote, and concerted research into such questions of marijuana's medical efficacy are hamstrung by restrictive federal regulations and supply constraints. But right now his Placer County jailers are conducting a very dangerous experiment to test Kubby's theory. A Canadian doctor, Dr. Joseph M. Connors, chair of the Lymphoma Tumor Group at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, has testified that without his pot, Kubby is at high risk of suffering potentially fatal heart attacks, seizures, or strokes from his cancer's effects.

Kubby was acquitted of the pot charges arising from the raid, but convicted in 2001 for some peyote buttons and a psychedelic mushroom the cops also found. Before serving his term, he and his family left for Canada, where they've spent the past five years. He, his wife Michele, and his two daughters were finally deported back to the U.S. last week. They were met at the San Francisco airport by a gang of officers, Kubby was handcuffed and taken away, avoiding the press and well-wishers awaiting him in the airport, and ended up in Placer County jail.

Kubby has become something of a cause célèbre because of his intimate connections with the libertarian and medical marijuana communities. But he's not the only one suffering in prison because of lack of marijuana. In a similar situation—ill, in prison, denied marijuana that helps them cope or survive their illness—are Joe Fortt (in jail in Fresno, his T-cell count plummeting, he'd been using pot to cope with AIDS while free), Robert Schmidt (currently in Leavenworth, a prison under full "lockdown," denied both medicine and visitors), and many others. Prisons in California may, at their discretion, but are not required under the law, provide inmates with their medical marijuana-and generally don't.

As of this writing, Kubby is being permitted the use of marinol, a pharmaceutical synthetic THC, though not the whole marijuana plant. His blood pressure has stabilized and the blood has left his urine. (When he refused to take standard blood pressure medicine, inappropriate for the spiked variety of high blood pressure his adrenal problems caused, they made him sign a waiver absolving his jailers of all responsibility for what might happen to him.) His pre-trial hearing on a charge of failure to appear for probation is scheduled for February 15.

The Kubby case presents many unresolved controversies; is it really the marijuana that has kept his adrenal cancer from killing him? Did his status as a felony fugitive arise from judicial misconduct? (His conviction was originally for a misdemeanor, raised to a felony level by a judge during his appeals process, which is what made his lack of appearance at a hearing because he was in Canada a crime. Kubby has filed a complaint with California's Commission on Judicial Performance, alleging the judge, who had been earlier recused from his case, was acting illegally.)

Whatever the final resolution of those questions, in Auburn, California, a man is in jail ultimately for growing a plant he believes helps him, suffering from cancer, his vitals erratic, deprived of medication that makes his life bearable. He has harmed no one, and is being harmed for it.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man, (Little, Brown), whose paperback edition will be released by BenBella Books in summer 2005.

Chiropractic (1924)

H.L. Mencken

This preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic "hospitals." The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals" copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord -- in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.

Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, i.e., they began to study anatomy and physiology. The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still's ideas. The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the x-rays. With four years' training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. [It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.] Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits -- retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school -- say homeopathy -- plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.

Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues [syphylis], they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers. That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents -- this I doubt. The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them. Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him. His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps any a worthy soul from getting well.

The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them. But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now harry their students furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays. All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farmhand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him. Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was their meat. Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men and decayed welterweights, and the land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.

I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney's spot and playing on his vertebra as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can't convince myself that would work any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.

Congress, DEA, AMA...

Show me where the Constitution grants any authority regarding medicine to Congress or the DEA. As for the AMA, the following statement is the most recent that I could find. If you can find one that is more recent, I would appreciate it if you would show me the link.

The following statement, recommended by the Council on Scientific Affairs, was adopted as AMA policy by the AMA House of Delegates at the 2001 AMA Annual Meeting:

The AMA calls for further adequate and well-controlled studies of marijuana and related cannabinoids in patients who have serious conditions for which preclinical, anecdotal, or controlled evidence suggests possible efficacy and the application of such results to the understanding and treatment of disease; (2) The AMA recommends that marijuana be retained in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act pending the outcome of such studies. (3) The AMA urges the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to implement administrative procedures to facilitate grant applications and the conduct of well-designed clinical research into the medical utility of marijuana. This effort should include: a) disseminating specific information for researchers on the development of safeguards for marijuana clinical research protocols and the development of a model informed consent on marijuana for institutional review board evaluation; b) sufficient funding to support such clinical research and access for qualified investigators to adequate supplies of marijuana for clinical research purposes; c) confirming that marijuana of various and consistent strengths and/or placebo will be supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to investigators registered with the Drug Enforcement Agency who are conducting bona fide clinical research studies that receive Food and Drug Administration approval, regardless of whether or not the NIH is the primary source of grant support. (4) The AMA believes that the NIH should use its resources and influence to support the development of a smoke-free inhaled delivery system for marijuana or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to reduce the health hazards associated with the combustion and inhalation of marijuana. (5) The AMA believes that effective patient care requires the free and unfettered exchange of information on treatment alternatives and that discussion of these alternatives between physicians and patients should not subject either party to criminal sanctions.

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