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Medicinal Marijuana Address
Why We Must Care And Why We Still Bother
by Norm Kent
September, 1994 NORML Conference
Two years ago, South Florida faced the wrath of a natural enemy that challenged our resources as never before. It was a hurricane we called Andrew, and for a moment, I would like you to join in a role-playing exercise that would make your psychotherapists very proud.
You live in a beautiful home at the eye of the storm, and you are fortunately blessed with all the necessities and luxuries of life, including, but not necessarily limited to, a comfortable job, a paid to date mortgage, and transportation you are proud of. You are also the parent of two six-month-old twins- a boy and a girl. You have running water, flowing electricity, food in the pantry, and money in the bank. But now, a natural disaster not caused by you and beyond your control wreaks sudden havoc upon your life.
In the sudden swell of a rising tide and crushing wind, everything you own, possess and cherish- materially, at least- is lost to this devastating force of fate. You and your children fortunately survive, making your way, after a few days, from the rubble and ruin of your home and neighborhood, to a shopping center and the crumbling ruins of a supermarket that barely survived the storm. You and your children are wet and weary, shivering from unsheltered nights and gale force winds and rains. The market appears abandoned, and there are no voices or neighbors or governmental agencies that are visible to offer assistance. There is only a threatening sign on the supermarket, which reads: "Warning - No Trespassing- Looters Will Be Shot."
You read the sign but you feel your children, crying and hungry, in your arms and against your breast, and you see food and clothes inside the market that is within your reach; food and garments that will feed and clothe your child. You proceed to appropriate those items for your own use. Not with the intent to steal, but with the desire to survive. As you leave the market, a clerk who was hiding in the warehouse freezes you with a staring gun. The national guardsmen are called, and the chief officer, following the storekeeper's request, takes you into custody and charges you with theft.
Who amongst us in this room would find this woman guilty?
Who amongst us would instead say that this woman should be found not guilty because she acted out of necessity to survive, not intent to deprive?
If you, as I, would declare this woman's conduct to be excusable you would in effect be saying that there is certain criminal conduct that becomes excusable and justifiable under a limited set of reasonable circumstances. You would be making a declaration that this child's biological needs far eclipsed some corporation's material and financial interests. Now I ask you- is that so wrong?
To understand the nature of this defense, you do not need to be a lawyer, a graduate of law school, or have watched every pre-trial hearing in the O.J. Simpson case. You just need to grasp that at its root is an appreciation that there may be circumstances where the value of the law and traditional public policy is not as important as the value of human life and individual liberty. In a case like this we are saying, boldly and dramatically, that the torch of personal freedom burns more resolutely than the usual and customary rules of our land.
This story is not unlike the dilemma many victims of hurricane Andrew faced. But it is also the bridge and nexus that enables us to talk about the courageous cases of citizens like Robert Randall, Elvy Mussika, or brownie Mary. In august of 1988, Elvy Mussika was living a quiet and comfortable life in her suburban home in Hollywood, Florida. One major factor made her story a bit different than her neighbors. Most of her friends baked cookies and tended to their tulips. Elvy, however, grew marijuana. She had to, though. She had no choice.
A glaucoma patient for decades, Elvy had endured all the tried and traditional treatments for this disease, which would periodically, and all too often steadily, cause the intra-ocular pressure in her eye canals to increase, causing her unbearable pain and inevitable blindness. Oh, the doctors had tried to help her. Elvy had experimented with every possible treatment, including 23 surgeries, cataract operations, and even frightening injections into the retina of her eye. But her sight continued to deteriorate, and ultimately, she even lost sight in one eye.
Elvy had heard through others that marijuana smoking had mild benefits. But a middle-aged woman did not have easy access to street level marijuana. So she grew a few plants of her own. Harvesting them, she enjoyed the benefits of a rehabilitative drug. But an angry ex-roommate told the police about are harvesting venture, and one afternoon they paid her a visit. She was asked about her pot and openly stated: yes, I have a little. I grow it for my survival; for my sight. But the law only knew she was committing a felony, and they took her into custody.
In the space of the next few hours, days, and weeks, Elvy's world would turn upside down. She was booked, searched, stripped, and bonded. She was arrested, jailed, prosecuted and named as a defendant in a criminal information that could have sentenced her to jail for five years. And the prosecutors gave her only one alternative: forego the further growing of pot, and its consumption, submit to random drug tests, and we'll give you probation. If you don't like this plea, go to trial and risk the possibility of conviction and a jail sentence.
Elvy stood up for her rights. She demanded a trial and rejected all prosecutorial plea offers. She hired me as her lawyer and we went into court together, asserting that this was a woman who grew and smoked pot today so that she could preserve her eyesight tomorrow. We told a startled community that pot for Elvy had a medicinal value- that it relieved the pressure, retarded the pain, and reduced the number of headaches she endured from glaucoma. Remarkably, the community of public opinion, like the court of law acquitted Elvy Mussika. Taking the case public, on the radio and TV airwaves, like the newspapers, we found enormous public support. And we also found out Elvy was not alone.
We received calls from, and discovered, cancer patients, one a police officer, who used pot regularly to reduce the pain of chemotherapy, an agonizing hurt that racks his body and rends his strength. We found multiple sclerosis victims using pot to prevent recurring instances of uncontrollable epileptic spasticity. We found individuals, lawyers and doctors, with chronic migraines smoking pot to eliminate headache pain and daily stress.
And we found countless aids patients, like my friend Jimmy Messer, sitting today in a Vero Beach, Florida, hospital, fighting nausea and appetite deprivation, consuming marijuana not just to get high, but in order to restore their health and retard the pain of a fatal disease. By coming out of the closet, we smashed a wall of national secrecy. We found patients across the country who shared Elvy's truths.
Ultimately we unveiled a whole new world of people who smoked and used pots. Scores and scores of good and decent and respectable people, who, like the mother of the child in our hurricane Andrew example, simply sought to survive. Yes, we learned that there were patients like Elvy who had an articulable history of success with marijuana as a therapy. But we also learned that the majority of America's states and municipalities had no real interest in protecting the health and welfare of the Elvy Mussikas of America. We learned that medical marijuana was not available. In fact, even after her acquittal, Elvy had to threaten the United States with a suit before they would make four year old freeze -dried marijuana from the university of Mississippi available to her on a trial basis. Now, six years later, she is still only one of a handful of Americans fortunate enough to acquire this medicine. Thousands of other patients continue to suffer, both the threat of jail for seeking it, and the fear of increased illness by not acquiring it. And the once hopeful promise bill Clinton gave us drowned with whitewater.
Our government has continued to prosecute a war on drugs that has instead become a vicious crusade against individual liberties. They order you to piss in a cup today and subject yourself to mandatory drug tests tomorrow. They want to regulate you not by the quality of your character but by the quantity of cannabis in your urine. In state after state, city after city, day after day, and month after month, there are authorities who lock pot smokers up. We are jailed, booked, stripped, searched, thrown on the ground at gunpoint, handcuffed, humiliated, harassed, physically hurt and brutally dehumanized for smoking a weed that makes you appreciate the rainbow just a little bit more than the average student at art 101. We are the victims of rat-brained legislatures and tough-talking legislators who make the scourge of crime our personal responsibility. But you know what, we have never been in charge, and we didn't start the fire. But we are being torched nevertheless.
Yes, we are prosecuted and persecuted because we have collaborated with injustice and not resisted it, been silent and not stood up, been subservient and not toked up. We have remained in the closet too long, and like our brothers and sisters, in another fraternity, we have too smash those closets down. That's why we have to care; that's why we must bother.
Like brownie Mary and glaucoma Elvy; like the Jenks family with Aids in Pensacola, and like Robert Shaw with cancer in port Huron, like Barry Brass with colitis in Fort Lauderdale, and like Mary Jenny, we have got to come out of the closet and breathe the fresh air of human freedom. We have got to say
I want legal pot and I want it now; I want legal pot and I want it now: so repeat after me...
"I want legal pot"
"When do you want it?"
"Now"
To right the wrongs done to others yesterday, and to prevent those injustices from occurring again tomorrow- that's why we must continue to care and that's why we must still bother.
Let me tell you something about legal drugs. The physicians desk reference is probably 4,000 pages long, prescribing 25,000 drugs for 50,000 illnesses all of which have such mild contraindications as liver disease, heart failure, and embolisms- but then I am told, you are told, it's illegal to smoke cannabis sativa- and the only contra-indication of smoking a joint is eating too many Oreo's in the supermarket.
So that's why we care and that's why we bother.
You know, I like to say I have a drug-free body. I do. I do.
I freely use drugs in my body. I take aspirin for my headaches, antibiotics for my colds, and inhalers for my allergies, after I tore up my knee playing ball this summer, doctors shot me up with cortisone and xylocaine in my knee. When that didn't work they opted for surgery, and right after I came out of general anesthesia, they gave me shots of Demerol to reduce pain and penicillin to prevent infections. They sent me home with prescriptions for anti-inflammatants like Motrin, blood-thinners to prevent clotting like Ecotrin, and muscle relaxants like Flexeril and Darvon.
Brothers and sisters, to win the battle for legal pot we must not only stand against a repressive government, but we wage this drug war against pharmaceutical companies who profit profusely from pills and yet fight vociferously against the legal distribution of pot.
To win the battle, it must be fought against the people who prefer you to have a highball and a martini to a bong; an aspirin to a joint. It must be fought against lawyers who rake in money from defending pot users but don't donate a dime to the Norml legal committee.
But most of all, it must be fought against ourselves- our apathetic friends and countless peers who take for granted that Norml has run its course; that our battle has been fought; that we are an appendage to history. Anybody that thinks people don't go to jail for pot anymore ought to see a client of mine in Fort Lauderdale facing twenty years for cultivating 100 plants; they ought to see another client in Wisconsin in jail without bond on preventative detention because his pot farm presented a threat to the community. For whatever social problem exists today, there is some pot-bellied politician willing to blame it on drugs; willing to commercially exploit your personal choice and suggest it is a wrongful, illegal, and criminal deed. They have made us the criminals, like we are the reason all has gone wrong. You know what I think. The people who smoke pot should not go to jail.
The people who pass laws making people who smoke pot go to jail for smoking pot- they are the ones who should go to jail.
The judges who put people in jail for cultivating and consuming pot -instead of declaring those laws unjust and unconstitutional- they are the ones who should go to jail.
So it is time to stand up and say:
Pot smokers are not the criminals
I am not a criminal.
You are not a criminal.
We are not the criminals.
And that's why we care and that's why we still bother.
Finally, let me share these moving thoughts with you. Because our battle is still so great and the goal sought to be won still so far away, the journey will continue to be controversial. Politicians who support us will be accused of coddling criminals. Writers and educators who join us will be slandered as soft on crime and weak on drugs. Educators who dare speak on our behalf will be renounced by parents' groups. The road will be more than lonely- it will be rocky. There is no rosebush without a thorn, no way of finding honey without daring the sting of bees.
Keep in mind, then, these simple thoughts- that it is far better to fight and fail in a righteous cause that will ultimately succeed then to support an unjust cause that is inevitably doomed to certain failure.
But because we will prevail,
Because we have our heart in the right place,
Because giving up is the ultimate tragedy,
That's why we must continue to care,
And that's why we must still bother.