O^FF T^HE A^IR

Joanna McKee: "There are people dying that we saved their life, or at least prolonged their life for a bit, and made them comfortable. This is not a party situation." -(from "Seattle Live" aired on KIRO Channel 7 in August 1995) "I have the support of my doctor. I have a spinal cord injury. I deal with migraine headaches, epilepsy and constant pain. And so I had a note from my doctor to go ahead and use [marijuana] for my own purposes. It's beneficial to me, he said. I have seen the AIDS patients who were sick, who had wasting syndrome, I shared it with them.... If they could bring me a note from their doctor, I'll go ahead and help them, see if I could get some medicine for them." -(from "Town Hall," aired on KOMO Channel 4 (ABC) in August 1995)

Ralph Seeley: "[Marijuana] is a miracle medicine....chemotherapy-induced nausea is violent, completely debilitating, usually accompanied by diarrhea. In my case I would up in the fetal position on the floor at the University hospital....[my doctor] prescribed THC. In 1991 it was about 84 cents a tablet. By 1993, it was five dollars." Jeffrey Steinborn, Joanna McKee's attorney: "What happened in the interim there was that the DEA finally decided once and for all they were going to make it available for medicine, so the pharmaceutical industry raised the price." Seeley: "[Marijuana] is certainly an emotional lifesaver. You know, with cancer, you pray to be normal. Please God, just let me be like all these other people who don't appreciate what they have. Take a five dollar tablet and watch it go down the toilet. Smoke a little weed and ten minutes later you're fine. The tablets take two to three hours to kick in and they last about 14 hours. So either way, with the tablets you're not going to be feeling normal. They make you extremely high." -(from "Seattle Live" aired on KIRO Channel 7 in August 1995)

"If I take one of those tablets (marinol) at 10:00 at night, I get no relief until midnight, and I try to go to work or school the next day, and I'm losing arguments with a doorknob at 10:00 in the morning, or I'm trying to study and I'm reading the same sentence over and over. Smoke a joint, I don't have to do it two hours ahead of time. I don't have to watch $5 tablets disappear down the toilet one after another. Ten minutes later the nausea goes away. If it doesn't, you can take a little bit more, self-titration in medical terms, and when you wake up in the morning, you've had a nice sleep and you're not debilitated from the side effects. There's simply no comparison whatsoever, and it doesn't make any sense, which I discovered: the DEA's administrative law judge [Francis Young] put together, in 1988, in a 68-page report and recommended that the drug be placed in Schedule II, where it could be prescribed." -(from "Town Hall," aired on KOMO Channel 4 (ABC) in August 1995)

Gatewood Galbraith III: "My main issue is choice. My main issue and fear is that the whole bundle of rights of individual free choice, held by the individuals in this country, the citizens of this country, the kinds of freedoms that our forefathers fought and died for since 1776, that our subsequent generations have gone to war for, are now under assault by the present administration and the past administration and its two-term stay in office. These people, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, are not conservatives; these people are ALIENS! These people have nothing to do with conservatism. I'm a conservative candidate, I want to license and regulate marijuana as a cash crop and let our farmers make this money instead of making these international criminal syndicates in South America and Mexico rich. And the current administration calls itself conservative, but when I was growing up, conservative meant you kept the government in a little box, you didn't let it out, the government stayed in that little box, because when you let the government out of that box, it starts exponentiating and feeding upon itself, becoming self-serving and always against the interests of the people. Inexorably, it will grow to occupy the space currently occupied by our civil liberties and it has been doing so for the last 40 years. Ronald Reagan snookered the public and said he was going to take the government off the backs of business. He did that, but he put government directly on the backs of the people. He took all that built-up government, he gutted the social programs and took all that money and fed his cronies with it and then brought in the military and the police force to ride herd on the population. That's exactly what's happened. I'm going to reverse that effect. When I get to be governor of the state of Kentucky, I'm going to put that government back in the box. I'm going to tell the government that we don't have the right to interfere in a lot of different aspects of individuals' lives in this state. Marijuana is a benchmark question for many reasons: Number one, a society that can accommodate alcohol and tobacco has no--absolutely no--argument with marijuana, which is far less harmful than either of those two. The state has no right to tell the individual that he cannot alter his consciousness. If he can do that respectably and in a non-violent or -threatening manner, then he should be able to do that. Not with addictive drugs. I am not talking about legalizing drugs. I'm talking about licensing and regulating marijuana as a cash crop in the state of Kentucky. I can kick crack and cocaine and heroin out of the state of Kentucky. I can solve that problem. My granddaddy never grew crack, or cocaine or heroin, but he used to grow the hell out of hemp. And when he did, we made a pretty penny on it. I'll kick crack and cocaine and heroin out, because what I'm going to do is, I'm going to tax and regulate the marijuana smoker and remove them as a buffer zone from around the hard drug market. You know, as a marijuana smoker, I resent being forced to run involuntary interference for the hard-drug market. I don't belong in that same category, and I will not be placed in that same category, and I sure as hell am not going to be going through my life as an adult in this society, looking over my shoulder, wondering when the government is going to pounce out and haul me and hold me in a cage for ransom because of my association with the green plant my granddaddy used to grow. If we're going to fight about this, we're going to fight about it in front of the courthouse, with a bullhorn, at 12 noon, in the sunshine with the public watching. And if we're going to fight about it politically and through the system, we're just going to flat take over the system and remove this kind of asinine, fascist law and this kind of asinine, fascist mentality from existence in this society." -(from "The Hemp Video") To a crowd gathered at a "smoke in" at Michigan University: "They know marijuana does not make you crazy. They know marijuana does not lead you to crime. They know marijuana does not lead you to harder drugs. [The law against] marijuana is a system of control that they can exercise over you in case you step out of line from their corporate policies." -(from "The Hemp Video")

Tony Serra, a San Francisco civil rights attorney from Zero Tolerance : "This total prohibition [against marijuana] is what is historically aberrant. That it's unwise to prohibit, by prohibition, and we do prohibit in this country, we have created a criminal class. We have created this so-called drug problem, this terrorism, this thing that ultimately, now, is unchecked and causing, from my perspective, a reason for a grasping, overzealous executive class to grab more power. To use that as the excuse." -(from a video by Paper Tiger, reshown on "The Hemp Video")