"He's lost a bunch of weight. He looked pretty dried up," said Jay Turner, a Tallapoosa County Narcotics Task Force investigator who led the June 11 search.

Once the family's primary breadwinner and his wife's caretaker, Smith has been battling stomach cancer for two years.

Most of his stomach has been removed. Marijuana is the one drug that stimulates his appetite, he told police. And he said selling it seemed like the best way to cope with the family's huge medical bills in the face of his inability to work manual labor, the only kind of job he's had.

Police charged both with first-degree possession of marijuana and with possession of drug paraphernalia. Their teenage sons also were charged, along with two other young men. Police say they found several ounces of marijuana on a brown, wooden kitchen table.

From their small blue house set back from a rural road in this Alabama mill town, William and Tammie Smith quietly embody national controversies over the medical use of marijuana and the soaring costs of prescription drugs.

Quietly, but illegally, police say.

"I understand about her medical bills, and I feel sorry for her, but there are other ways to make money," Turner said.

Not only that, but police believe many of Smith's customers were teenagers.

"I don't see why, just because he has that problem, anybody should have sympathy. Because he's ruining a lot of other people's lives," Turner said. "Two or three years down the road, they're going to be the crackhead on the corner."

Third felony charge:

This isn't Smith's first drug arrest. In 1992, he was given probation for a marijuana possession conviction, a felony. He also has a 1984 manslaughter conviction that arose out of a fight in his native Walker County. Smith claims it was self-defense, but it also was a felony.

If he's convicted on the new charges, his third felony, Alabama's habitual offender law will require a prison sentence of 15 years to life, stomach cancer or not.

As this was Mrs. Smith's first arrest, Turner predicted there is a strong chance she will get probation, if convicted.

The couple are raising her sons, who are 18 and 15. They have also adopted a 6-year-old girl from a relative who could not care for the child.

Prison time for her husband would leave Mrs. Smith without the support she's relied on since 1997. That's when her heart became dangerously enlarged, a combination of genetic weaknesses and extremely high blood pressure.

Doctors at University Hospital in Birmingham ordered a transplant, but Mrs. Smith was not a typical patient. While awaiting a donor heart, she survived nearly three years on a heart pump. The time she spent waiting benefited hundreds of other cardiac patients, doctors said at the time, because she proved that a temporary device could be stretched into long-term service.

Mrs. Smith received a transplanted heart in 1999, and returned home to a husband with cancer.

Now married 14 years, they joke about how their medical maladies make them a great match. "It's like we were meant for each other," William Smith said. Debts, desperation

With a high school diploma and a year of technical school, Smith held a series of jobs until the cancer came - in a chicken plant, in two textile mills and as a welder. Immediately before his surgery, Smith worked at Avondale Mills. The job came with health insurance. But with two-thirds of his stomach gone, he hasn't been able to return to work and has lost the insurance.

Weak and gaunt, Smith moves with a teenager's fidgety energy in a cancer patient's withered body. His weight has dropped from 160 pounds to about 100 pounds at 5 feet 9 inches. Doctors tell him not to lift more than 10 pounds. He does occasional mechanical work, and collects aluminum cans.

They have disability checks, his $860 a month, hers $536. The payments put their income too high for Medicaid.

William Smith needs glasses and a hearing aid. But those are on hold, with their combined medical bills topping $100,000.

"We get bills in the mail every day. Ain't one thing we can do with them," he said.

They are six years away from paying off the mortgage on their house, and they're determined to make the $459 monthly payments. Because the heart transplant operation was so expensive, Medicaid paid. It also covers some of the continuing medications connected to the new heart, Mrs. Smith said, sorting through an insulated cooler that holds the regimen.

But her blood pressure medicines are not covered by the federal program.

The marijuana sales were not bringing in much, but it helped, Smith said.

"They try to make it look like a big-time drug operation," Smith said. "If it was, don't you think we would've had something?"

Their house is modest, but nicely furnished with a leather living room set purchased before the illnesses. The couple drove back and forth to their Birmingham doctors in a 10-year-old Ford Crown Victoria until May when the car fell into disrepair. They replaced it with a 1999 Ford Explorer.

The home furnishings and late-model vehicle worked against the couple as they tried to explain their financial crisis to police. "To be in debt, they were living above their means," Turner, the investigator, said.

Police found no other illegal drugs at the Smiths' house. "We hardly ever come across someone just selling marijuana," Turner said.

Smith said cancer is the main reason he began selling marijuana instead of only using the drug. He said he needed extra income to keep himself supplied with marijuana.

During his stay at UAB, Smith was given medication for pain, nausea and infection control. "They gave me drugs to try to make me eat that don't work. This is a drug that's not approved, but it works," he said.

Since 1996, eight states have enacted laws that allow patients to use medical marijuana despite federal laws that ban it. Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii allow medical marijuana. Several courts upheld a voter-approved California law that protected clubs who distributed the drug to patients with doctor's approval. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the lower court ruling, the most recent blow to medical marijuana efforts.

In June the American Medical Association rescinded its 1997 position opposing a "compassionate use" medical marijuana program. The group fell short of endorsing the program, as its Council on Scientific Affairs had proposed.

'Polite' drug bust:

Smith has recovered fairly well. Doctors have told him, "whatever you're doing, keep doing it," he said. He will return to UAB later this month for a checkup to determine whether the cancer has returned. His monthly medications now run about $400. They've lost track of Mrs. Smith's drug costs.

Now out of jail on bond, the Smiths have not yet secured a lawyer, and don't know how they will pay for one.

They're scheduled to appear in court July 26.

Though they wish police had never come, the Smiths don't fault the officers.

"They was just doing their job. I respect them for that. I give them an A-plus," Smith said. "Although they have a hazardous job, they were very polite."

Added Mrs. Smith: "They're supposed to bust down the door, but they knocked on the door. They didn't want to give me a heart attack."

Complete Title: 'Polite' Knock Puts Couple in Medical Marijuana Debate

Source: Birmingham News (AL)
Author: Carla Crowder, News Staff Writer
Published: July 1, 2001
Copyright: 2001 The Birmingham News
Contact: Epage@bhamnews.com
Website: http://www.al.com/birmingham/

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Dan B

• narcosoft.com

from http://www.guerrillanews.com/cocakarma/

• "What if YOUR drugs were illegal?"

It is long, but shows how far curruption goes in amzing detail...

• read the whole story of justice corrupted...

That's why!

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Give all praise and thanks to Jah Rastafar-I!

[ Post Comment ]

Please pass the sugar. The bullcrap we're being fed isn't quite sweet enough!

• Goldwing Tom dot com

KISSS MY IRISHMEX A#@#@S!


[ Post Comment ]

My appetite for lunch is gone. Guess i better go
stimulate it and hope nobody busts down my door...

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