'In November 1998, Bob Barr won re-election with 55 percent of the vote, which means that he has significantly less support than medical marijuana.' -The NATIONAL REVIEW, Oct. 11, 1998

HIGH TIMES Freedom Fighter Cheryl Miller was called a "prop" by Rep. Bob Barr (7th Dist., GA) last week, after her husband was arrested in the doorway of Barr's office in Washington, DC during a medical-marijuana demonstration. Capitol police, who broke up the rally and charged Jim Miller with demonstrating there, opted not to bust Cheryl also, who was lying next to her husband in Barr's office doorway, immobilized with advanced multiple sclerosis.

"It is truly sad to see marijuana-legalization advocates using seriously ill patients as props in their campaign to make dangerous, mind-altering drugs legally available," Rep. Barr proclaimed in a press release after the demonstration.

A Prop That Talks!
Cheryl Miller, now 52, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1971. By 1997, she had been strictly homebound by her condition for over 10 years, before she and her husband participated in that year's Boston-to-Washington "Wheelchair Crusade" for medical marijuana. After actually staying out overnight to demonstrate at a Cures-Not-Wars rally in Trenton, Cheryl told HIGH TIMES that she found the novel experience extremely animating and therapeutic.

"I've been having a good time getting to talk to people and getting a message across that desperately needs to be heard," Cheryl Miller told HT reporter Jessica Loos. "I am motivated by the hope that everyone with my condition has the legal opportunity to try marijuana. I needed to do this to help other people, and I felt that I could help. It was the most important thing I've ever done, except for having and raising my four kids, whom I've always wanted to set a good example for." Since then, the Millers have joined in several political actions for medical marijuana, most recently last Thursday's civil-disobedience action in DC.

Lying About Medical Evidence, Too
Rep. Barr's office in the Longworth government building was selected as the site of last week's protest in order to publicize Barr's latest moves to nullify "Initiative 59," the District of Columbia's new medical-marijuana law. DC voters enacted I-59 by a 69-percent majority in last year's elections, voting to allow seriously ill people there to grow and use marijuana legally if they have the approval of their doctors. But thanks to legislative obstructions pressed primarily by Rep. Barr (and declared patently unconstitutional already in Federal court), patients who use medical marijuana in the District of Columbia still face jail time.

So last week, as another of Barr's extra-constitutional endeavors to nullify I-59 headed for the desk of President Bill Clinton for his signature, DC's Marijuana Policy Project helped organize a national-scale protest at Barr's office. Besides the Millers from New Jersey, spasticity patient Jacki Rickert of Mondovi, WI and glaucoma sufferer Gary Storck of Madison, WI lined up with MPP supporters to chant "Bob Barr, You've Gone Too Far," and brandish placards that beseeched, "Stop Arresting Patients!"

Rep. Barr responded with his press release calling Cheryl Miller a "prop," and continuing, "All existing research strongly indicates that smoked marijuana has no medical benefits, and in fact significantly damages the health of those who use it. It is despicable for legalization advocates to offer false hope to the sick in a cynical effort to legalize marijuana."

Besides his demonstrated ignorance of the fact that Cheryl Miller has never smoked pot--and indeed cannot smoke anything, due to her MS condition, which requires that she take cannabis extract as an oil-based food supplement (when she can get it)--and his meretricious slandering of medical-marijuana organizers as "pot legalizers," Rep. Barr's vituperation also flatly contradicts the federal Institute of Medicine's definitive findings about medical marijuana, released last March after billions of dollars spent in taxpayer money over decades of research.

The IOM report's authors, after decisively determining that marijuana's active properties have unique therapeutic value for a long list of disease conditions such as MS, conceded that smoked pot might turn out to be useful only in "limited circumstances" in American medicine--and very pointedly emphasized that a salient "limiting" factor involved is political opposition to medical marijuana from law enforcement, from drug companies, and from ideological Drug War legislators like Rep. Barr.

Serial Anti-Constitutionality
Barr's latest maneuver to nullify I-59 takes the form of a "budget rider" attached to the pending DC city appropriations bill, which is controlled by Congress. Although already vetoed once by the President when it was attached to an earlier version of the DC budget, Barr's re-inserted rider nullifying I-59--the first time Congress has ever sought to nullify a law passed directly by US voters at the polls--is to be signed into law this week as part of a last-minute "omnibus" act to ensure the continued functioning of the whole US government.

The Marijuana Policy Project, a non-profit advocacy group that campaigned for Initiative 59 last fall, is working to defeat Rep. Barr's efforts to overturn the initiative--or, at least, to unmistakably apprise the public of the manifest contempt evinced by Barr (and the Congress, and the President, for that matter) for the declared will of whole jurisdictions of US voters when it comes to "E-Z-2 Pass" Drug War legislation like Barr's.

"Congressman Barr is involving the entire Congress and therefore the nation in what should have been a local issue. Today's event shows that patients across the nation are taking notice," said Chuck Thomas, MPP's director of communications. "Barr's government-knows-best legislation is anti-Democratic in intent and authoritarian in effect. His efforts are a slap in the face to patients whose lives depend on using marijuana."

Preston Peet with Dean Latimer - Special to HT News