Episode Four: Criminalizing Care

Peter McWilliams was an optimist activist poet and advocate for personal freedom His book Ain t Nobody s Business If You Do The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country resonated across the political spectrum After contracting AIDS and being diagnosed with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin lymphoma in McWilliams turned to healthcare marijuana to manage his nausea and keep down his medication He became a vocal advocate for biological cannabis but in he was arrested by federal government for running a grow operation despite California creating specific protections for medicinal use at the time As a condition of his bail McWilliams was forced to stop using marijuana even though it played a critical role in his medicine He later died after choking on his own vomit while awaiting sentencing by a federal judge This episode of Collateral Damage explores McWilliams s life and legacy and examines how the drug war has obstructed robustness care Transcript Peter McWilliams I want to tell you about a pair of epiphanies that I had in The first happened in March of when I was diagnosed with both AIDS and cancer I tell you this early on because I want your sympathy throughout the rest of this speech Laughter Radley Balko That s Peter McWilliams a self-help author and poet speaking at the Libertarian Party National Convention Peter McWilliams When you mention AIDS or cancer people are so afraid of their own death that they treat you very nicely Radley Balko McWilliams known for his wit and sharp commentary was also brutally honest about his struggle with chemotherapy and AIDS remedy Peter McWilliams So the nausea that was treated that was caused by these things ended instantly with marijuana With one puff of marijuana Radley Balko Speaking both to the crowd and a televised C-SPAN audience McWilliams shared that health marijuana was far more effective for him than the anti-nausea medication he had been prescribed Peter McWilliams It is astonishing how well it works And you have to understand how serious it is when you can t keep your medication down It s not just that it s uncomfortable If you can t keep that medication down it s not gonna save your life Radley Balko McWilliams wasn t just making a personal plea he was urging his audience to challenge curative marijuana prohibition Julie Feldman So it certainly pays to know someone like Peter McWilliams Host Here s a guy who has written three bestselling books And you know what He published them himself Conan O Brien Please welcome Peter McWilliams Todd McCormick Peter had become a multimillionaire before he moved out of his mother s house in Michigan When he was in his late teens early s he wrote a book called Come Love With Me and Be My Life The Romantic Poetry of Peter McWilliams went on to sell over million copies of a poetry book Which is pretty incredible Radley Balko But McWilliams wasn t just a poet He was also a technophile a columnist a motivational speaker and a prolific self-help author He was friends with the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim He wrote and directed a movie starring Bette Midler He appeared on Conan O Brien Oprah and was a repeat guest on Larry King Live Larry King One other thing Peter You self-publish right Peter McWilliams Yes Larry King Very hard to be flourishing not countless that make bestseller lists Radley Balko He thought of himself first and foremost as a humanist And above all Peter McWilliams was perpetually curious Peter McWilliams Hundreds of suggestions It s a thick book People look at it and go Oh it s thick Cyndy Canty I ll never read it Peter McWilliams I ll never read it But every lefthand page as you pointed out is a quote One of my favorite quotes is from Mae West Cyndy Canty Which is Peter McWilliams Mae West declared Oh I used to feel bad about what I did And someone mentioned Did you reorganization No I just don t feel bad anymore Chortling Radley Balko The people close to McWilliams say he never aspired to be the sort of person who would give a barnstorming speech at a political convention And as someone with such lust for life he certainly never saw himself as a victim Yet martyrdom came calling anyway In March of McWilliams was diagnosed with AIDS and with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin s lymphoma He was not much of a drug user But smoking marijuana was the only thing that eased the nausea brought on by the AIDS medication and the chemotherapy Marijuana allowed him to keep down the drugs that were keeping him alive And so he became a supporter and then a spokesperson and then a passionate advocate for civil libertarianism Peter McWilliams Our leaders whom we trust whom we look up to from the Democratic president to the who-knows-what-he-is drug czar to the Republican leaders in Congress of both the House and the Senate They have lied to us about medicinal marijuana They have lied to us about the harm of marijuana There is no more benign medicinal substance known to human beings And we have been lied about this Radley Balko Less than two years after that speech McWilliams would be dead at the age of California where he lived had effectively legalized marijuana for medicinal use but the federal cabinet had made it a priority to stop the momentum for therapeutic marijuana from spreading to other states So the feds began going after growers and activists in places that had approved the recovery And that put McWilliams in their crosshairs Thomas Ballanco Prior to his being arrested he had had his checkup He had regular checkups His viral load had been undetectable for over a year and his T-cell count was high Well as soon as he was prohibited from using natural cannabis his viral load started to spike And it went into the thousands Then it went into the s Not only did we see this in his blood you could see this in his physical well-being He went from like being current and vivacious to eventually being in a wheelchair being exhausted all the time Being what you think of when you think of classic AIDS patients from the early days of AIDS Radley Balko Deprived of marijuana after his arrest the nausea from chemotherapy and the AIDS drugs left McWilliams unable to keep down his medication It also made it intricate to eat And so the illness took over and his body withered until it failed America s drug war had killed Peter McWilliams From The Intercept this is Collateral Damage I m Radley Balko an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than years The so-called war on drugs began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction but the war part briskly became all too literal When the drug war ramped up in the s and s it brought helicopters tanks and SWAT teams to U S neighborhoods It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections All wars have collateral damage the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs we were more willing to accept several collateral damage In the modern war on drugs which dates back more than years to the Nixon administration the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn t just tolerated it s inevitable This is Episode Criminalizing Care The remarkable life and cruel death of Peter McWilliams Collateral Damage Podcast Collateral Damage Peter McWilliams was born in August in Detroit Michigan and grew up in the nearby suburb of Allen Park He was a shy and sensitive kid but also creative and ambitious He began writing poetry in his teens and published his first book of poems at the age of McWilliams came out as gay in the early s and eventually moved to West Hollywood California Thomas Ballanco He would perpetually say I am not a proud fag but I am a fag Radley Balko That s McWilliams s old attorney Thomas Ballanco a fellow marijuana activist who first met McWilliams in the mid- s at a party in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Bel Air Thomas Ballanco We think of oh coming out being publicly gay in this day and age OK that is not an uncommon thing Peter came out at a young age in the early s And I have to emphasize what a different time that was and what that meant when you re in Michigan and you come to the realization Hey I m a gay man And that in a way that is so much more accepted and common now really became a defining characteristic And he did not flaunt that He was not Oh I m this and that But he didn t deny that Radley Balko McWilliams was at first drawn more toward self-improvement than gay activism His sexuality was of program a huge part of his own life and he didn t shy away from writing about it But he also looked for tactics to overcome his shyness insecurity and other quirks that he saw as impediments to his happiness And he requested to share what did and didn t work for him with others so they could improve their own lives He didn t even want to be a marijuana activist He s dependably disclosed I m a humanist advocating for human beings Thomas Ballanco So much of his writing his activism was really about liberating the individual freeing the person inside to be who they were He rejected the title of a gay rights activist Because he noted that wasn t his fight He didn t even want to be a marijuana activist He s unfailingly disclosed I m a humanist advocating for human beings I don t think everybody should be gay but people who are gay are gay Radley Balko But McWilliams soon discovered that gay rights are inseparable from self-liberation Thomas Ballanco As he began to write like I think a lot of people who were open about their sexuality then he got flooded with letters that never stopped Till the day he died he had letters on his desk of people around the country that were Hey I ve been wrestling with my sexuality I feel like I m gay but I don t know how to tell anybody I don t want to explain this to anybody And he answered them He answered them all And he engaged on that He was a compassionate and caring person and I think that s what drove him to a few of this activism That he couldn t stomach the thought no pun intended because of the nausea he couldn t stomach the thought of living in a society that criminalized the consensual behaviors of adults Radley Balko In McWilliams published his renowned book Ain t Nobody s Business if You Do The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country Channeling the philosopher John Stuart Mill the book was a plea for people to be left alone to pursue their own happiness so long as they don t harm others Conan O Brien My next guest has written more than books Radley Balko McWilliams went on Conan O Brien s show to talk about his new book His wardrobe was quintessentially Peter McWilliams baggy beige slacks a Beavis and Butt-Head t-shirt and a blue blazer that looked as if he d just thrown it on after a long nap O Brien s first question What is a consensual crime Peter McWilliams A consensual crime is anything they can put us in jail for that doesn t physically harm the person or property of another And we re talking about things like gambling drug use homosexuality prostitution helmet laws seatbelt laws all of that Radley Balko McWilliams went on to break down the cost of consensual crimes in terms of the thousands jailed and millions more arrested every year O Brien followed by asking about drug abuse specifically and if McWilliams thought selling or using cocaine is harmless Peter McWilliams It s as adults it s not harmless necessarily But then if you look at the preponderance harmful drug in the country it s definitely cigarettes people a year die from cigarettes Conan O Brien Right Peter McWilliams All the illegal drugs put together it s less than people a year So in terms of actual harm either we should be consistent we should ban cigarettes ban alcohol Crosstalk Or we have to let adults make their own decisions He couldn t stomach the thought of living in a society that criminalized the consensual behaviors of adults Radley Balko Three years after that appearance Williams was diagnosed with AIDS and lymphoma Thomas Ballanco He lived as much of his life as he could in his bathrobe because of his illnesses So he was actively medicating What was called at that time the combination cocktail was a cutting-edge drug but had tremendous nausea side effect And amongst the plenty of coping mechanisms Peter had for the ever-present nausea in his life was soaking in hot water So he had turned his entire swimming pool into effectively a hot tub So a bunch of meetings were held in his swimming pool that was degrees Radley Balko Right around the same time that McWilliams got sick California voters passed Proposition which began to create a legal structure around clinical marijuana The ballot measure didn t outright legalize marijuana itself but it did protect doctors patients and supporters from state prosecution The law was seen as fairly radical at the time this was Although the federal administration continued to prohibit the drug the FDA had already recognized the biological benefits of cannabis for a decade Here s Jacob Sullum a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of the book Saying Yes In Defense of Drug Use Jacob Sullum Back in the s the Food and Drug Administration approved a synthetic form of THC which is the main evolving ingredient in marijuana as a restoration initially for the side effects of cancer chemotherapy And then later they approved another use which is for AIDS wasting syndrome And this was established through the kind of controlled clinical trials that the FDA demands It recognized that marijuana is effective at relieving nausea restoring appetite enhancing appetite which is something people have recognized for a long time But that was validated in a very systematic way in order to get FDA approval for what was Marinol at the time and now we have generic versions of that So how can you maintain that the main operational ingredient in marijuana does have recognized physiological uses but marijuana does not have recognized therapeutic uses It didn t really make sense Radley Balko And patients like McWilliams ran into a dilemma with Marinol It didn t work hastily enough for them to keep their medication down Here s Ballanco again Thomas Ballanco He would take his combination cocktail dose I think it was five times a day he had to take this handful of pills that work together It was what was termed low-level chemotherapy When it hit his stomach somewhere along the way it would create nausea And if he vomited he would lose at least a portion of that dose But it was so strong that he couldn t just take another dose Let s say he took a dose minutes later he vomits He s absorbed chosen of that but who knows how much He couldn t just take another one So when he vomited he lost the benefit of that dose So what he discovered was when he was taking the oral antiemetics to include Marinol which was the pharmaceutical THC the delayed onset didn t help him He takes the drugs he feels nauseous he takes another drug to make him not nauseous too late In the time between that taking effect he s already thrown up Whereas if he smokes cannabis as he s taking it it s an almost immediate impact He feels a little nauseous he smokes a little more it settles his stomach Radley Balko For McWilliams only smoking marijuana allowed him to fully digest the medicine that was keeping him alive Thomas Ballanco So that was the pattern he had settled into for about two years living with AIDS and cancer effectively Jacob Sullum For somebody who s severely nauseated and vomiting all the time if you have to swallow a capsule and keep it down that in itself is a challenge When you consume it orally THC orally it gets processed through the liver which produces byproducts that change the psychoactive experience and particular people find more disturbing than smoked marijuana or vaporized marijuana Third dose control is much harder when you swallow a capsule and you may have to wait an hour or more for the effects to come on If it turns out it was too much it s too late And if it turns out it s too little in order to adjust the dose it takes a lot longer than with a product that s either smoked or vaporized and inhaled So you have much better dose control and you have much faster action Radley Balko McWilliams promptly became an advocate and then a financial supporter of legalization groups and the rush of cultivators dispensaries and other entrepreneurs that popped up in the wake of California s medicinal marijuana initiative That work eventually led him to Todd McCormick an activist and a pot-growing guru Todd McCormick My name is Todd McCormick I m years old I m an author and I m the owner of a company called Authentic Genetics I provide cannabis seeds around the world Radley Balko McCormick was diagnosed with cancer nine different times between the ages of and and then again at the age of After one chemotherapy session his mother passed him a joint which this instant helped him feel better This was years before medicinal marijuana was legal Todd McCormick I was using health cannabis when I was years old and I was solicited to talk to another kid who was also going through the same methotrexate chemotherapy that I was on and wasn t having as good of an effect with it And when we were walking to the hospital room where the kid was in I urged my medical expert he was holding my hand I remember he was so much taller than me and I explained You want me to lie to him and not tell him I m smoking marijuana right And he stopped me he says I never communicated you to lie I disclosed Well you don t want me telling him I smoke marijuana right And if we don t tell him that s basically lying by omission I felt like other people were suffering because they didn t have access to something that was helping me And I unfailingly felt like this is screwed up Like that kid looked pale and bald I had color in my skin and hair on my head And it just felt wrong And at that point on I felt like other people were suffering because they didn t have access to something that was helping me And as I got older it bothered me more it bothered me more it bothered me more And I decided to try to do something about it And I ve been a cannabis activist for the last almost years Radley Balko In the mid- s McCormick was living in Amsterdam where he was editor of a magazine called Hemp Life The magazine caught McWilliams s eye so he requested McCormick for a meeting McCormick then flew out to Los Angeles Todd McCormick We met just really hit it off got along really well He s from Michigan I m from Rhode Island we both had kind of an East Coast vibe He was just a really open and upfront person He offered me a quarter-million dollars as a book advance I took it and yeah as they say the rest becomes history But it was one of those LA moments where you have a meeting and your life is turned upside down in about two seconds Radley Balko McCormick briefly moved into McWilliams s home and the two started talking about how to proselytize the benefits of healthcare cannabis Todd McCormick We were sitting in his living room going through the boxes he saw me with these little packs of seeds that had a thousand seeds in each pack and sought me how much a seed was worth I recounted him about And he realized that each little package of seeds in front of me was worth to grand roughly I had seemingly to packages of seeds And he at that point revisited his offer to me And when I revealed yes he drove me directly down well I drove but he had me drive him right directly to the bank put money in my account and it was like a handshake deal He sought me to do a website he sought me to do a grow book he wished me to go around and teach people how to cultivate cannabis at lectures and he also demanded me to make a documentary about growing cannabis Radley Balko With McWilliams s money McCormick bought his own place a grand building in a tony neighborhood in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains that they called Liberty Castle Todd McCormick I detected a home in Bel Air on Stone Canyon that we referred to as The Castle It was like a five-storied castle-styled mansion that was fully gated It was a little storybook Radley Balko The dilemma for activists like McCormick and McWilliams was that their advocacy was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Prop Todd McCormick It didn t really legalize anything unfortunately It created a healthcare necessity defense that you could present if you were arrested by the state It did not protect you from any type of federal prosecution which unfortunately I identified out after being busted by the feds Radley Balko McCormick like majority of people didn t understand these legal intricacies at the time He treated the law as it had been portrayed in the media as if it had legalized cannabis for anatomical use So he lived his life as if what he was doing was legal openly and brazenly And that presented a direct threat to the federal regime s war on the drug That war began during the Nixon administration which demonized marijuana users lumping them in with anti-war protesters hippies and the civil rights movement all as existential threats to the silent majority of white suburban voters The administration categorized the drug under Schedule I the class of drugs that the cabinet says are highly addictive and have no medicinal value That made pot more tightly controlled than cocaine amphetamines and opium The focus on pot continued during the Reagan administration which like Nixon saw marijuana users and advocates as part of a subversive counterculture Ronald Reagan Leading healthcare researchers are coming to the conclusion that marijuana pot grass whatever you want to call it is apparently the bulk dangerous drug in the United States and we haven t even begun to find out all of the ill effects but they are permanent ill effects Radley Balko And despite Bill Clinton s infamous line Bill Clinton I didn t inhale and never tried it again Radley Balko His administration continued the policies of his predecessors By the mid- s polls demonstrated a growing portion of the citizens started to realize that pot wasn t the dangerous gateway drug politicians portrayed it to be Momentum was building to legalize the drug for medicinal purposes California and Arizona went first as voters passed ballot initiatives in But the Clinton administration saw these referendums as a direct attack on the authority and supremacy of the federal cabinet The administration made clear that despite the will of voters it planned to aggressively enforce the federal prohibition on marijuana starting with threats to prosecute doctors in the state who recommended the drug Jacob Sullum This was seen as an intolerable threat to the prohibition regime not just by conservative Republicans but by supposedly liberal Democrats So the Clinton administration announced We have to do something about this This cannot be allowed And we can t have doctors recommending marijuana to their patients who then have selected way to literally get the marijuana and use it to relieve their manifestations This is intolerable Radley Balko The month after the two ballot initiatives passed the Clinton administration held a well-publicized press conference covered by C-SPAN to denounce the voters of both states Donna Shalala We have a matter Increasing numbers of Americans believe that marijuana is not harmful Radley Balko Healthcare and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala Donna Shalala In California and in Arizona voters sent very confusing messages to the teenagers in those states and to young people all across the country And let me make it very clear This administration is opposed to the legalization of marijuana Radley Balko Shalala was joined by Attorney General Janet Reno Janet Reno Despite these initiatives we want to make clear that federal law still applies and federal personnel will continue to apply the law as it has constantly done on a case-by-case basis Barry McCaffrey This is not medicine This is a Cheech and Chong show Radley Balko And here s President Clinton s drug czar Barry McCaffrey Barry McCaffrey Clearly the only thing that s not under debate is whether federal law is still operative It s unaffected by these proposals Radley Balko Clinton administration authorities went out of their way to emphasize that there was a scientific process for approving drugs and that federal agencies like the FDA and USDA had looked into curative marijuana and exclusively identified no beneficial use for it Alan Leshner Let me be clear There is not an existing body of scientific evidence to suggest that smoked marijuana is a viable effective medication Radley Balko Alan Leshner director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the time echoed the same talking point Alan Leshner The scientific region gave up the analysis of marijuana as a anticipated medication in the s We at National Institutes of Robustness have received only one proposal in the last years to examine smoked marijuana as a prospective medication and that failed peer review So there is not a body of evidence to suggest that this is a viable medication Radley Balko But this narrative pushed by Clinton administration representatives isn t exactly what happened After the break we ll dig deeper into the history of stigmatizing and criminalizing marijuana and how Peter McWilliams discovered himself in the middle of that fight Break Radley Balko Pot has been used for medicinal purposes going back thousands of years But in it was subjected to a heavy tax due in part to racist fears that Black men used the drug to seduce white women and also its association with Mexican South Asian and West Indian immigrants Sullum says the tax was burdensome enough to all but eradicate any legal field for the drug despite the vocal objections from groups like the American Health Association Jacob Sullum AMA at that point in the late s was saying Look we think this still has curative use you shouldn t make it impossible to use for anatomical purposes or to research for curative purposes Congress pretty much dismissed those concerns Radley Balko Over the next sparse decades a number of studies touted medicinal benefits of the drug but they were dismissed by Harry Anslinger head of the agency that would later become the Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA The Supreme Court struck down the marijuana tax in That opened a probable window for marijuana to go mainstream once again But the Nixon administration responded with the Controlled Substances Act which imposed a federal prohibition on a host of drugs that it classified based on their medicinal value and feasible for abuse Giving marijuana a Schedule I status cemented a firm stigma on the drug Nixon would later be heard on one of the infamous White House tapes discussing the strategy Richard Nixon I want a goddamn strong declaration on marijuana Can I get that out of this son-of-a-bitch Domestic Council H R Bob Haldeman Sure Richard Nixon I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them Radley Balko It s pretty hard to make out but Nixon says I want a goddamn strong message on marijuana I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them He adds a moment later I want to hit it against legalizing and all that sort of thing Richard Nixon I want to hit it against legalizing and all that sort of thing Radley Balko Nixon s decision to give cannabis Schedule I status made it all but impossible to do any medicinal research on the prospective benefits of the drug Jacob Sullum Marijuana s Schedule I status made it relatively hard to research compared to other drugs Secondly there were a series of bureaucratic hoops you had to jump through historically in order to do research on marijuana specifically And that didn t even necessarily apply to other drugs that were used illegally as intoxicants You had to go through several different approval processes Another barrier was that for a great number of years the only legal source of marijuana for research was this one contractor at the University of Mississippi that worked for the federal governing body worked for the National Institute on Drug Abuse And they produced the only source of marijuana that could legally be used in research The fact that this was available through the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells you something because it wasn t an organization that was interested in researching the positive uses of marijuana it wasn t interested in looking into its medicinal utility The research was focused on abuse And even if you did manage to get approval for a medicinal evaluation you would have to be getting marijuana from this one source which was not very high quality There wasn t much variety The quality was not very high And it was hard to get to begin with because you had to go jump through all these hoops to get it approved People chanting Stop arresting patients for clinical marijuana Stop arresting patients Radley Balko The ballot initiatives were an aggressive move by voters to break through the stalemate Advocates expected to face regime resistance and they were right The Arizona state legislature passed a law that effectively nullified that state s ballot initiative And as certain Californians moved cautiously forward the Clinton administration began threatening doctors who prescribed physiological marijuana They began filing lawsuits against pot clubs and going after operations In one instance the DEA staged a pre-dawn raid of a San Francisco pot club confiscating about pounds of pot And in another armed DEA agents seized plants from a biological marijuana shop in northern California The decision to enforce federal law over the will of state voters was on its face undemocratic And the choice to use such overwhelming force was wholly unnecessary The raids were intimidation to send a message to these businesses and California voters that the federal ruling body would resist any challenge to its authority These weren t kingpins fighting bloody street wars over turf They were licensed businesses operating openly under state law The raids were intimidation to send a message to these businesses and California voters that the federal cabinet would resist any challenge to its authority Despite the implicit threat citizens continued to make themselves heard In curative marijuana ballot measures passed in Washington state Oregon Alaska Nevada and D C And in Arizona voters overrode the legislature and approved clinical pot for a second time Barry McCaffrey This is not an issue of healthcare use of marijuana We commented it s disguised as a it s a hoax proposition Radley Balko But Clinton authorities like drug czar McCaffrey insisted that the curative marijuana initiatives were just a ruse to get the drug legalized outright Barry McCaffrey And you may rest assured that we see this as a direct threat to the U S national drug strategy We re going to try and move on it in a balanced and sound way Jacob Sullum The fact that they went to such lengths to try to stop physiological use of marijuana tells you how terrified they were of this as a precedent And I would say that they were right that ultimately it proved to be the incident that allowing health marijuana was an essential first step toward broader legalization That is the way it played out ultimately So they were right to be worried Radley Balko In California in particular it became relatively easy to get a diagnostic marijuana card and certain took advantage of that lenient program to use the drug recreationally But there were also plenty of sick people who genuinely needed it And Peter McWilliams was one of them Peter McWilliams And so this was my first epiphany was over here watching my normal run to the bathroom with one puff of marijuana turn into a meandering raid on the kitchen Laughter and applause And so the one epiphany was over here and I disclosed I am not going to rest until health marijuana is available to every sick person who necessities it in the United States Applause Radley Balko McWilliams by that point was a minor celebrity known for his poetry and his numerous books on computers meditation and self-help He had also started working with Todd McCormick who had become one of the world s leading experts on cultivating pot McCormick had a seed collection well into the thousands He had been breeding them to create strains to treat specific ailments and as McCormick himself would admit for recreational use as well Todd McCormick I was just home growing I had a lot of money and a big house and I was just really growing at my own home I was looking at doing research I m interested in cannabinoids and terpenes and the combinations And what I was looking at doing is trying to go through my seed collection and build up what would be a living library like I have now of valuable and selected varieties Radley Balko McCormick was also a key organizer behind a number of initiatives to inch the drug closer toward legalization He and McWilliams became fierce advocates for cannabis rights at about the time that the federal ruling body was asserting its power And that made them prime targets Tom Ballanco first met them both at a birthday party for a mutual friend Thomas Ballanco I happened to be in LA for Jack s th birthday party He invited me over to Todd McCormick s house The directions to get there were Go down Sunset turn on Stone Canyon Boulevard it s the first big gray castle on your left So only in Bel Air do you need big and gray to identify which castle we re talking about But I walked in there s two giant plants right there at the gate I m like Wow somebody is really going after it There was a sign that announced Party on the third floor Got in the elevator There s another plant in the elevator Got up to the top bunch of people there s Jack and we re talking celebrating his birthday And at several point he s like Come here I want to show you something Takes me out onto the porch And at that point it was the preponderance cannabis I had ever seen in one place Thousands of plants like there wasn t surface area in this yard that didn t have a plant or clones or something growing on it And he s like This is all legal because of Prop And I revealed Well I m glad you re giving me that advice and I m not giving you the advice But I was amazed Not disconcerted but I will say a little bit shocked One of the party guests there was Peter McWilliams and he was very happy to share his role in all this that he and Todd were partners and they were gonna revolutionize patients access to cannabis Todd McCormick There was no drugs or guns or it s not like I had pot for sale or anything like that I was just extravagantly growing the seeds I had at my house Radley Balko Todd McCormick again Todd McCormick I was buying soil by the pallet I had a lot of guidance I had a staff of five working for me helping keep the house clean and organized and gardening And it wasn t really a big deal I mean it sounds like Oh you had all these thousands of marijuana plants growing in your house It was just like flowers everywhere and planting seeds and it s really all it was And because I was going through what s called a sex and selection phase of it I would have thrown away percent of those plants because like out of a pack of seeds I was only looking for one plant So nine of the plants would have been discarded and the one plant would have been kept Radley Balko McCormick says he never had any intention to sell the plants But he thinks a local dispensary owner with a personal beef announced otherwise and began working with the feds to set him and McWilliams up for arrest Radley Balko The federal raid came on July Todd McCormick I was just home one of my friends revealed up and I had to go to Home Depot to pick up particular stuff When he and I left to go down the street I was pulled over by a police car and they brought me to the little fire station across from the Bel Air gates where there were a lot of police cars They proceeded to use about officers raided my home I had no guns no drugs no illegal income my taxes were paid I mean there was nothing there other than flowers growing in my backyard and in my basement and various places But they raided me and I will never cooperate They brought me down The next morning I was charged with manufacturing of marijuana and held on a million-dollar bond which was eventually lowered to half a million dollars and posted by the actor Woody Harrelson Radley Balko McWilliams himself didn t grow pot So the federal cabinet came up with a creative way to go after him They reported by paying McCormick to write a book about growing marijuana McWilliams was certainly funding the cultivation of illegal drugs McWilliams himself didn t grow pot So the federal leadership came up with a creative way to go after him Todd McCormick Peter had given me my book advance and had basically enabled me to be able to rent my house buy my food get the tools I need just like any production company would with anybody If you hire a rock star to produce an album and you give them an advance there s a chance he s going to spend it on you know girls and drugs and all sorts of stuff that s beyond your control Doesn t mean that the music production company should be prosecuted for the rock stars sessions But in this situation in a sense that s exactly what happened I took my money I rented a big house in Bel Air I started growing cannabis thinking it was legal then got busted And Peter was prosecuted for providing me with the money that I used to rent my house and buy my food and buy my soil and growing equipment And it was pretty much that They called him a drug kingpin because of him financing me But it wasn t the situation at all I mean Peter had never made a dollar off of selling cannabis or any drug in his life He was a multimillionaire from selling books and that s what he did really well But they were looking for examples more than they were looking for justice So they came after Peter and I pretty hard They were looking for examples more than they were looking for justice So they came after Peter and I pretty hard Radley Balko The media had dubbed McCormick the Pot Prince of Bel Air The feds raided Peter McWilliams s home later that year The police took the bulk of McWilliams s files computer and papers They confiscated his notes notebooks research and multiple of his books Thomas Ballanco This is a prolific author who if there s a manic part to manic depression when he was creative could be working on a dozen different projects So the disruption that occurs when feds come in and start throwing around papers unplugging hard drives taking your computer was really devastating to him as much as the incarceration I think the aftermath was apparently a pallet worth of file boxes of papers and outlines of books To take that away from an author is a tremendous thing You can t just blink that Oh yeah I wrote it I can remember it No way So it was a dramatic impact on not just his personal but his professional life Radley Balko Facing federal conspiracy charges for his funding of McCormick s marijuana operation McWilliams spent about a week in jail Unable to access marijuana while he was there he wasn t able to keep down his medication He fast began to deteriorate That s when Thomas Ballanco first signed on to be his attorney Thomas Ballanco The person I saw in the jail after just three days of incarceration looked entirely different from the person I had met on two previous occasions the guy who had a full lively complexion was happy looked alive even though I knew he was literally fighting for his life against these diseases In prison his eyes were sunken He was gaunt His complexion had turned to white And this is just only a limited days of lock-up so that first foray into federal lock-up was a harbinger of what would become his future Radley Balko McWilliams s bail was first set at million then lowered to And though he had made a lot of money from his books he also spent extravagantly both on himself and on the people close to him Todd McCormick There were times when Peter was a multimillionaire like when I met him But then there was post-bust Peter depressed Peter spent more money quicker than anyone I ve ever seen spend money in my life By about I would say he was perhaps I wouldn t say broke because that wouldn t be it but he had used his guidance not too wisely Radley Balko McWilliams didn t have bail money and he didn t want to pay out a hefty percent sum for a bond Thomas Ballanco Despite the money he had he didn t have he yearned to just throw away to a bail bondsman to get out of jail He did have properties Now he bought those properties In the name of his mother was the house he lived in and he had on the same street in the Hollywood Hills a house that belonged to his brother Peter bought them both but he titled them to his family members Now in the time since I ve had a lot of clients who put properties in the names of their family members because they re trying to hide assets that they might have gotten from ill-gotten gains These were Peter s legitimately gotten gains but it was his way of literally sharing the wealth leaving particular legacy to his family And his mother and his brother were both willing to put these homes up So Peter instead of doing the to the bail bondsman had his mother s house and brother s house put up as protection for his bond Radley Balko That decision would prove catastrophic It essentially forced McWilliams to choose between his family s livelihood and his own life Because one of the conditions of McWilliams s bail was that he could not use any illicit drugs including clinical marijuana A violation would liability not only going back to jail to await trial but forfeiting his mother and brother s homes Thomas Ballanco If he doesn t use cannabis his life is threatened If he does use cannabis his mother s and brother s homes are threatened If he doesn t use cannabis his life is threatened If he does use cannabis his mother s and brother s homes are threatened Radley Balko McWilliams ultimately chose his family And without the ability to use physiological cannabis to help keep his medicine down and stimulate his appetite McWilliams s soundness continued to suffer Todd McCormick Peter McWilliams s condition worsened incredible after he got arrested I mean Peter was dealing with AIDS and cancer simultaneously so he was not in very good shape His mood deteriorated his medical deteriorated his ability to make money write books all of it fell away I mean it was devastating Radley Balko As McWilliams s fitness declined so too did his odds of beating the charges against him Because Prop was a state law the federal courts refused to let federal juries hear about it This meant defense attorneys were barred from utilizing the largest part likely defenses For example they couldn t tell juries that physiological marijuana was effectively legal under state law They couldn t say that a defendant needed the drug for medicinal reasons And they couldn t say that a defendant had mistakenly thought or was erroneously recounted by a lawyer that Prop meant they couldn t be prosecuted Thomas Ballanco You can t mention medicinal and marijuana in the same sentence You can t refer to Proposition And you can t use anatomical necessity as a defense Todd McCormick I was blown away When I learned that I could not present a medicinal necessity defense in federal court I also learned I could not present what s called advice of counsel Because prior to planting all those plants in my Bel Air mansion I went and spoke to a lawyer and noted What are my rights And he basically explained interstate and intrastate commerce and how they re different and if I did not distribute any of the cannabis that I would be OK So I thought under advice of counsel that I would be legal if I didn t let any of the cannabis go beyond my gate so to speak But because the leadership can come in with intent to distribute that s what I was charged with Because they can crawl into your head and charge you with your intentions even if they re not true Jacob Sullum Under federal law still there is no legitimate use of marijuana except in federally approved research There s no legitimate anatomical use there s no legitimate recreational use So when people were being arrested for producing or supplying clinical marijuana in states where that was legal and being charged under federal law legally it was fully irrelevant that the state had decided to allow this And that s why and when people were tried on federal charges they were not allowed to say this was for curative use Another aspect to that is typically the juries also did not know what penalties people were facing So if you have anatomical marijuana providers who grew a large enough number of plants they could be facing mandatory minimum sentences five-year sentences year sentences Radley Balko McWilliams and McCormick began to see the writing on the wall They were guilty of violating federal law And their the majority persuasive defenses at least the defenses that would be bulk likely to sway a jury would be prohibited in court So they began to negotiate with prosecutors Here s McCormick Todd McCormick Two deals were Accept a guilty verdict and your right to appeal You get to keep your right to appeal but if you lose your appeal you come in and do the five years But you can stay out on bond pending your appeal Or you can waive your right to appeal which at the time was not an option for me because I considered in the appellate system and I thought the judge was wrong So I demanded to fight my appeal So you want to fight your appeal that s great You can stay out of bond pending your appeal but if you lose your appeal you come in and do the entire five years If you want to waive your appeal you can go in before the judge and they can give you anywhere from zero to months depending on the judge So you re gonna put the leniency into the judge I had no faith in Judge George King none at all after watching him and his decisions for three years none at all So I chose to keep my appellate rights to stay out on bond for five years and to roll the dice and hope I win my appeal so that I could go back and present my defense and go to trial Radley Balko There s chosen disagreement between McCormick and Ballanco about how Peter McWilliams approached his own plea negotiations back in Here s what Ballanco recalls and he was acting as Peter s attorney at the time Thomas Ballanco Peter had been emphatic that we need to go to trial on this occurrence Now this was a federal scenario so that involved -year mandatory minimums It could have gone higher than that He thought it was fundamental to do that Todd McCormick on the other hand felt like the vulnerability was very high They were offering a five-year prison term that might be better than the peril of or even years incarceration Nobody wants to do a day in jail These are formidable decisions for anyone To complicate matters the feds made it all the offers were considered global Which is to say they d only extend the offer if both Peter and Todd accepted So Peter didn t want to be in the position where he forced Todd to go to trial Todd at the same time didn t want to make Peter do time in jail when Peter didn t want to So these were ongoing negotiations Radley Balko But according to McCormick McWilliams had resigned himself to a conviction Todd McCormick Peter accepted the deal that he would waive the right to appeal and he would allow the judge to sentence him from anywhere from zero to months because Peter thought the judge might be compassionate I thought that was crazy Radley Balko In the end it wouldn t matter McWilliams would die before the matter got that far As his lawyers negotiated with federal prosecutors a fire broke out in McWilliams s home It destroyed any of his work that hadn t already been confiscated by the federal administration The fire also destroyed the heater in McWilliams s pool so he began spending more time in his bath to seek relief from his nausea McWilliams was facing years in prison He was sick and getting sicker He couldn t use the one medicine that seemed to boost his robustness And to top it all off he was now living in a fire-damaged home The system was latest him Thomas Ballanco So he was running his bath maybe he had taken Marinol maybe he had taken the GHB whatever it was on his way to the bath he had passed out against the bathroom door so that he was in a sitting-up position unconscious invariably Because any time that passes if Peter you know got more than four hours in his existence he s going to be vomiting So he ends up vomiting while he s in this sitting-up position passed out against his bathroom door It has nowhere to go but gurgles back into his lungs So he ended up asphyxiating and drowning in his own vomit which is just a bittersweet description of you know he s denied the medicine that controls his nausea Yes there were complications Yes there were other things going on But ultimately the mechanism of his death is vomit Radley Balko Todd McCormick was in prison at the time The feds had seized on a traffic ticket revoked his bond and locked him up Todd McCormick I was in Terminal Island federal prison when Peter McWilliams died I got the news from possibly my mom when I called that day and revealed How you doing And I was devastated I thought very highly of Peter Peter had mood swings and you know sometimes he would be your best friend sometimes he could be your worst enemy But largest part of the time Peter was a very compassionate and empathetic person that cared a lot for other people When I heard that he passed away it was really heavy on me Before I went to prison Peter and I were talking about writing Death and how to deal with death because death is imminently part of all of our lives A lot of times people don t face it because they don t want to face their own ending But I made the comment or I made the argument that it was a key to unlocking your life s happiness because when you realize the party is going to come to an end you can just enjoy it Nobody was with him when Peter died But his mother did find a poem next to his bed that was a poem about death I believe that Peter being the sophisticated mind that he was would never write a suicide note But he would write a poem And it basically mentioned when I go let me be And I thought it was really beautiful Radley Balko McWilliams s life advocacy and death made national news across the political spectrum William F Buckley the father of modern conservatism was friends with McWilliams and eulogized him in the pages of National Review Peter McWilliams touched a lot of people Online memorials and eulogies continued in the years after his death Paul Stanford And he died because of marijuana prohibition Julia Rose Please remember Peter McWilliams and in his words While alive live Radley Balko It has been a quarter-century since Peter McWilliams died Recreational marijuana is now legal in more than states and health marijuana is legal in at least a dozen more The federal regime largely leaves the states alone to enforce their own laws Thomas Ballanco Marijuana legalization would not have happened without the AIDS epidemic and the dramatic emphasis from the AIDS and gay society about the medicinal properties the real world this really helps This is a medicine that helps for people who have no place else to turn Todd McCormick It was people that were suffering I mean if it wasn t for cancer patients like myself and AIDS patients like a lot of my friends who had absolutely nothing to lose I don t think we would have seen the push as hard as we did because people like me were spearheads There wasn t countless of us that were trying to fight this battle at the time because people were afraid of being locked up Thomas Ballanco And Peter wasn t an activist for this but finding himself at the epicenter He was gay He had AIDS He lived in West Hollywood And he was an entrepreneur So he really set about after Prop passed and explained in California clinical patients can assert a defense of clinical necessity in criminal trials That s all it revealed Huge change And Peter reported We ve got to make this medicine available to anybody who wants it Peter was at the forefront of how do we get sick people this medicine now that the law says we can do it Todd McCormick That whole scenario was beneficial to the movement in the way that it got people talking Thomas Ballanco And it s easy to look back and say Oh well they should have done this or they should have done that But what Peter and Todd were acting from was a sense of urgency These were both patients Both of their lives had been dramatically improved from the use of diagnostic cannabis clandestinely at first These were people suffering with medicinal conditions that got recommended by a physician Hey you know I ve read I heard marijuana can genuinely help in a situation like this So they were evangelists if you will trying to spread that news Related Oregon s Decriminalization Vote Might Be Biggest Step Yet to Ending War on Drugs Radley Balko Ultimately Peter McWilliams s legacy was to usher in a kinder more compassionate more humane approach to drug prohibition Those who knew him say that would have pleased him though he d have been disappointed that it took so long But if he had lived they say he d also still be fighting He d have continued fighting until drug prohibition itself was entirely gone Thomas Ballanco If Peter stood for anything it was liberation of the individual Be who you are be yourself don t hurt other people but enjoy your life Enjoy your being And I miss that I miss that about him I am ashamed that I couldn t stop the executive from squelching out that light because it was a light and it was a truth We suffer from the loss of truth like that Radley Balko Tom Ballanco shared an anecdote with us that really illustrates the cruel often absurd consequences that these policies inflicted on their casualties It takes place late in the cabinet s scenario against McWilliams and McCormick as the two arrive in court for a hearing Thomas Ballanco And so we re shuffling into the courtroom And Peter and Todd had been talking and Peter at that point was in a wheelchair And normally I wheel him in like you know I m a mafia lawyer wheeling in my client But at this point because Todd and Peter were talking Todd took the handle to the wheelchair and he was wheeling him through the door and I was walking behind him with the other lawyers As the door opened it was these swinging doors it like blew Todd s hair off the back of his neck as it was swinging open And it revealed this six-inch scar he has on the back of his neck from a surgery he had when he was like years old So were they activists Yeah but they were still patients They re still wounded people And they re still facing the full force of the U S regime And I m like these are our wounded The feds had put in point a guy in a wheelchair and a guy who had the five vertebrae in his neck fused when he was years old That s who s leading point on this effort The lawyers are all behind him So were they activists Yeah but they were still patients They re still wounded people And they re still facing the full force of the U S governing body and it just should not be that way These are procedures discussions They shouldn t be forced on individual human beings And these lives should have been spared Todd s still alive but he didn t need to spend five years of his life in federal prison Peter certainly didn t need to die Radley Balko We reached out to Peter McWilliams s brother Michael hoping to interview him for this episode He politely declined but he did share a touching written tribute that he revealed we could use He wrote Peter was an extraordinary person whose creativity flowed in so numerous different directions He was different things to different people A poet a self-help guru a computer expert a survivor of depression a self-published author publicist and businessman And yes a crusader on the side of the angels in the war on drugs So please don t be offended when I say that I believe my brother s enlistment in the drug war not only hastened the end of his life but overshadowed his legacy as a writer Peter will consistently be remembered by me as a humane gay artist rather than a casualty in the futile war on drugs Next time on Collateral Damage Sequoia Pierce We were hanging out watching TV laying in bed and we heard like an aggressive knock on the door And then we heard like glass shatter I ran into the closet And then he ran into the restroom I really kind of wasn t really aware of what just had happened before my eyes Andre Lagomarsino The Fourth Amendment in Nevada has been severely degraded with the way that the drug war has been pursued Radley Balko Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept It was announced and written by me Radley Balko Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer who also served as producer and editor Laura Flynn is our showrunner Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal We had editing promotion from Maryam Saleh Truc Nguyen mixed our show Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan Art direction by Fei Liu Illustrations by Tara Anand Copy editing by Nara Shin Social and video media by Chelsey B Coombs Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance This series was made practicable by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund If you want to send us a message email us at podcasts theintercept com To continue to follow my work and reporting check out my newsletter The Watch at radleybalko substack com Thank you for listening The post Episode Four Criminalizing Care appeared first on The Intercept