Pot Shots: A Last, Desperate Appeal to Stay in Canada

Kubby is an activist who played a key role in getting Prop 215 on the ballot in 1996. He and his wife Michele were busted in January '99 and charged with growing 265 indoor plants at their home in Squaw Valley. Placer County prosecutors charged that the plants were for sale to Bay Area clubs; the Kubbys maintained they were for personal use (and that more than half were unsexed seedlings).

Kubby's defense included a letter from Vincent DeQuattro, MD, the USC Medical Center cancer specialist who in the early 1980s diagnosed Kubby's condition as Pheochromocytoma, a cancer that stimulates overproduction of adrenaline (inducing heart attacks and strokes). DeQuattro was surprised to learn that Kubby had survived when in 1998 he saw his name listed in the Voter's Handbook as the Libertarian Party candidate for governor of California.

"I contacted him to determine how it was that he had survived all these years," DeQuattro recounted. "He told me that he was treating himself with the advice of his physicians in northern California with marijuana and has been taking no other medical therapy for several years." DeQuattro consulted another specialist who confirmed "that every patient other than Steve with Steve's condition had died during this interval of time. Steve was the only survivor."

DeQuattro hypothesized that "in some amazing fashion, this medication has not only controlled the symptoms of the pheochromocytoma, but in my view, has [also] arrested its growth." He also advised the court that a very sharp spike in Kubby's blood pressure during his three-day imprisonment following the bust suggested that the cancer, though in remission, was still present in his adrenal system.

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