Pubdate: Sat, 16 Jan 2010
Source: Asbury Park Press (NJ)
Copyright: 2010 Asbury Park Press
Contact:  http://www.app.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/26
Author: Erik Larsen, Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Cheryl+Miller

SHORE MAN RECALLS WIFE'S MEDICAL-MARIJUANA FIGHT

On her deathbed in 2003, Cheryl Miller made her husband James promise 
her that he would not give up their fight to have the use of 
marijuana for medical purposes legalized.

Having suffered from a debilitating form of multiple sclerosis since 
1971, Miller used marijuana to ease the painful symptoms of her disease.

Together, the Toms River couple engaged in carefully crafted acts of 
civil disobedience that culminated in 1998 with chomping down a piece 
of marijuana outside the office of a congressman opposed to 
legalization of the drug for any reason.

So when the Legislature on Monday approved a bill that would make New 
Jersey the 14th state to allow chronically ill patients access to 
marijuana for medical reasons, the occasion was bittersweet for James 
Miller, 57, who still lives in Ocean County.

"I didn't hear the name Cheryl Miller mentioned. It's not why I went, 
to hear my late wife's name mentioned," Miller said Wednesday, during 
a speech at the Red Bank Public Library.

"You'd think maybe somebody who stood there in the beginning, 
virtually by herself . . .," he continued, before stopping himself. 
"When I say stand, she couldn't move her arms or her legs by herself 
at all -- I mean that figuratively. So why do I think that was an oversight?"

Though Cheryl Miller is credited with helping bring down former U.S. 
Rep. Bob Barr's re-election bid in 2002 over the issue, a position 
that Barr has since reversed, the controversial, in-your-face tactics 
of the Millers have not exactly endeared them to the protocol and 
image-conscious political establishment.

But in the 1990s, when the legalization of medical marijuana was seen 
largely as a backdoor, slippery slope effort to decriminalize 
cannabis altogether, unorthodox means were the only way the Millers 
could gain any attention.

"The press wouldn't come to our house," James Miller recalled. "So 
she had me push her wheelchair across Seaside (Heights) to Trenton, 
58 miles in 25 hours . . . that's all I had do in '93 to get 
television stations, radio stations and newspapers to show up. They 
didn't care this could save a woman's life; they didn't care if it 
was a medical miracle. They cared to see a dog and pony show. But 
I've kind of learned how to do that ever since. Give them what they 
need when they show up."

James Miller said the power of his late wife's advocacy was inversely 
proportionate to the destruction of her body by the disability.

"The worse she got, the stronger she got as an advocate," he explained.

Law enforcement officers were reluctant to charge and therefore be 
forced to process a dying woman in so much visible agony that she 
needed either to lie down or be immobile in a wheelchair.

Despite having heard it countless times, the story of the Millers 
still gives goose bumps to Colleen Begley, 29, of Moorestown, a 
volunteer with the Coalition for Medical Marijuana -- New Jersey, who 
is now moving on to work with Students for Sensible Drug Policy in 
Pennsylvania, one of a handful of states where the battle lines move next.

Begley said the bill would not have passed the Legislature at this 
time if it were not for the work of Cheryl and James Miller, and that 
promise he made to his wife more than six years ago. "He's really 
become such a wonderful, powerful speaker. . . . He has helped us so 
much here in New Jersey," Begley said. "It was Jim who said, "Let's 
get a medical marijuana bill here in New Jersey to help people like 
my dying wife.'"

Miller said he is writing a book about the fight that he and his wife 
waged over two decades from the Statehouse in Trenton to Capitol Hill 
in Washington, and even in front of the White House. Miller has been 
arrested more than once.

He said American society developed a completely unreasonable 
perspective on marijuana in the 20th century, in which the drug was 
erroneously lumped into a category of dangerous substances in the 
absence of any legitimate science to support that position. 
Nevertheless, the stigma persists to this day.

"To say "medical marijuana,' some, I don't know how many hundreds of 
thousands of times over the years, people start to kind of separate 
it, almost like, well, that would be OK, rather than "marijuana for 
the sick.' Because then, it's "Oh no, not marijuana!'

"I could go to a mall, right now, and say any one of George Carlin's 
seven dirty words as loud as I want or say "marijuana,' and marijuana 
is going to get me kicked out of there quicker and get more people to 
look, because it's that word." 
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