Pubdate: Mon, 09 Mar 1998
Source: Ottawa Citizen (Canada)
Author: Luiza Chwialkowska
Contact:  http://www.ottawacitizen.com/

A FEW PILLS FROM DEATH

Jim Wakeford isn't a criminal - just a very sick man with a very big mission.

TORONTO -- The most recent - and potentially most serious - challenge to
Canadaís drug laws comes not from a long-haired hippie bent on bringing
down the establishment, but from a dying man who has spent most of his life
helping kids stay away from alcohol and drugs.

When he was young and broke and couldnít afford a phone, Jim Wakeford tied
tin cans to a rope and dropped them out of his apartment window so street
kids could summon him down when they were in trouble. Now his doctor says
he might die without marijuana, and his lawyer says that not on1y should he
be allowed to smoke the drug, but the federal government should supply it.

On Thursday, Mr. Wakeford, a 53- year-old Toronto AIDS patient, filed a
civil suit in the Ontario Court of Justice against the Canadian Government
demanding that he be exempt from laws against cannabis, and more
audaciously, that the government be required to supply the drug to patients
who need it. His case is scheduled to be heard on May 4.

Until then, Alan Young, the Osgoode Hall law professor who is fighting a
number of drug-rights cases, is scouring the world for experts who will
tell the court that cannabis is a legitimate medical treatment and that Mr.
Wakeford is not a criminal.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wakeford is reluctantly lighting up joint after joint at the
request of television news crews, and trying to use the skills he acquired
over a lifetime of charity fund-raising to raise the tens of thousands of
dollars he needs to fight what will likely be his last great cause. He has
raised $6,000 so far.

Mr. Wakeford doesnít look like a criminal. Nor does he look like a man with
enough strength to take his government to court.

Even if you didnít know that he has spent the past five years only a box of
pills away from death, you would notice the slightness of his frame, the
lightness of his step, and the translucence of the skin draped over his
hollow cheeks.

There is a fragility about him that makes you worry whether heíll slip away
when you're not looking, or whether heís really there to begin with. The
quiet calm of his voice makes you wonder, midsentence, if he's really
speaking. So ethereal is his presence and unremarkable his appearance, that
to meet him walking home in his plainer-than-plain blue jeans, jacket, and
white sneakers, itís easy to imagine him slinking by unnoticed to some
lonely bare-walled mom to wait for his illness to take its final toll.

Yet as Mr. Wakeford makes his way through the neighbourhood, passersby
recognize him. "You cheeky devil. I saw you smoking up on TV last night!"
calls out a young man. At the "local greasy spoon where he takes his bacon
and eggs in the morning, a sympathizer at another table secretly pays for
Mr. Wakeford's breakfast before he can ask the waitress for the bill.

And when he finally makes it to his Church Street apartment - a going-away
gift he bought himself when doctors told him in 1993 that he had two years
left to live - the rooms are bursting with light, life, and colour. In this
determinedly cheerful place where he planned to die, even the powder-room
ceiling is sunflower yellow.

Five defiant years after receiving his death sentence, Mr. Wakeford sits in
a wine-coloured leather chair under a soaring three-metre ficus tree, his
gaunt face lit up by sunshine pouring in from a terrace overlooking streets
that be calls "the heart of Torontoís gay ghetto."

The brightly painted walls are crowded with paintings, posters, and
photographs of the friends and celebrities who love him. There are awards
for the good works he has done, like founding Oolagen House, a treatment
facility he started in 1967 out of his home to help Torontoís street kids
in trouble with drugs. Last year, Oolagen House celebrated its 30th
anniversary and reported an annual operating budget of more than $2 million.

There are so many pictures of friends and admirers on the walls that it's
easy to overlook the eerie photo of a once-healthy and robust Mr. Wakeford
showing a once-lively Diana, Princess of Wales, around Casey House, the
reknowned AIDS hospice whose foundation he built.

And somewhere in this incongruity, in the gap between the smallness of his
voice and the bigness of his achievements, between the vulnerability of his
body and the immutability of the law, lies the reason this soft-spoken son
of a Saskatchewan miner is taking the Government of Canada to court.

"What has marijuana done for Jim Wakeford? It has allowed him to live,"
says John Goodhew, a Toronto AIDS specialist and Mr. Wakeford's physician.

"I am offended by the way some media have been covering my case so far,"
Mr. Wakeford says. "They make light of it, as though it is not a
significant and necessary part of my medical regime."

He doesnít smoke marijuana for fun, he maintains. He smokes three joints a
day, in the afternoon, to counteract his medication, which leaves him
nauseated and unable to eat.

"I don't think he would be taking his anti-HIV medications if he wasn't on
marijuana," says Dr. Goodhew, who prescribes the battery of 40 pills that
has raised Mr. Wakefordís life expectancy from a year to a level he now
says he "doesn't presume" to predict. "Thanks to the medications, his
immune system went from 10 to 15 per cent of normal strength to 40 or 50
per cent now. The virus in his blood dropped to undetectable levels," Dr.
Goodhew explains.

But as the medications began to give Mr. Wakeford back his life, Dr.
Goodhew says, they also gave him nausea and diarrhea, killed his appetite
and caused him to lose drastic amounts of weight.

"His chart was improving dramatically, but every time I saw him, he looked
sicker and sicker.

"His cheeks sunk in, he had no butt, his arms and legs were like sticks,"
Dr. Goodhew says. "He knew that on these medications, he was wasting away."

Mr. Wakeford was wasting away be-cause of a peculiarity of the
new-generation AIDS drugs, called protease inhibitors, that only work if
taken according to a strict schedule. Four of Mr. Wakeford's medications
have to be taken on an empty stomach, which means he canít eat for three
hours before taking them.

"The thing about these drugs is that you have to comply 100 per cent with
the schedule to keep the virus from reproducing," Dr. Goodhew says.

"He takes four anti-stomachs a day, meaning that he canít eat for in hours
out of each day. He has four one-hour intervals when he can eat, but the
pills kill his appetite in that window."

Dr. Goodhew says Mr. Wakeford has tried the all available anti-nausea
medications, and none worked until he tried smoking marijuana. Dr. Goodhew
stops short of saying whether he suggested marijuana to Mr. Wakeford,
saying only that, "When Mr. Wakeford informed me that he was using it,
there was a dramatic improvement."

And Mr. Wakeford is not a unique case, says Dr. Goodhew, who treats 200
HIV-positive patients. He estimates that one-quarter to one-half of his
patients on anti-HIV medication use marijuana on a "semi-regular" basis.

"Patients who use it continue to use it with my knowledge and consent," he
says. "Medically, I think it is a worthwhile cause. It is absurd to
criminalize a product that is so useful, effective, inexpensive, and so
non-toxic compared to all the pharmaceutical alternatives."

If an AIDS patient were arrested for buying marijuana and had to spend even
24 hours in prison without following his drug regime, Dr. Goodhew argues,
the virus could reproduce so quickly and drastically that there would be no
turning back.

"I just find the marijuana laws ludicrous," Dr. Goodhew says. "I can't
take them seriously. I can't believe that anyone, except a small group of
police, takes them seriously."

Dr. Goodhew is one of the expert witnesses to file an affidavit in the
case, and might be cross-examined by government lawyers. Mr. Young and his
law students are busy searching out others to make their case in the next
two months.

"It is our contention that it is a constitutional violation to criminalize
therapeutic activity," Mr. Young says.