Kay Lee is the coordinator of Medical Cannabis Key West, a role she assumed by default after the death of Joe Hart. Joe, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and recipient twice of the Purple Heart, five bronze stars and the air medal for service, belonged to more than a dozen clubs that sold marijuana for medical use. Joe died from AIDS-complicated multiple myeloma at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Miami on August 21.

Kay Lee, known affectionately as Grandma Lee, worked with Joe during the past year at the Medical Cannabis Key West club. But don't make the mistake that this kindly, older lady is no more than one of the many people grieving Joe's passing. She certainly is that – grieving the friend she lived with and loved for the past year – but she is also the energy, knowledge, experience, and fire that will carry on Joe's work.

"I first met Joe three years ago in Philadelphia. We were participants in the Philadelphia Experiment, whereby Attorney Lawrence Elliot Hirsch brought together a number of people who had generated media pertaining to medical marijuana. He paid for the trip to Philadelphia as well as accommodations and we had no pressing agenda except to begin writing a class action lawsuit for cannabis therapeutics.

"Mr. Hirsch supported the idea of suing the government because, at that time, eight patients in the United States, in a government-sponsored study, were receiving 300 joints each month for medicine, and no one else was allowed to participate. They closed the IND [Investigational New Drug] program back in '92, and our goal is to have questions answered about that program. The IND has tried to get the Justice Department, the defendant in this case representing the United States government, to throw the lawsuit out as frivolous, but the judge said we'd not had a chance to redress our grievances, so we go to court this month in Philadelphia."

Kay will be there.

The IND program studies and tests new drugs on patients. Participants in the study have diseases that may be, at least theoretically, cured or slowed by a new drug. In the case of testing marijuana as medicine, it was a compassionate IND program. The current lawsuit, which includes over 400 people, asks that they be used for "research" as well. Kay says that most of the litigants are older and suffer from a variety of diseases and conditions.

One person is signed on simply because his family has a history of diseases that he's afraid he will inherit. There are people suffering from stress because, as Kay points out, when proper research is finally complete, it will be found that stress and depression are the two main conditions alleviated by the use of marijuana.
She says the lawsuit includes quadriplegics, paraplegics, persons with broken backs, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, every kind of cancer, and a myriad of diseases no one's ever heard of. And, of course, a lot of AIDS patients.

"My daughter's on the lawsuit, and she has anachroiditis. Sounds like spider webs. She was having a back surgery and a doctor accidentally cut the duodenal sack. It takes about five years for the resulting scar tissue to grow enough for them to recognize it as anachroiditis. In the years since her botched surgery, scar tissue has wrapped itself around her spine and is choking off the supply of vital sensory function.

"She's 26 years old. They told her there's absolutely nothing they can do for her except a wheelchair and pain killers. There is a surgery she could have; it's rare and there's only one doctor that does it. It scrapes away as many layers of scar tissue as possible and relieves some pain and gives her back some function. The insurance company said, 'no.'"

Kay's daughter's husband worked for Fidelity Investments, but lost his job when his wife got very sick and was increasingly in need of his assistance. In Kentucky she was unable to get the medication for her pain which the Texas doctors had been giving her. "She was in pain. She couldn't get the surgery. I got so frustrated. I knew about marijuana because it saved my life 20 years earlier. I just never felt the need to talk about it. I didn't talk to the kids about it," says Kay.

One of Kay's other daughters suffers from ARDS [Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome], a condition usually found in the elderly and nearly always fatal in a short period of time. Her daughter had been placed in a medically-induced coma for three month because of the disease and currently suffers intense nightmares because of it. Much like HIV, ARDS has permanently compromised her immune system. Also, her lungs are severely damaged and she is unable to take in enough oxygen. Ironically, two tokes of marijuana, which one would expect to be especially harmful to a person with compromised lung capacity, not only enables her to sleep without nightmares, but also permits her lungs to relax enough to enable breathing and more efficient oxygen intake.

Kay recounts a time in her own life when she was clinically suicidal due to years of depression. She says she was labeled a "moody child." It really came to a crisis, she says, after her third child was born."I did a couple of extremely serious suicide attempts. When my son died from an accidental drowning, I was thinking about walking in front of a Mac truck. I had not smoked any marijuana, but somebody came to me and said, 'This won't hurt you, and it might help you.'"

Kay smoked it, and, she recalls, "It was immediately as if cobwebs were just cleared away. There was light up there from where I'd been living in this little dark shell. When I smoked it, within the first couple of tokes, I immediately realized it was medicine because of the 'light' inside my head.

"Then, it was like I almost... almost heard a voice – not auditory, just a very strong thought – I call it a 'pot thought' – that came to me and said, 'Kay, if you can handle this, you can handle anything that's going to come your way.' The strength that I've found from that simple statement has seen me all through my years. I was a single parent of six children; I raised them all. They're grown and none of them have problems with the law. They're productive and loving people."

Kay recalls various prescription drugs, particularly her bad experiences with Haldol. "[Before marijuana] I had the 'Haldol drool' because I was on Haldol and many other [legal] drugs. Haldol makes you forget to even swallow; it just makes you into a zombie. And that's legal medicine."I went through stages: they'd give me a medicine, and it wouldn't work; they'd take me off and I'd have withdrawals while I began a new medicine. I was frantic. I knew nothing about medicine back then. Some of these things frightened me. Some would make my arms and legs twitch and jerk. I had awful side-effects from these medicines. And all they did was make me too down to try and kill myself as my life was falling apart all around me."

Kay says that when she smoked a joint that day, she "took the pills and destroyed them. I've never touched chemical pills again because I don't need it."

While living in Ohio for a period of time, Kay relates meeting the director of a marijuana club who, without Kay's ability to provide a doctor's statement, was unable to provide her with marijuana. She had been three months without her medicine and emotionally broke down during an interview in his office. She says it was really embarrassing, and she started crying and couldn't stop.

"[I was] sent to the hospital and they wanted to admit me as being at the most severe level of clinical depression. I realized this was going to put me back to the Haldol drool." Kay declined treatment as she was without a job, new to the area, and everything was really hard for her.

"I couldn't find a job if I was in their hospital. I told them I wouldn't get back on the medicines, and the doctor said, 'Then you've wasted our time." So, I went home and told someone I was desperate, and they let me clean their house and gave me a little bit of medicine. In three days I had a job. I was back on the road again. That was the longest I've had to do without for the years I've been using it."

Kay does not consider herself to be an activist because, she believes, it removes her from the association of the everyday person, and she wants the public to understand that "I'm just like them."

"I'm just a person who got so upset, and I've seen how they're hurting my daughters. I'm just angry. I started studying medical marijuana because I wanted to present it to my daughters when they had no other alternatives." Kay believes that if a person studies marijuana deeply enough – and that means going to live with people who use it – s/he will understand marijuana as a genuine medicine and not simply an illegal drug.

"When I think of being an activist, I think of the day I picked up a folding table and went over across the street from the Kenton County Courthouse in Covington, Kentucky, and started talking about medical marijuana. There was law enforcement on every corner with walkie-talkies. I wasn't smoking anything, but I was setting a precedent in being there. I went out there every week for about 20 weeks and talked with as many people as I could. [My message was] the fact that marijuana has not enough side effects for it to be illegal, and it's an effective and safe medicine. It doesn't kill anybody."

Kay has spent the past six years traveling around and meeting with people who call to ask Kay to help tell their story. When Joe Hart was going through his court case here in Key West and needed some support with the local club, Kay came to help.

Kay doesn't only advocate for the medicinal use of marijuana but for general use as well.

"Because of the amount of study I've done, I absolutely know it shouldn't be against the law. Even if a child experimented with it, one experiment is not going to hurt that child. In Europe, children drink wine and learn to handle it. I totally believe in that [teaching responsible behavior for the consumption of alcohol and marijuana to children], but that takes a stretch of the imagination to think people have learned enough to actually prevent abuse by teaching use. It's a strange concept, but it works in other countries.

Kay says she would be satisfied if marijuana were placed in schedule three or four of the government's drug use guidelines. If a drug will hurt nobody and has no known dangers, it can be in schedule five and sold on a drugstore shelf. If it's really harmful, and there's no medical use, it's placed in schedule one, and anyone who uses it or recommends its use is put into jail. Marijuana is a schedule one drug.

Kay would like to see people demand of the government to prove why any plant belongs in schedule one. However, she will not be satisfied with a change to schedule two because it still remains incredibly restrictive, which is why, she says, they wouldn't give her daughter pain medicine. "When I read the list of schedules and it describes what goes into each schedule," says Kay, "it doesn't even belong on schedule three. Maybe schedule four, but this is a plant. It's a plant!"

Kay sees the change from schedule one to anything higher or less restrictive as a "Catch-22" because the research involved is very expensive and there is no profit potential in a substance that is easily grown and, therefore, cannot be controlled or taxed.

"That's what we're up against, plus a lot of other factors to consider because the 'drug war' has been used to diminish personal rights and freedoms. There are so many words to describe the drug war. It's the most insane thing because prohibition has been used so many times in history and every time it's used, it fails to control the substance for which it was designed," says Kay.

Kay refers to alcohol prohibition in the earlier part of this century, when a person could use the trunk of a car and put so many gallons of beer or whiskey in it. The advent of moonshine came because of the prohibition of alcohol in much the same way as crack came about because of the prohibition of drugs.

"If you've got a trunk and you can put enough  beer in there to make a hundred bucks," reasons Kay, "you can concentrate and adulterate the form and come up with moonshine and make a thousand bucks off the trunk of your car. All prohibitions have created these side substances because of money. It's all because of money," says Kay.

Kay has been writing to prisoners for six years. She says the vast majority, stating 99 percent as a fair guess, of them are incarcerated for violating drug laws. And, says Kay, 99 percent of these are for marijuana."I was listening to C-Span and the man currently running the DEA was saying they go for the cartels and big people, they don't arrest the street dealer, unless he's causing a problem, or the users. I've got to compose a letter to him because those are total lies," says Kay. And, continuing, "I had a police officer say to me one time, 'Oh, we don't arrest people for possession.'"

Why, then, are so many minor offenders in jail? "They went after the cartels and couldn't control that aspect, and I'm not sure they wanted to, because there are two lawsuits against the government over the CIA's involvement with crack and things like that.

"When they couldn't use the drug war to do that," says Kay, "they went down to the level of the street dealer, and they couldn't even control that. They can't even keep it out of prisons. So, they turned and began to attack the normal, average user. He [the average user] goes to work, and you'd never know him [as a user] unless you look at his urine. You'd never know it."

Kay has strong suspicions why legal authorities go after the "normal, average user": "They've gone after that kind of person because now forfeiture comes into the picture," says Kay. "They're seizing billions of dollars each year in other people's property. It is legalized thievery," she says.

"Now it's turned on the sick people because the truth is sitting there with the medical marijuana issue. So, they're going to break us. They have focused now on the lowest rung of the ladder," says Kay, "what they think is the weakest. They couldn't handle the cartels and everything that this drug war is supposed to be handling.

"I see 30 years of the drug war," she says. "I don't see my children any safer. I see an incredible amount of money going down the drain. The education budget is being cut for this drug war. And I see all these people going to prison. Their lives disrupted and the ripple effect: they've got wives, kids, and friends. It's to the point where I'd say one out of three adults have touched the legal system because of this drug war. There's approximately 2.5 million orphans because of the drug wars: 'Turn your parents in and we'll take care of you.' I don't want my children to live in this. In 20 years, they say half the population will be in prison and the other half keeping them."

Kay says she has studied guard brutality in prisons and says that the citizens of the United States, "if they would just open their eyes, would be shocked at what's going on in prisons."

She says the typical American doesn't want to believe it – guard brutality – because he still "carries that old
picture of all the murderers and rapists and bad people in there." Kay says the supposed drug war has changed the demographics within the prison system. "With the current demographics, there's a lot of people like me in there. You."

Kay blames much of the change in these demographics to a system where legal authorities no longer need drugs in evidence to lock a person up. "All they need is someone mad at you to call and say, 'I saw so-and-so with drugs in his house.' That's all they need. And if they drive up and you got a nice car and they want it, you're gone."

Although legislation was recently passed that will give back some rights to the wrongfully accused, Kay says that, up to this point, the burden of proof is upon the accused. After confiscating an accused person's possessions under the forfeiture law, the accused, after clearing charges against her, would then have to pay an attorney fifteen or twenty thousand dollars and it would take several years to regain her possessions, if she regained them at all.

"You can be forced to spend your whole life on a battle to get back something a bunch of thieves took that had no right to it," says Kay. "But it's all written up as legal. They've got the mandatory minimum, so you've got people in prison who are 80 years old. They're getting us in there and a lot of them are dying," says Kay."A lot of AIDS patients are going to prison as marijuana is an accepted medicine in the AIDS community. There's no doubt it stops vomiting, makes you gain weight, and helps you sleep," says Kay. "There's no doubt."

This activist says Joe Hart took no approved medicine for the 14 years he had AIDS. She says he stayed over 200 pounds and remained  healthy with nothing but "copious amounts of marijuana."

When Joe got sick in February, she remembers, he and Kay had been out of medicine for about three months because of a couple of drug busts in the area. Kay reports that Joe started in and out of the hospital and underwent surgeries she claims he didn't need. He simply got sicker and sicker in the hospital, and Kay attributes much of his worsening condition to his inability to smoke marijuana in the hospital.

However, Kay says that when Joe came home, he'd smoke and, at first, wouldn't eat and remained listless.

However, the second day home with the smoke, he began to eat everything in the refrigerator! She says, "It was like his body was trying to take in everything he couldn't get in before." Kay reasons that as Joe lay in the hospital with all the morphine he wanted, had radiation, and vomited, vomited, vomited, that, out of compassion, they should have been able to hand him a joint. After all, it had worked for him for so many years.

Kay says that if the prosecutor in Key West would have had his way in December, Joe Hart would have died in Butler State Prison. "Joe was really behind me [advocating for the humane treatment of prisoners] because he knew he could have died in Butler with the real low level of medical care they give prisoners. [Additionally], we've got 14 affidavits from men who are low-level offenders who've been beaten at the prison work camp – bad check writers, deadbeat dads, and marijuana people.

"They're beating them for having rubber bands in their locker or looking at a guard funny because the guard's in a bad mood. Governor Jeb Bush won't investigate any of these allegations because they say anytime it's the word of a guard against a prisoner, they take the guard's word. We're not put into prison for being liars," contends Kay. "Why would you automatically assume the prisoner is lying?"

What does Kay see for the future? "A movement of the Truth. Somebody cared enough to dig deep and find things that the general public doesn't know. You go out and try and share that information with people," she says.

Kay says that any time you're going to effect change, the government is going to handle the issue like this: "First, they're going to ignore you; five years ago we couldn't get an article in the paper that told our side. Then they're going to mock you; that's the Cheech and Chong and all those references. Then they're going to punish you, and this is where the pain is; it is happening now. And then, step four, you win." Kay sees victory soon.

"I see all the people who are out there striving so hard to change laws that are bad," says Kay. "You can tell a law is bad if that law is in direct and violent conflict with compassion and common sense. It has got to be a bad law.

"If a law tells me that I have to go against God's law, it's a bad law. I am going to choose God's law first! And if I see a man hurting," she says, "and I know a plant's going to help him, and I know God said he put that plant on this Earth for our use, there is no way I can obey a bad law and let that man sit in pain, let that human being suffer when I know right there in my hands is the thing that can help."

For her family, says Kay, "All I want to do is grow my daughter a medicine garden." Not only marijuana, says Kay, but there are other plants the government has made illegal of which they don't know the medical value.Kay believes drug laws are all arbitrary and all they accomplish is a loss of respect by the people toward their government because these laws are unenforceable. "They're unenforceable because you can’t legislate morality," says Kay.

"I don't think there's such a thing as a 'drug free world' because then you've got to include the drugstore drugs and the pharmaceutical drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are pill pushers. They would make natural plants illegal because they can't benefit [financially] from it. These laws seem to be restricting us more and more away from the natural things and the natural laws."

For emphasis, Kay sites the sanctioned use and abuse of Ritlan and Prozac. "They don't care if you're addicted; they just want you addicted to the drug that's going to make them some money. It's all about the money," says Kay.

As stated earlier, those close to Kay call her Grandma Lee. She accounts for the tender moniker "because this is a journey and because I'm away from my children while I do this. It would be too dangerous for me to be with them, and I want my grandchildren, when they read an article or hear something good that I had a part in, to read 'Grandma Lee,' and they're going to know that's me and I'm out there making the world better for them. I love them very much and I want them to know exactly why I'm not home with them."

Kay was drawn to Key West to help Joe Hart. "He was on trial, had a spare room, and he needed help. He went through two busts here. He had a computer he wouldn't touch, but I can do it. It turned out to be the most peaceful year I've had in the longest time. I didn't realize until after his death how much he protected me," says Kay, being very quiet for the first time during the conversation.

"I love Key West. I'm going to do everything I can to stay. I want really bad to keep the club going for Joe. I've got AIDS Help helping me, and I've got all the club patients helping to look for someone who could benefit by me doing their cleaning and their chores and have a spare room throw me in, I'm happy to [continue with the club]."

Kay says Joe has a lawsuit to be filed against the city, and, because Joe left everything to her, she can push that lawsuit. When they arrested him in the spring of 1997, they threw him on the floor, recounts Kay, "put a boot in his neck, a gun to his head, and they called him a 'contaminated faggot.' A hate crime. The cops committed a hate crime on Joe," says Kay. She points out that "Marijuana people are so mellow. Why would you need that much brutality and force every time you bust into one of their homes?"

Kay believes the citizens have found a purpose for marijuana, and regardless if that purpose is spiritual, creative, medical, or recreational, it should be their choice to smoke a joint rather than drink a beer. Why, Kay asks, would the government choose alcohol as the only recreational drug when it's the most violent, aggressive drug there is? "It's beyond me, but that's what they've done," says Kay.

As she looks ahead 20 years, Kay sees her grandchildren just becoming adults, and "they'll have to deal with all this in the worst fashion possible: everybody going to jail and all the rights gone, no music in school, our kids in uniform, and the dogs and the guards. I don't want that for my children! You'd be surprised how many parents and grandparents feel this way," she says.

Does the publication of this article cause Kay to fear for her safety? "Of course, but I don't fear anything anymore. I mean, I do fear, but anything that comes my way I'll be able to handle. If prison comes my way, I can see myself helping inmates. I can see myself growing in a spiritual nature. If I have to, if that's what it's going to come to.

"I can't live my life just in this little box in which the government's trying to put me, a round peg, into a square hole. I'm not fitting it. I don't want to be afraid of it. My quality of life is so much more important than my quantity of life. I can't let fear be the decision-maker.

"I want you to tell them the club will go on as long as I can push it. The lawsuit will go forward as long as I can push it. The judge told the cops to give Joe back his stuff [last] January, and they claim they can't find it. With Joe leaving everything to me I can walk down to that police department now and tell them, 'You give me back my stuff!' Those were Joe's address books, his photos.

"They're stalling and I've been letting them get away with it because Joe's been so sick and my mind is on more urgent things. I've got years and years, and they're going to admit to somebody where that property went, even if it's in a court of law."

Don't mess with Grandma Lee!

For more information about Medical Cannabis Key West or ways in which you can assist Kay Lee in her mission, please telephone Medical Cannabis Key West at (305) 293-1865. You can also visit her personal website at http:// www.zyworld.com/kay~lee/Home.htm or e-mail mrjah@flakeysol.com and request to be placed on her e-mail list.And to Joe Hart: Your mission continues!