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Judge Adjourns Pot Exile’s Life and Death Hearing
By Hempology | July 21, 2002
From the Coast Reporter, July 20th, 2002
By Jany Seyd
U.S. pot exile Steve Kubby says he’ll have to keep buying marijuana on the black market to stay alive after B.C. Supreme Court adjourned his request for a “temporary exemption” to drug laws until next month.
Kubby had asked to appear before a judge in B.C. Supreme Court in Chilliwack to seek an exemption from drug charges laid after police found marijuana plants at his Sechelt home.
Kubby also wants to ask the judge to order police to hand back pot seized by Sechelt RCMP on “life and death” medical grounds.
“I’m hoping that a judge will say that under the Charter of Rights, we have the right when there’s clearly a medical need to do what we were doing without being treated like criminals,” Kubby told the Coast Reporter.
But federal prosecutors working on the case told the judge they weren’t ready to go ahead with arguments in court on July 15.
Kubby called adjournment of his case disappointing. “What part of life and death do they not understand?” he said.
Kubby, who suffers from adrenal cancer, says smoking pot is the only thing that protects him from heart attacks and strokes which result when his cancer cells start producing extra adrenaline.
Steve and Michele Kubby, high-profile medicinal pot activists from California, moved to the Sunshine Coast last year with their children ages six and two.
Steve Kubby was arrested on an immigration warrant in April after coming to the attention of Sechelt RCMP in media reports about medicinal marijuana.
U.S. officials want Steve Kubby to serve a four-month jail sentence for a California conviction for possessing a trace amount of hallucinogenic mushroom.
The Kubby’s say that isn’t possible because Kubby wouldn’t be allowed access to the marijuana they say is keeping him alive.
Following an immigration hearing on the Lower mainland, the couple returned to the Coast and applied for political refugee status as members of a persecuted social group.
The Kubby issued a writ to the B.C. Supreme Court earlier this month after hearing that an applicant was successful in a similar case that came before the B.C. Supreme Court at the end of June.
The writ says “the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act fails to adequately exempt persons from criminal liability who possess or produce marijuana for personal medical use.”
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