THE AD THAT KILLED

by Rogier van Bakel

When Peter McWilliams took out an ad, it killed him. Literally.

The ad, an open letter to the movie community, ran in *Daily Variety* in
December 1997. "Where is Hollywood's answer ... to the ten million marijuana
arrests since 1972?" Peter asked. "Where is the 'Gentleman's Agreement' or
'To Kill a Mockingbird' or 'Platoon' dramatizing the insane cruelty of the
War on Drugs?" He also, perhaps unwisely, blasted Drug Enforcement
Administration officials as "arrogant" and "selfrighteous."

It wasn't unfamiliar territory for Peter. In 1993, he'd published a tome
called *Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do < the Absurdity of Consensual
Crimes in Our Free Country* (updated in 1996, and available for free in
digital form at www.mcwilliams.com). The book, which was on the New York
Time bestseller list, documented < and ridiculed < U.S. bureaucrats'
attempts to legislate what people can and cannot see, read, and imbibe.
Peter launched a particularly formidable argument against drug prohibition.

In 1996, when AIDS and cancer entered his life, he became an advocate for
medical marijuana, testifying before the National Academy of Sciences and
doing numerous media interviews. "As a recent cancer, chemotherapy, and
radiation survivor who uses medicinal marijuana to keep down the anti-AIDS
drugs that are keeping me alive," Peter wrote in the Variety ad, "I can
personally attest to marijuana's anti-nausea effect."

Exactly seventeen days after the ad ran, the Government responded the only
way it knows how: with a full-scale raid. Eight DEA agents, guns drawn,
stormed Peter's house in Laurel Canyon, Calif., confiscating his computer,
his backup drives, and various research materials. Peter readily admitted to
growing some marijuana for his own medical use, "in the time-honored
tradition of Washington, Jefferson, and Timothy Leary."

The Feds had no warrant for his arrest at the time of the raid, but they
finally came for him in July 1998. The indictment against Peter stemmed in
large part from the fact that as publisher of Prelude Press, his own
publishing company where he employed eighteen people, Peter had given a book
advance to an author for a book on medical marijuana. That writer, a fellow
medical marijuana patient, used a portion of the advance to grow his own
medicine. The Feds saw Prelude Press as the source of the funds the man had
used to finance his little crop. So they treated Peter as a drug kingpin.

It's an interesting piece of logic. If some Microsoft engineer uses a
portion of his salary to visit a prostitute, can Bill Gates be arrested on
federal pandering charges?

More importantly, did Peter really break the law? Depends on whom you ask.
California *explicitly allows the use of medical marijuana* under
Proposition 215, passed into California constitutional law in 1996. The
Federal Government, however, does not recognize the state's right to adopt
its own drug legislation. So what Peter did was perfectly legal in his own
state; it just didn't sit well with some drugfighting hard-liners three
thousand miles away in Washington D.C., who decided to dispatch an assault
team to an increasingly frail AIDS and cancer patient.

One of the conditions of Peter's bail was a weekly urine test. Were he to
test positive for illicit drugs, he'd return to jail, pending his trial.
Besides, his mother (in her seventies) had put up her house as collateral
for the bond. The Feds could seize her home and evict her if Peter violated
his bail terms. So Peter had to be content with being sick as a dog on most
days < much sicker than he would have been if he'd been allowed to smoke
marijuana, a plant whose medical benefit is well documented. Now frequently
unable to hold down down his medication, Peter grew weaker and became
wheelchair-bound.

Last month, when he was at home, taking a bath, the nausea overcame him once
more. He choked to death on his own vomit. He was 50 years old. He died
because the Government wouldn't let him have a toke. Viewed another way, he
died because he had the temerity to run that ad.

The prosecutors commented they were "saddened" by Peter's death.

No doubt, so are the smart, well-meaning creatives on Madison Avenue who
lend their talents to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, propagating a
War on Drugs that is making more casualties by the day.

(c) 2000 Crain Communications and Rogier van Bakel
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