DEA RAIDS PRELUDE PRESS OVER POT BOOK

At 6:30 a.m. on December 17, nine armed DEA agents raided the home of
Prelude Press publisher Peter McWilliams, on apparent suspicion that he was
cultivating or dealing drugs. Serving him a warrant without affidavit,
agents placed him in handcuffs, and for three hours searched his house.
Finding no drugs, they left the premises with his computer and two hard
drives, as well as eight bags of personal papers. According to McWilliams,
the DEA was interested in material he was compiling for a book entitled An
AIDs-Cancer Patient Explores Medical Marijuana.

From McWilliams' home, the DEA agents went to the Santa Monica offices of
Prelude Press, publisher of the 1996 bestseller Hypericum (St. John's Wort)
& Depression, where they spent two hours searching, coming away, finally,
with only three credit-card statements. Prelude marketing and publicity
manager Ed Haisha said, "It was a complete violation of human rights. They
had no idea what they were looking for, and were just snooping."

Prelude Press, which publishes books primarily on self-improvement, has
been in operation since 1981, and has a total of 15 titles on its list.
Hypericum (St. John's Wort) & Depression (1996) sold more than 200,000
copies. Until now, the press has published no books on marijuana; the
closest it has come is a book by McWilliams called Ain't Nobody's Business
If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes, a libertarian treatise that
mentions McWilliams's belief that medical marijuana should be legalized.

The confrontation with the DEA began last July when the Bel Air mansion of
Todd McCormick, a Prelude author working on a book on medical marijuana,
was raided and he was arrested.

So far, the DEA has returned McWilliams's computer, after the ACLU
complained. The hard drives, which contain the data for McWilliams's book,
have yet to be returned.

Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly.