GROWING DESPERATE

Woman Turns To Hunger Strike To Get Right To Grow Medical Marijuana.

She wears the look of someone pinned beneath a boulder, a woman exhausted
by pain and frustration.

Why else would 45-year-old Robin Prosser - why would anyone - go on a
hunger strike to get medical help? Why would a devoted single parent of a
teen-age girl force herself to go so long without food - 10 days, as of
Tuesday morning - that answering the telephone leaves her weak and
hospitalization could lie ahead?

The answer is desperation. And the desperation, startlingly, is for pot.
Cannabis. Medical marijuana.

Prosser, a Missoula mom and talented musician, suffers from a lupus-related
immunosuppressive disorder, an illness that for the past 17 years has
caused her chronic pain, heart trouble, muscle spasms, nausea, bone
fractures and migraines. She also has neurological problems similar to
those caused by multiple sclerosis, she says.

Along the way, Prosser has tried nearly every prescribed potion and pill,
including morphine and other painkillers (she's violently allergic to
them), anti-nausea medications (ditto) and a long list of therapies
(nothing works). Finally, on her own, she tried marijuana.

"It made the pain go away," she says, squinting against the incongruously
cheerful sun working its way into her living room. The aura inside
Prosser's Upper Miller Creek home, meticulously tidy in a street of like
houses, is otherwise not unlike a sickroom. "The pain is never completely
gone," Prosser corrects herself. "But with marijuana, it's manageable."
With daily pot use, Prosser says she can compose music, write, take care of
her daughter and live a fairly normal life. Without it, she says, "I'm sunk."

It might seem far-fetched to go on a hunger strike and hope to solve in a
few days what in many respects is an intractable, decades-old legal issue.
The matter of making marijuana available for medical use is mired in
politics, zero-tolerance policies and a federal resolve to keep the drug
illegal. Indeed, federal policy on such matters has recently led to federal
shutdowns of two cannabis buyers' clubs in California widely used by cancer
and AIDS patients to combat pain, nausea and weight loss.

But Prosser, who lost 28 pounds in the first seven days of her fast (she
isn't thin, but "I had some to spare," she jokes), says she felt she had no
other choice. And she won't eat, she says, until she gets some assurance
that using pot won't land her in jail. In the past, she was well enough to
make the long drive to Seattle and buy from the cannabis club there, but
she no longer has the strength, she says. And she wants some public
official to promise not to prosecute her for growing marijuana in her yard,
strictly for her own use.

"I cannot do that," says county Sheriff Doug Chase. "In my position, I
certainly could not legitimize that." If Prosser were to get arrested,
Chase adds, it would be up to the courts to sort out whether she deserves
an exemption or some special treatment.

"It sounds kind of inhumane and callous," Chase says. "But I'm certainly
not in a position to say that I'm not going to enforce the law. It would be
totally inappropriate for me."

Missoula Police Chief Bob Weaver is more blunt. "She'll be busted if she
grows pot and we learn about it. The courts can look at mitigating
circumstances."

Prosser, sitting in a T-shirt and sweat pants sipping juice so she doesn't
get dehydrated and collapse, says she doesn't want to be a criminal. That's
her point. "I don't want to break the law," she says. "But I don't want to
be forced to live and be sick. There has to be some law protecting people
like me."

A Missoula neurologist familiar with her case, Dr. Ethan Russo, agrees.
"Yes," Russo says, "I believe that using cannabis is helpful to her condition."