Marianne
New Member
She has cerebral palsy, four kids and loads of debt. Meet the unofficial spokeswoman for marijuana legalization
Hearing Room No. 7, in the basement of the Missouri Capitol, is beige. The walls, the floors, even most of the suits worn by the state representatives in the front of the room are beige. Then comes Jacqueline Patterson.
She wears a pink blazer, fishnet stockings and a pleated black skirt that looks more like a slip. Pink stripes line her hair. Somebody in the front of the room calls her name. She hobbles up to a microphone at a beige desk.
"My name is, umm. My name is, umm, Jacqueline Patterson. I am, ahhh-umm, from Kansas City, Missouri. I have a severe st-st-stutter."
So far, the representatives at this early morning hearing in April have looked uninterested by the parade of oddballs. A severely obese guy came up to the microphone in a special wheelchair that looked to be made out of roll bars and ATV tires. Some kid who sounded stoned babbled about his sick uncle. A Navy vet strung together unrelated sentences. These speakers were supposed to convince the representatives that marijuana is medicine. A couple of reps started reading the paper. One munched on an egg sandwich. Another went outside to take a call.
Now, every one of them has looked up to see 27-year-old Patterson struggle to speak.
"I came here today to ummmm, to ummm, to ummm, to ask you to put yourself in my shoes," she says, reading from a speech scribbled the day before in a spiral notebook. She asks the representatives to imagine growing up with cerebral palsy and being made fun of for having a limp, a right hand that doesn't work and a stutter. Even without the stutter, her voice sounds on the verge of tears or panic. Her nervousness aggravates the stutter.
She stops for a moment. She often gets hung up on words that begin with vowels. They get stuck in the back of her throat, and her face contorts, as though she has just tasted something awful. The state reps gawk as she struggles to expel a one-letter word.
"I -- I -- I smoked cannabis for the first time when I was 14," she says. "For the first time, my muscles were not tense. And words slid from my mouth, from gggghhh -- from me at a fluid pace instead of sssss-stuck on my tongue like a g-ghh -- like a train wreck."
Pot was the only thing that made her feel normal. But getting it, she says, meant hanging out with seedy people she didn't trust. She felt like a criminal.
Patterson takes them through the horrific details of her adult life. The rape. The time she broke her neck. Her husband's suicide. She's now a widowed mother of four. The politicians have put down their newspapers. The one with the breakfast sandwich listens intently. A woman in the gallery cries quietly.
Then things turn. Patterson launches into a tangent about her broken neck and how doctors had to drill holes in her skull. She follows that with a diatribe about the inconsistent quality of cannabis. At least a couple of the reps look disgusted as she describes the time she begged a friend to let her smoke a bowl with him while she was eight months pregnant.
She's lost all of them.
Even the committee chairman, Rep. Wayne Cooper, a physician from Camdenton who has sounded pro-medical marijuana all day, looks aghast. When Patterson finishes, Cooper quickly dismisses her by saying: "OK, thank you."
Patterson comes back to join her oldest son, 9-year-old Tristan, in the second row. "Oh," she says, "that didn't go so well."
The hearing on House Bill 1831, which would legalize medical marijuana in Missouri, ends with no discussion from the representatives.
The hearing has made it clear that those who would benefit most from legalized pot aren't the best at speaking to conservative lawmakers. They're the fringe of society, suffering from chronic pain or post-traumatic stress. They're weakened cancer or AIDS patients, strengthened by pot's ability to make them hungry. They're not the type who can connect with the beige representatives. If the pro-marijuana cause is to get a legitimate debate in Missouri, those who claim to smoke weed for their health need a lot of polishing.
After the hearing, Patterson takes her son to the Capitol rotunda for a tour. School kids on field trips turn to stare at her as she limps up five flights of stairs. She can't get her mind off the idea that she failed.
"I hate my speech so much," she says near the top of the Capitol. "I drrr- ... I dr- ... I drove my husband to suicide, you know."
Patterson remembers the night she first smoked weed the way others remember the loss of their virginity. She was 14 and living in Texas, where her mom had moved from Kansas City after divorcing her father. A friend named Tim asked if she wanted to go for a walk in the woods. Tim was four years older. It was late, maybe 10 or so. He pulled out a small metal pipe.
"Hey, do you want to smoke this?" he asked.
"All right," she quickly agreed.
Afterward, they sprawled out in a clearing to gaze up at the sky. It was a cool summer night. At some point in the conversation, she realized how easy the words were coming out. And her muscles, which normally felt cramped and pained, were loose. She'd never felt so comfortable with herself. "It was a release from the disease and from the emotional trauma," she recalls.
Her parents had divorced when Patterson was young, and she and her mother had moved around a lot. That meant Patterson didn't know many people to get high with. She did it only a few times as a teenager. She quit when the babies came.
The first was Tristan, whose father she met at a haunted house when she was in high school. She moved out of her mother's place, and not long after she graduated high school, her roommate raped her. She later gave birth to a boy she put up for adoption. ( The rapist, Michael Scott Parker, is serving a 15-year sentence. ) She had a short-lived marriage that produced a daughter, Jane, who's now 6.
In 1998, she enrolled at Northern Iowa Area Community College and later transferred to the University of Northern Iowa. Misfortune followed her there, too, when she flipped her Geo Tracker and broke her neck. She spent a week and a half in the hospital, much of it with metal screws drilled into her head to help heal her rebuilt spine.
In 2000, she was living with her two kids in a dorm when her future husband knocked on the door. There was something about Travis Patterson that made her think she knew him already, and she invited him in. It took a few minutes before she realized he was there to sell her magazines. He asked her out to a movie. She was a divorced mother of two who couldn't afford a baby-sitter, so no, she said, she wouldn't be going out to a movie. He came back that night with a DVD of The Green Mile.
They shared stories of rough childhoods. Her stories were full of alienation, kids making fun of her stutter. His were about abuses that came back in recurring dreams. To forget his childhood, Travis smoked pot. So they shared that, too.
The couple moved to Kansas City in 2001, and Travis got a construction job. They had two kids: Ulysses, who's now 4, and Fiona, 2. Jacqueline took classes at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and eventually her father let them stay in the two-story Grandview house where her family had lived before her parents' divorce.
At UMKC, Patterson met Elise Max, a fellow student and an active proponent of legalizing pot.
The summer after high school, Max was busted with two roaches, and the judge sent her to rehab with hardcore addicts. She says the experience convinced her that pot users shouldn't be punished alongside hardened criminals. So she founded a local chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Once Max got involved in the movement, she realized that few marijuana users participate in marches or rallies for fear of being stigmatized as pot smokers.
"It's just like when people talked about the abolition of slavery," says Max, who graduated this spring from UMKC. "It was taboo then, just like it's taboo now to talk about legalizing marijuana."
After Max got her involved, Patterson discovered a talent that made her a celebrity in the pro-pot movement. Many activists who claim that marijuana benefits them medically can't easily prove the point, but Patterson can do it by puffing on a joint and speaking more clearly as she gets high.
That's evident one afternoon at the small south Kansas City home that she rents from her brother. Patterson pulls a glass bowl out of a desk in the living room. She holds it deftly in her weakened right hand, her twisted index finger capping a hole in the side of the pipe. She uses her left hand to light it and takes her finger off the carburetor. She inhales deeply, holding in the smoke for a while. Her two oldest children are at school, her second-youngest is napping and the little one is eating a biscuit in a highchair.
After a couple of hits, the stutter nearly disappears. "People who have disabilities are ignored," she says. "The civil rights movement is not over."
When Patterson first got involved, there wasn't much of a pro-pot lobby in Missouri. Lawmakers with little influence in Jefferson City had introduced bills that quickly died without the first step of a committee hearing.
In 2004, however, the movement got a boost when two pro-pot city ordinances appeared on the ballot in Columbia. The first proposed allowing those who benefit medically from marijuana to possess up to 35 grams, about 20 joints. The second stripped police of the power to arrest somebody for that same amount; instead, those caught with small amounts would get a ticket similar to an open-container violation and face no jail time, just a fine and community service. The measures passed resoundingly.
In a practical sense, they haven't had much effect. Nobody has used the medical marijuana defense, says Capt. Mike Martin of the Columbia Police Department. The changes have simply reduced most possession charges to nothing more than a beer ticket.
The victory in Columbia motivated the pro-pot lobby to try for a statewide change. And they've picked up some unlikely allies, potentially leading to a legitimate statewide debate about medical marijuana.
Earlier this year, state Rep. Tom Villa of St. Louis agreed to sponsor House Bill 1831 -- the proposed law for which Patterson testified. It would have allowed patients who have a doctor's prescription for pot to receive a special license from the state to grow up to three marijuana plants and possess up to 3 ounces of processed weed. Villa, who works at his family's business distributing light bulbs, is anything but a pothead. When asked whether he partakes, he points to his round belly and then to his bald head. "Do I look like I do?" he quips. "I'm 61. I'm pretty boring, I guess. I have no experience with it at all."
It was a sense of compassion that moved him to sponsor the legislation, Villa says. Besides, Villa is a former majority whip and has served eight terms as a Democrat from liberal south St. Louis, so he doesn't fear conservatives attacking him for a pro-pot stance.
Wayne Cooper, the chair of the House's Health Care Policy Committee, seemed receptive to the medical marijuana bill during the hearing in April. He's a Republican and a former Christian missionary to the Philippines -- not exactly the type to favor medical marijuana. But advocates often find allies among physicians, who know that weed is beneficial to glaucoma and cancer patients.
Cooper was alone in voicing his support during the April hearing. Most of the other 10 representatives looked as disinterested as Rep. Kathy Chinn, a 52-year-old pork farmer from Clarence. Chinn says she's against legalizing any drug. "I thought she had things she needed to express," Chinn said when the Pitch asked what she thought of Patterson's testimony. "I do not judge her. That is not what I do."
Cooper had scheduled the hearing with only two weeks left in the legislative session, meaning there wasn't enough time for the bill to get a full vote from the House. But getting a hearing is something, Villa says. "There is some light at the end of the tunnel," he says. "Just not this year."
This summer, proponents will hone the bill's language in hopes that the committee might send it on to the House for debate.
And a debate over medical marijuana on the House floor of a state controlled by conservatives would get the movement some needed attention, says Dan Viets, a 54-year-old lawyer from Columbia. Viets has spent 20 years defending kids busted with small amounts of dope and is one of the state's most active pro-pot lobbyists. It's unlikely that Missouri will soon join the other 12 states with some form of medical marijuana law, but Viets hopes to at least send a message. "Why in the world would we not trust our doctors with marijuana when we trust them with morphine, codeine and amphetamines?" he says.
Patterson has already experienced what it's like to smoke medical marijuana legally. In April, while traveling to California for a conference put on by Patients Out of Time, she visited the office of a Bay Area doctor who's known for prescribing cannabis. She smoked a joint with him in his office. She says the doctor estimated that her speech improved by 75 percent.
Even more than helping to stop the stutter, pot does something else: It helps her forget.
Tension between Jacqueline and Travis Patterson started building during a long cold spell back in December 2004. Travis was working construction, but the severe cold had kept his job site closed from late November. Jacqueline was six months pregnant with their fourth child, and the bills weren't getting paid.
On Christmas, the kids came downstairs to find a bunch of poorly wrapped gifts under the tree. There was one for Jacqueline: gold butterfly earrings with amethyst and peridot stones. Jacqueline knew Travis had spent his last check on the presents. It was sweet, but it was also the last of their money.
A couple of weeks passed before the fight broke out. Patterson accused her husband of squandering money. Another couple was staying with them at the time, so they tried to keep their shouts down to keep their friends from hearing the argument. At some point, Jacqueline took off her wedding ring and threw it at Travis. He answered by making fun of her speech, something he hadn't done before.
"He stuttered the way I do," Patterson recalls. "As soon as the words left his mouth, he looked like, 'I can't believe I just said that.'"
She didn't talk to him the rest of that night or the next morning. By then, the cold weather was over, and he went to work. When he came home that night, Patterson was cooking a boxed dinner, a Skillet Sensation, with green beans on the side. Travis tried to apologize, but she pushed him away. "It was just the sweetest apology in the world, but I was too mad to accept it."
After dinner, Travis approached her again. She was in the kitchen struggling to take off a necklace. She's stubborn about that sort of thing. It'll take her 10 minutes to screw the cap on her youngest child's bottle, but she keeps turning until she gets it on. As Travis tried to help with the necklace, Patterson hit him with stinging words. "I would rather be raped again, a thousand times over, than get help from you."
Travis went into the basement, where their friends were staying. One of them was packing a bowl of weed and offered some to Travis. Instead, he went upstairs and locked himself in the bedroom. Jacqueline stayed downstairs that night.
Travis didn't come down the next morning. When Jacqueline went upstairs, she could hear a fan going inside the room, which was strange, because he hated that fan. It was around 7:30 on January 7, 2005. Jacqueline tried the door and found it locked. So she crawled out the bathroom window and shimmied along the roof outside.
She could see him from the window. "The first thing I thought was, When did he get so good at doing costume makeup?"
His face was blue. His purple tongue dangled from his mouth. He had taken off his wedding ring, placed it on a bedside table and used a belt to hang himself from the frame around the bathroom door.
Jacqueline knew his upbringing had been tragic, but she says there's no question that she was responsible for his suicide. "If I had gone to him that night and taken his apology, he wouldn't have done it," she says. "You know, you only find the other half of you once. It might be a fucked-up other half, but I can still feel the hole from where he's not attached to me anymore."
Later on, she kept thinking about how their friends had asked Travis to smoke a bowl with him. If he had stayed downstairs, if he had gotten high, perhaps he would have calmed down.
It's not exactly an argument that would convince conservative lawmakers to legalize pot. But it was Patterson's motivation to get serious about the cause.
George McMahon plops himself down on the small stone wall that outlines the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He folds a rolling paper in half, takes a pill bottle out of his pocket and pours some weed across the crease. As he runs his tongue lengthwise along the joint, a wedding party strolls past. Bride, groom, bridesmaids, dad, mom. They all stare, baffled.
"Oops," he says, giggling as he stuffs the pill bottle back in his pants. He decides that he ought to go someplace less conspicuous. So he walks across Oak Street and sits on the wall of Southmoreland Park, a few yards away from the wedding party.
His reason for being so brash: Sitting on the wall next to him is a tin canister that looks like a large can of tomatoes. Once a month, the federal government sends him a canister stuffed with 300 joints, along with directions that he should smoke 10 of them a day. He has used the can to prove to cops that he can smoke legally.
In drug circles, McMahon -- a 55-year-old former ditch digger -- is a living legend. He's one of five Americans who receive dope directly from the government. He takes part in a little-known Food and Drug Administration program that started in 1978 but was discontinued in 1992; those already enrolled were allowed to continue. McMahon credits the government-grown cannabis with helping him endure the chronic pain caused by a genetic degenerative disease.
McMahon has come to Kansas City from his home in Iowa for this May 6 rally, where he'll give a speech in front of about 200 people gathered on the lawn of Southmoreland Park. Headlining the event is Patterson.
Patterson talked him into coming by promising him gas money, but a week ago, she called to tell him she was broke and couldn't come up with it. McMahon drove down anyway.
Patterson is near financial disaster. Her first husband sends her child support; the government sends her food stamps and a $900 disability check. But she owes her brother $500 in back rent. The phone company recently cut off her service. She can't afford to register her van. Even worse, she knows that at any moment, the government could discover her role in these pro-pot activities and take away her benefits.
"Can you believe a rapist or a child molester can get out of jail and get benefits, but if they find me with pot, they will take my benefits away?" she asks. But she believes that her dead husband is watching over her. "I'm pretty sure Travis is going to keep me safe."
Besides, the rally is beginning, and thinking about finances is a downer. "Hey, that's not sssss-something to worry about today," she says, standing near tables full of pamphlets promoting legalization. She takes the black wrapper off a peanut-butter-flavored marijuana candy and plops it on her tongue.
"Please get wise and legalize!" the event's master of ceremonies says over the PA system. He's wearing an Uncle Sam hat, a blue blazer with white stars, and shorts and boots that look like they've been stolen from a pro wrestler. He gives McMahon a quick introduction. "McMahon, come fill some time."
As a speaker, McMahon rambles. "If humans don't have some of the chemicals that are in cannabis in their body, guess what? They die," he says. Without pausing, he launches into a monologue on women being more affected by weed because they have babies. As he speaks, some people lounging on blankets share sandwiches they've grilled on a camp stove. A few people collect stickers from the tables. Patterson and her kids sit under a maple tree and dip bread into a jar of peanut butter. Few in the audience clap when McMahon finishes.
Patterson is a reluctant public speaker, and the crowd's reaction to the infamous McMahon makes her even more nervous. A punk band takes over to warm up for her. She remembers her speech before the Missouri House committee. "I did horribly bad. I really bombed," she says, the words flowing easily now that she's stoned.
At 4:20 p.m. -- the international time for potheads to light up -- Uncle Sam introduces the headliner. "Jacqueline, get up here," he says to sparse clapping.
Patterson wears a pair of cowboy boots that she inherited from a grandmother. She made her skirt from a pair of Travis' jeans that she cut up and paired with frilly pink material. Atop her blond, pink-striped hair is a crown of plastic pot leaves.
She begins by reading from the spiral notebook. "'The way we treat you is criminal.' That is the words uttered to me by aaaaa -- by aaaa - -- by a committee member during a hearing for House Bill 1831." The microphone is too tall for Patterson to read her speech while also stretching up to speak.
She abandons the notebook. Unlike her stutter-filled diatribe in the Capitol basement, Patterson ad-libs with clarity. She punches words for emphasis. Soon, she has the crowd cheering with her.
She promises to get medical marijuana legalized.
"If we don't do it this year, we will do it next year!" she screams into the microphone. The crowd reacts with loud approval. "We need you guys to get fucking involved!"
"Yeah, Jacqueline!" somebody yells.
Uncle Sam introduces the next band. Patterson limps to the back of the crowd to collect her kids. Along the way, she passes a lonely-looking woman seated at a folding table. In front of her is a stack of unsigned voter-registration cards.
Newskhawk: Happykid - 420 Magazine
Author: Eric Barton
Source: Pitch, The (Kansas City, MO)
Copyright: 2006 New Times, Inc.
Contact: feedback@pitch.com
Website: The Pitch
Hearing Room No. 7, in the basement of the Missouri Capitol, is beige. The walls, the floors, even most of the suits worn by the state representatives in the front of the room are beige. Then comes Jacqueline Patterson.
She wears a pink blazer, fishnet stockings and a pleated black skirt that looks more like a slip. Pink stripes line her hair. Somebody in the front of the room calls her name. She hobbles up to a microphone at a beige desk.
"My name is, umm. My name is, umm, Jacqueline Patterson. I am, ahhh-umm, from Kansas City, Missouri. I have a severe st-st-stutter."
So far, the representatives at this early morning hearing in April have looked uninterested by the parade of oddballs. A severely obese guy came up to the microphone in a special wheelchair that looked to be made out of roll bars and ATV tires. Some kid who sounded stoned babbled about his sick uncle. A Navy vet strung together unrelated sentences. These speakers were supposed to convince the representatives that marijuana is medicine. A couple of reps started reading the paper. One munched on an egg sandwich. Another went outside to take a call.
Now, every one of them has looked up to see 27-year-old Patterson struggle to speak.
"I came here today to ummmm, to ummm, to ummm, to ask you to put yourself in my shoes," she says, reading from a speech scribbled the day before in a spiral notebook. She asks the representatives to imagine growing up with cerebral palsy and being made fun of for having a limp, a right hand that doesn't work and a stutter. Even without the stutter, her voice sounds on the verge of tears or panic. Her nervousness aggravates the stutter.
She stops for a moment. She often gets hung up on words that begin with vowels. They get stuck in the back of her throat, and her face contorts, as though she has just tasted something awful. The state reps gawk as she struggles to expel a one-letter word.
"I -- I -- I smoked cannabis for the first time when I was 14," she says. "For the first time, my muscles were not tense. And words slid from my mouth, from gggghhh -- from me at a fluid pace instead of sssss-stuck on my tongue like a g-ghh -- like a train wreck."
Pot was the only thing that made her feel normal. But getting it, she says, meant hanging out with seedy people she didn't trust. She felt like a criminal.
Patterson takes them through the horrific details of her adult life. The rape. The time she broke her neck. Her husband's suicide. She's now a widowed mother of four. The politicians have put down their newspapers. The one with the breakfast sandwich listens intently. A woman in the gallery cries quietly.
Then things turn. Patterson launches into a tangent about her broken neck and how doctors had to drill holes in her skull. She follows that with a diatribe about the inconsistent quality of cannabis. At least a couple of the reps look disgusted as she describes the time she begged a friend to let her smoke a bowl with him while she was eight months pregnant.
She's lost all of them.
Even the committee chairman, Rep. Wayne Cooper, a physician from Camdenton who has sounded pro-medical marijuana all day, looks aghast. When Patterson finishes, Cooper quickly dismisses her by saying: "OK, thank you."
Patterson comes back to join her oldest son, 9-year-old Tristan, in the second row. "Oh," she says, "that didn't go so well."
The hearing on House Bill 1831, which would legalize medical marijuana in Missouri, ends with no discussion from the representatives.
The hearing has made it clear that those who would benefit most from legalized pot aren't the best at speaking to conservative lawmakers. They're the fringe of society, suffering from chronic pain or post-traumatic stress. They're weakened cancer or AIDS patients, strengthened by pot's ability to make them hungry. They're not the type who can connect with the beige representatives. If the pro-marijuana cause is to get a legitimate debate in Missouri, those who claim to smoke weed for their health need a lot of polishing.
After the hearing, Patterson takes her son to the Capitol rotunda for a tour. School kids on field trips turn to stare at her as she limps up five flights of stairs. She can't get her mind off the idea that she failed.
"I hate my speech so much," she says near the top of the Capitol. "I drrr- ... I dr- ... I drove my husband to suicide, you know."
Patterson remembers the night she first smoked weed the way others remember the loss of their virginity. She was 14 and living in Texas, where her mom had moved from Kansas City after divorcing her father. A friend named Tim asked if she wanted to go for a walk in the woods. Tim was four years older. It was late, maybe 10 or so. He pulled out a small metal pipe.
"Hey, do you want to smoke this?" he asked.
"All right," she quickly agreed.
Afterward, they sprawled out in a clearing to gaze up at the sky. It was a cool summer night. At some point in the conversation, she realized how easy the words were coming out. And her muscles, which normally felt cramped and pained, were loose. She'd never felt so comfortable with herself. "It was a release from the disease and from the emotional trauma," she recalls.
Her parents had divorced when Patterson was young, and she and her mother had moved around a lot. That meant Patterson didn't know many people to get high with. She did it only a few times as a teenager. She quit when the babies came.
The first was Tristan, whose father she met at a haunted house when she was in high school. She moved out of her mother's place, and not long after she graduated high school, her roommate raped her. She later gave birth to a boy she put up for adoption. ( The rapist, Michael Scott Parker, is serving a 15-year sentence. ) She had a short-lived marriage that produced a daughter, Jane, who's now 6.
In 1998, she enrolled at Northern Iowa Area Community College and later transferred to the University of Northern Iowa. Misfortune followed her there, too, when she flipped her Geo Tracker and broke her neck. She spent a week and a half in the hospital, much of it with metal screws drilled into her head to help heal her rebuilt spine.
In 2000, she was living with her two kids in a dorm when her future husband knocked on the door. There was something about Travis Patterson that made her think she knew him already, and she invited him in. It took a few minutes before she realized he was there to sell her magazines. He asked her out to a movie. She was a divorced mother of two who couldn't afford a baby-sitter, so no, she said, she wouldn't be going out to a movie. He came back that night with a DVD of The Green Mile.
They shared stories of rough childhoods. Her stories were full of alienation, kids making fun of her stutter. His were about abuses that came back in recurring dreams. To forget his childhood, Travis smoked pot. So they shared that, too.
The couple moved to Kansas City in 2001, and Travis got a construction job. They had two kids: Ulysses, who's now 4, and Fiona, 2. Jacqueline took classes at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and eventually her father let them stay in the two-story Grandview house where her family had lived before her parents' divorce.
At UMKC, Patterson met Elise Max, a fellow student and an active proponent of legalizing pot.
The summer after high school, Max was busted with two roaches, and the judge sent her to rehab with hardcore addicts. She says the experience convinced her that pot users shouldn't be punished alongside hardened criminals. So she founded a local chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Once Max got involved in the movement, she realized that few marijuana users participate in marches or rallies for fear of being stigmatized as pot smokers.
"It's just like when people talked about the abolition of slavery," says Max, who graduated this spring from UMKC. "It was taboo then, just like it's taboo now to talk about legalizing marijuana."
After Max got her involved, Patterson discovered a talent that made her a celebrity in the pro-pot movement. Many activists who claim that marijuana benefits them medically can't easily prove the point, but Patterson can do it by puffing on a joint and speaking more clearly as she gets high.
That's evident one afternoon at the small south Kansas City home that she rents from her brother. Patterson pulls a glass bowl out of a desk in the living room. She holds it deftly in her weakened right hand, her twisted index finger capping a hole in the side of the pipe. She uses her left hand to light it and takes her finger off the carburetor. She inhales deeply, holding in the smoke for a while. Her two oldest children are at school, her second-youngest is napping and the little one is eating a biscuit in a highchair.
After a couple of hits, the stutter nearly disappears. "People who have disabilities are ignored," she says. "The civil rights movement is not over."
When Patterson first got involved, there wasn't much of a pro-pot lobby in Missouri. Lawmakers with little influence in Jefferson City had introduced bills that quickly died without the first step of a committee hearing.
In 2004, however, the movement got a boost when two pro-pot city ordinances appeared on the ballot in Columbia. The first proposed allowing those who benefit medically from marijuana to possess up to 35 grams, about 20 joints. The second stripped police of the power to arrest somebody for that same amount; instead, those caught with small amounts would get a ticket similar to an open-container violation and face no jail time, just a fine and community service. The measures passed resoundingly.
In a practical sense, they haven't had much effect. Nobody has used the medical marijuana defense, says Capt. Mike Martin of the Columbia Police Department. The changes have simply reduced most possession charges to nothing more than a beer ticket.
The victory in Columbia motivated the pro-pot lobby to try for a statewide change. And they've picked up some unlikely allies, potentially leading to a legitimate statewide debate about medical marijuana.
Earlier this year, state Rep. Tom Villa of St. Louis agreed to sponsor House Bill 1831 -- the proposed law for which Patterson testified. It would have allowed patients who have a doctor's prescription for pot to receive a special license from the state to grow up to three marijuana plants and possess up to 3 ounces of processed weed. Villa, who works at his family's business distributing light bulbs, is anything but a pothead. When asked whether he partakes, he points to his round belly and then to his bald head. "Do I look like I do?" he quips. "I'm 61. I'm pretty boring, I guess. I have no experience with it at all."
It was a sense of compassion that moved him to sponsor the legislation, Villa says. Besides, Villa is a former majority whip and has served eight terms as a Democrat from liberal south St. Louis, so he doesn't fear conservatives attacking him for a pro-pot stance.
Wayne Cooper, the chair of the House's Health Care Policy Committee, seemed receptive to the medical marijuana bill during the hearing in April. He's a Republican and a former Christian missionary to the Philippines -- not exactly the type to favor medical marijuana. But advocates often find allies among physicians, who know that weed is beneficial to glaucoma and cancer patients.
Cooper was alone in voicing his support during the April hearing. Most of the other 10 representatives looked as disinterested as Rep. Kathy Chinn, a 52-year-old pork farmer from Clarence. Chinn says she's against legalizing any drug. "I thought she had things she needed to express," Chinn said when the Pitch asked what she thought of Patterson's testimony. "I do not judge her. That is not what I do."
Cooper had scheduled the hearing with only two weeks left in the legislative session, meaning there wasn't enough time for the bill to get a full vote from the House. But getting a hearing is something, Villa says. "There is some light at the end of the tunnel," he says. "Just not this year."
This summer, proponents will hone the bill's language in hopes that the committee might send it on to the House for debate.
And a debate over medical marijuana on the House floor of a state controlled by conservatives would get the movement some needed attention, says Dan Viets, a 54-year-old lawyer from Columbia. Viets has spent 20 years defending kids busted with small amounts of dope and is one of the state's most active pro-pot lobbyists. It's unlikely that Missouri will soon join the other 12 states with some form of medical marijuana law, but Viets hopes to at least send a message. "Why in the world would we not trust our doctors with marijuana when we trust them with morphine, codeine and amphetamines?" he says.
Patterson has already experienced what it's like to smoke medical marijuana legally. In April, while traveling to California for a conference put on by Patients Out of Time, she visited the office of a Bay Area doctor who's known for prescribing cannabis. She smoked a joint with him in his office. She says the doctor estimated that her speech improved by 75 percent.
Even more than helping to stop the stutter, pot does something else: It helps her forget.
Tension between Jacqueline and Travis Patterson started building during a long cold spell back in December 2004. Travis was working construction, but the severe cold had kept his job site closed from late November. Jacqueline was six months pregnant with their fourth child, and the bills weren't getting paid.
On Christmas, the kids came downstairs to find a bunch of poorly wrapped gifts under the tree. There was one for Jacqueline: gold butterfly earrings with amethyst and peridot stones. Jacqueline knew Travis had spent his last check on the presents. It was sweet, but it was also the last of their money.
A couple of weeks passed before the fight broke out. Patterson accused her husband of squandering money. Another couple was staying with them at the time, so they tried to keep their shouts down to keep their friends from hearing the argument. At some point, Jacqueline took off her wedding ring and threw it at Travis. He answered by making fun of her speech, something he hadn't done before.
"He stuttered the way I do," Patterson recalls. "As soon as the words left his mouth, he looked like, 'I can't believe I just said that.'"
She didn't talk to him the rest of that night or the next morning. By then, the cold weather was over, and he went to work. When he came home that night, Patterson was cooking a boxed dinner, a Skillet Sensation, with green beans on the side. Travis tried to apologize, but she pushed him away. "It was just the sweetest apology in the world, but I was too mad to accept it."
After dinner, Travis approached her again. She was in the kitchen struggling to take off a necklace. She's stubborn about that sort of thing. It'll take her 10 minutes to screw the cap on her youngest child's bottle, but she keeps turning until she gets it on. As Travis tried to help with the necklace, Patterson hit him with stinging words. "I would rather be raped again, a thousand times over, than get help from you."
Travis went into the basement, where their friends were staying. One of them was packing a bowl of weed and offered some to Travis. Instead, he went upstairs and locked himself in the bedroom. Jacqueline stayed downstairs that night.
Travis didn't come down the next morning. When Jacqueline went upstairs, she could hear a fan going inside the room, which was strange, because he hated that fan. It was around 7:30 on January 7, 2005. Jacqueline tried the door and found it locked. So she crawled out the bathroom window and shimmied along the roof outside.
She could see him from the window. "The first thing I thought was, When did he get so good at doing costume makeup?"
His face was blue. His purple tongue dangled from his mouth. He had taken off his wedding ring, placed it on a bedside table and used a belt to hang himself from the frame around the bathroom door.
Jacqueline knew his upbringing had been tragic, but she says there's no question that she was responsible for his suicide. "If I had gone to him that night and taken his apology, he wouldn't have done it," she says. "You know, you only find the other half of you once. It might be a fucked-up other half, but I can still feel the hole from where he's not attached to me anymore."
Later on, she kept thinking about how their friends had asked Travis to smoke a bowl with him. If he had stayed downstairs, if he had gotten high, perhaps he would have calmed down.
It's not exactly an argument that would convince conservative lawmakers to legalize pot. But it was Patterson's motivation to get serious about the cause.
George McMahon plops himself down on the small stone wall that outlines the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He folds a rolling paper in half, takes a pill bottle out of his pocket and pours some weed across the crease. As he runs his tongue lengthwise along the joint, a wedding party strolls past. Bride, groom, bridesmaids, dad, mom. They all stare, baffled.
"Oops," he says, giggling as he stuffs the pill bottle back in his pants. He decides that he ought to go someplace less conspicuous. So he walks across Oak Street and sits on the wall of Southmoreland Park, a few yards away from the wedding party.
His reason for being so brash: Sitting on the wall next to him is a tin canister that looks like a large can of tomatoes. Once a month, the federal government sends him a canister stuffed with 300 joints, along with directions that he should smoke 10 of them a day. He has used the can to prove to cops that he can smoke legally.
In drug circles, McMahon -- a 55-year-old former ditch digger -- is a living legend. He's one of five Americans who receive dope directly from the government. He takes part in a little-known Food and Drug Administration program that started in 1978 but was discontinued in 1992; those already enrolled were allowed to continue. McMahon credits the government-grown cannabis with helping him endure the chronic pain caused by a genetic degenerative disease.
McMahon has come to Kansas City from his home in Iowa for this May 6 rally, where he'll give a speech in front of about 200 people gathered on the lawn of Southmoreland Park. Headlining the event is Patterson.
Patterson talked him into coming by promising him gas money, but a week ago, she called to tell him she was broke and couldn't come up with it. McMahon drove down anyway.
Patterson is near financial disaster. Her first husband sends her child support; the government sends her food stamps and a $900 disability check. But she owes her brother $500 in back rent. The phone company recently cut off her service. She can't afford to register her van. Even worse, she knows that at any moment, the government could discover her role in these pro-pot activities and take away her benefits.
"Can you believe a rapist or a child molester can get out of jail and get benefits, but if they find me with pot, they will take my benefits away?" she asks. But she believes that her dead husband is watching over her. "I'm pretty sure Travis is going to keep me safe."
Besides, the rally is beginning, and thinking about finances is a downer. "Hey, that's not sssss-something to worry about today," she says, standing near tables full of pamphlets promoting legalization. She takes the black wrapper off a peanut-butter-flavored marijuana candy and plops it on her tongue.
"Please get wise and legalize!" the event's master of ceremonies says over the PA system. He's wearing an Uncle Sam hat, a blue blazer with white stars, and shorts and boots that look like they've been stolen from a pro wrestler. He gives McMahon a quick introduction. "McMahon, come fill some time."
As a speaker, McMahon rambles. "If humans don't have some of the chemicals that are in cannabis in their body, guess what? They die," he says. Without pausing, he launches into a monologue on women being more affected by weed because they have babies. As he speaks, some people lounging on blankets share sandwiches they've grilled on a camp stove. A few people collect stickers from the tables. Patterson and her kids sit under a maple tree and dip bread into a jar of peanut butter. Few in the audience clap when McMahon finishes.
Patterson is a reluctant public speaker, and the crowd's reaction to the infamous McMahon makes her even more nervous. A punk band takes over to warm up for her. She remembers her speech before the Missouri House committee. "I did horribly bad. I really bombed," she says, the words flowing easily now that she's stoned.
At 4:20 p.m. -- the international time for potheads to light up -- Uncle Sam introduces the headliner. "Jacqueline, get up here," he says to sparse clapping.
Patterson wears a pair of cowboy boots that she inherited from a grandmother. She made her skirt from a pair of Travis' jeans that she cut up and paired with frilly pink material. Atop her blond, pink-striped hair is a crown of plastic pot leaves.
She begins by reading from the spiral notebook. "'The way we treat you is criminal.' That is the words uttered to me by aaaaa -- by aaaa - -- by a committee member during a hearing for House Bill 1831." The microphone is too tall for Patterson to read her speech while also stretching up to speak.
She abandons the notebook. Unlike her stutter-filled diatribe in the Capitol basement, Patterson ad-libs with clarity. She punches words for emphasis. Soon, she has the crowd cheering with her.
She promises to get medical marijuana legalized.
"If we don't do it this year, we will do it next year!" she screams into the microphone. The crowd reacts with loud approval. "We need you guys to get fucking involved!"
"Yeah, Jacqueline!" somebody yells.
Uncle Sam introduces the next band. Patterson limps to the back of the crowd to collect her kids. Along the way, she passes a lonely-looking woman seated at a folding table. In front of her is a stack of unsigned voter-registration cards.
Newskhawk: Happykid - 420 Magazine
Author: Eric Barton
Source: Pitch, The (Kansas City, MO)
Copyright: 2006 New Times, Inc.
Contact: feedback@pitch.com
Website: The Pitch
