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A FEW PILLS FROM DEATH

Jim Wakeford isn’t a criminal - just a very sick man with a very big mission.

TORONTO—The most recent - and potentially most serious - challenge to Canada’s drug laws comes not from a long-haired hippie bent on bringing down the establishment, but from a dying man who has spent most of his life helping kids stay away from alcohol and drugs.

When he was young and broke and couldn’t afford a phone, Jim Wakeford tied tin cans to a rope and dropped them out of his apartment window so street kids could summon him down when they were in trouble. Now his doctor says he might die without marijuana, and his lawyer says that not on1y should he be allowed to smoke the drug, but the federal government should supply it.

On Thursday, Mr. Wakeford, a 53- year-old Toronto AIDS patient, filed a civil suit in the Ontario Court of Justice against the Canadian Government demanding that he be exempt from laws against cannabis, and more audaciously, that the government be required to supply the drug to patients who need it. His case is scheduled to be heard on May 4.

Until then, Alan Young, the Osgoode Hall law professor who is fighting a number of drug-rights cases, is scouring the world for experts who will tell the court that cannabis is a legitimate medical treatment and that Mr. Wakeford is not a criminal.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wakeford is reluctantly lighting up joint after joint at the request of television news crews, and trying to use the skills he acquired over a lifetime of charity fund-raising to raise the tens of thousands of dollars he needs to fight what will likely be his last great cause. He has raised $6,000 so far.

Mr. Wakeford doesn’t look like a criminal. Nor does he look like a man with enough strength to take his government to court.

Even if you didn’t know that he has spent the past five years only a box of pills away from death, you would notice the slightness of his frame, the lightness of his step, and the translucence of the skin draped over his hollow cheeks.

There is a fragility about him that makes you worry whether he will slip away when you’re not looking, or whether he is really there to begin with. The quiet calm of his voice makes you wonder, mid-sentence, if he’s really speaking. So ethereal is his presence and unremarkable his appearance, that to meet him walking home in his plainer-than-plain blue jeans, jacket, and white sneakers, it’s easy to imagine him slinking by unnoticed to some lonely bare-walled mom to wait for his illness to take its final toll.

Yet as Mr. Wakeford makes his way through the neighbourhood, passersby recognize him. "You cheeky devil. I saw you smoking up on TV last night!" calls out a young man. At the local greasy spoon where he takes his bacon and eggs in the morning, a sympathizer at another table secretly pays for Mr. Wakeford’s breakfast before he can ask the waitress for the bill.

And when he finally makes it to his Church Street apartment - a going-away gift he bought himself when doctors told him in 1993 that he had two years left to live - the rooms are bursting with light, life, and colour. In this determinedly cheerful place where he planned to die, even the powder-room ceiling is sunflower yellow.

Five defiant years after receiving his death sentence, Mr. Wakeford sits in a wine-coloured leather chair under a soaring three-metre ficus tree, his gaunt face lit up by sunshine pouring in from a terrace overlooking streets that be calls "the heart of Toronto’s gay ghetto."

The brightly painted walls are crowded with paintings, posters, and photographs of the friends and celebrities who love him. There are awards for the good works he has done, like founding Oolagen House, a treatment facility he started in 1967 out of his home to help Torontoís street kids in trouble with drugs. Last year, Oolagen House celebrated its 30^th anniversary and reported an annual operating budget of more than $2 million.

There are so many pictures of friends and admirers on the walls that it’s easy to overlook the eerie photo of a once-healthy and robust Mr. Wakeford showing a once-lively Diana, Princess of Wales, around Casey House, the reknowned AIDS hospice whose foundation he built.

And somewhere in this incongruity, in the gap between the smallness of his voice and the bigness of his achievements, between the vulnerability of his body and the immutability of the law, lies the reason this soft-spoken son of a Saskatchewan miner is taking the Government of Canada to court.

"I don’t think he would be taking his anti-HIV medications if he wasn’t on marijuana," says Dr. Goodhew, who prescribes the battery of 40 pills that has raised Mr. Wakeford's life expectancy from a year to a level he now says he "doesn’t presume" to predict. "Thanks to the medications, his immune system went from 10 to 15 per cent of normal strength to 40 or 50 per cent now. The virus in his blood dropped to undetectable levels," Dr. Goodhew explains.

But as the medications began to give Mr. Wakeford back his life, Dr. Goodhew says, they also gave him nausea and diarrhea, killed his appetite and caused him to lose drastic amounts of weight.

"His chart was improving dramatically, but every time I saw him, he looked sicker and sicker.

"His cheeks sunk in, he had no butt, his arms and legs were like sticks," Dr. Goodhew says. "He knew that on these medications, he was wasting away."

Mr. Wakeford was wasting away be-cause of a peculiarity of the new-generation AIDS drugs, called protease inhibitors, that only work if taken according to a strict schedule. Four of Mr. Wakeford’s medications have to be taken on an empty stomach, which means he can’t eat for three hours before taking them.

"The thing about these drugs is that you have to comply 100 per cent with the schedule to keep the virus from reproducing," Dr. Goodhew says.

"He takes four anti-stomachs a day, meaning that he can’t eat for in hours out of each day. He has four one-hour intervals when he can eat, but the pills kill his appetite in that window."

Dr. Goodhew says Mr. Wakeford has tried the all available anti-nausea medications, and none worked until he tried smoking marijuana. Dr. Goodhew stops short of saying whether he suggested marijuana to Mr. Wakeford, saying only that, "When Mr. Wakeford informed me that he was using it, there was a dramatic improvement."

And Mr. Wakeford is not a unique case, says Dr. Goodhew, who treats 200 HIV-positive patients. He estimates that one-quarter to one-half of his patients on anti-HIV medication use marijuana on a "semi-regular" basis.

"Patients who use it continue to use it with my knowledge and consent," he says. "Medically, I think it is a worthwhile cause. It is absurd to criminalize a product that is so useful, effective, inexpensive, and so non-toxic compared to all the pharmaceutical alternatives."

"I just find the marijuana laws ludicrous," Dr. Goodhew says. "I can’t take them seriously. I can’t believe that anyone, except a small group of police, takes them seriously." (Ed. note: And the people who rule the large country immediately to his south.)

Dr. Goodhew is one of the expert witnesses to file an affidavit in the case, and might be cross-examined by government lawyers. Mr. Young and his law students are busy searching out others to make their case in the next two months.