Best-selling self-help author Peter McWilliams, 50, was found dead on his bathroom floor at his Los Angeles home on 14 June 2000, about two months before he was to be sentenced on federal marijuana charges.[1][2] Friends said he appeared to have choked on his own vomit; he had AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and had used marijuana against the severe nausea of his medications.[1][2]
Federal agents had arrested McWilliams and fellow activist Todd McCormick in 1998 and charged them with raising about 6,000 marijuana plants at four locations, which the Drug Enforcement Administration said were destined for buyers’ clubs serving medical patients.[1] Both men pleaded guilty after U.S. District Judge George H. King barred them from presenting a medical-necessity defence, so the jury never heard about his illness, California’s Proposition 215 or the federal government’s own medical marijuana programme.[1][2]
King also refused to let McWilliams use marijuana while free on $250,000 bail, even though McWilliams said it was the only way he could keep down the drugs keeping him alive.[1][2] He instead relied on a regimen of the prescription drug Marinol, herbs, hot baths and bed rest, writing that keeping his medications down was agonising, exhausting and debilitating three times a day.[1]
