High Above the Law

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.