High Above the Law

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.