Peter McWilliams was an optimist, activist, poet, and advocate for personal freedom. His book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country” resonated across the political spectrum. After contracting AIDS and being diagnosed with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1996, McWilliams turned to medical marijuana to manage his nausea and keep down his medication. He became a vocal advocate for medical cannabis, but in 1997, he was arrested by federal authorities for running a grow operation, despite California creating some protections for medicinal use at the time.

As a condition of his bail, McWilliams was forced to stop using marijuana, even though it played a critical role in his treatment. He later died after choking on his own vomit, while awaiting sentencing by a federal judge. This episode of Collateral Damage explores McWilliams’s life and legacy, and examines how the drug war has obstructed health care.

Transcript

Peter McWilliams: I want to tell you about a pair of epiphanies that I had in 1996. The first happened in March of 1996 when I was diagnosed with both AIDS and cancer. I tell you this early on because I want your sympathy throughout the rest of this speech. [Laughter]

Radley Balko: That’s Peter McWilliams, a self-help author and poet, speaking at the 1998 Libertarian Party National Convention.

Peter McWilliams: When you mention AIDS or cancer, people are so afraid of their own death that they treat you very nicely.

Radley Balko: McWilliams, known for his wit and sharp commentary, was also brutally honest about his struggle with chemotherapy and AIDS treatment.

Peter McWilliams: So the nausea that was treated, that was caused by these things, ended instantly with marijuana. With one puff of marijuana.

Radley Balko: Speaking both to the crowd and a televised C-SPAN audience, McWilliams shared that medical marijuana was far more effective for him than the anti-nausea medication he had been prescribed.

Peter McWilliams: It is astonishing how well it works. And you have to understand how serious it is when you can’t keep your medication down. It’s not just that it’s uncomfortable. If you can’t keep that medication down, it’s not gonna save your life.

Radley Balko: McWilliams wasn’t just making a personal plea — he was urging his audience to challenge medical marijuana prohibition.

Julie Feldman: So it certainly pays to know someone like Peter McWilliams.

Host: Here’s a guy who has written three bestselling books. And you know what? He published them himself.

Conan O’Brien: Please welcome Peter McWilliams.

Todd McCormick: Peter had become a multimillionaire before he moved out of his mother’s house in Michigan. When he was in his late teens, early 20s, he wrote a book called “Come Love With Me and Be My Life: The Romantic Poetry of Peter McWilliams,” went on to sell over 3.5 million copies of a poetry book. Which is pretty incredible.

Radley Balko: But McWilliams wasn’t just a poet. He was also a technophile, a columnist, a motivational speaker, and a prolific self-help author. He was friends with the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. He wrote and directed a movie starring Bette Midler. He appeared on Conan O’Brien, Oprah, and was a repeat guest on “Larry King Live.”

Larry King: One other thing, Peter. You self-publish, right?

Peter McWilliams: Yes.

Larry King: Very hard to be successful; not many that make bestseller lists.

Radley Balko: He thought of himself first and foremost as a humanist. And above all, Peter McWilliams was perpetually curious.

Peter McWilliams: Hundreds of suggestions. It’s a thick book. People look at it and go, “Oh, it’s thick.”

Cyndy Canty: I’ll never read it.

Peter McWilliams: I’ll never read it. But every lefthand page, as you pointed out, is a quote. One of my favorite quotes is from Mae West.

Cyndy Canty: Which is?

Peter McWilliams: Mae West said, “Oh, I used to feel bad about what I did.” And someone said “Did you reform?” “No, I just don’t feel bad anymore.” [Laughing]

Radley Balko: The people close to McWilliams say he never aspired to be the sort of person who would give a barnstorming speech at a political convention. And as someone with such lust for life, he certainly never saw himself as a victim. Yet martyrdom came calling anyway.

In March of 1996, McWilliams was diagnosed with AIDS and with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was not much of a drug user. But smoking marijuana was the only thing that eased the nausea brought on by the AIDS medication and the chemotherapy.

Marijuana allowed him to keep down the drugs that were keeping him alive. And so he became a supporter, and then a spokesperson, and then a passionate advocate for civil libertarianism.

Peter McWilliams: Our leaders whom we trust, whom we look up to, from the Democratic president to the who-knows-what-he-is drug czar, to the Republican leaders in Congress of both the House and the Senate: They have lied to us about medical marijuana. They have lied to us about the harm of marijuana. There is no more benign medicinal substance known to human beings. And we have been lied about this.

Radley Balko: Less than two years after that speech, McWilliams would be dead at the age of 50. California, where he lived, had effectively legalized marijuana for medicinal use, but the federal government had made it a priority to stop the momentum for medical marijuana from spreading to other states. So the feds began going after growers and activists in places that had approved the treatment. And that put McWilliams in their crosshairs.

Thomas Ballanco: Prior to his being arrested, he had had his checkup. He had regular checkups. His viral load had been undetectable for over a year, and his T-cell count was high.

Well, as soon as he was prohibited from using natural cannabis, his viral load started to spike. And it went into the thousands. Then it went into the 100,000s. Not only did we see this in his blood, you could see this in his physical well-being.

He went from, like, being active and vivacious to eventually being in a wheelchair, being exhausted all the time. Being what you think of when you think of classic AIDS patients from the early days of AIDS.

Radley Balko: Deprived of marijuana after his arrest, the nausea from chemotherapy and the AIDS drugs left McWilliams unable to keep down his medication. It also made it difficult to eat. And so the illness took over, and his body withered until it failed. America’s drug war had killed Peter McWilliams.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause.

But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 4, “Criminalizing Care: The remarkable life and cruel death of Peter McWilliams.”

Peter McWilliams was born in August 1949 in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in the nearby suburb of Allen Park. He was a shy and sensitive kid, but also creative and ambitious. He began writing poetry in his teens and published his first book of poems at the age of 17. McWilliams came out as gay in the early 1970s, and eventually moved to West Hollywood, California.

Thomas Ballanco: He would always say, “I am not a proud fag, but I am a fag.”

Radley Balko: That’s McWilliams’s old attorney Thomas Ballanco, a fellow marijuana activist who first met McWilliams in the mid-1990s at a party in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Bel Air.

Thomas Ballanco: We think of, oh, coming out, being publicly gay in this day and age, OK, that is not an uncommon thing. Peter came out at a young age in the early ’70s. And I have to emphasize what a different time that was and what that meant when you’re in Michigan and you come to the realization, “Hey, I’m a gay man.” And that, in a way that is so much more accepted and common now, really became a defining characteristic. And he did not flaunt that. He was not “Oh, I’m this and that.” But he didn’t deny that.

Radley Balko: McWilliams was at first drawn more toward self-improvement than gay activism. His sexuality was of course a huge part of his own life, and he didn’t shy away from writing about it.

But he also looked for ways to overcome his shyness, insecurity, and other quirks that he saw as barriers to his happiness. And he wanted to share what did and didn’t work for him with others, so they could improve their own lives.

“He didn’t even want to be a marijuana activist. He’s always said, I’m a humanist, advocating for human beings.”

Thomas Ballanco: So much of his writing, his activism was really about liberating the individual, freeing the person inside to be who they were. He rejected the title of a gay rights activist. Because he said that wasn’t his fight. He didn’t even want to be a marijuana activist. He’s always said, ‘I’m a humanist, advocating for human beings. I don’t think everybody should be gay, but people who are gay are gay.’

Radley Balko: But McWilliams soon discovered that gay rights are inseparable from self-liberation.

Thomas Ballanco: As he began to write, like I think a lot of people who were open about their sexuality then, he got flooded with letters that never stopped. Till the day he died, he had letters on his desk of people around the country that were, “Hey, I’ve been wrestling with my sexuality. I feel like I’m gay, but I don’t know how to tell anybody. I don’t want to explain this to anybody.”

And he answered them. He answered them all. And he engaged on that. He was a compassionate and caring person, and I think that’s what drove him to some of this activism. That he couldn’t stomach the thought — no pun intended because of the nausea — he couldn’t stomach the thought of living in a society that criminalized the consensual behaviors of adults.

Radley Balko: In 1993, McWilliams published his renowned book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country.” Channeling the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the book was a plea for people to be left alone to pursue their own happiness, so long as they don’t harm others.

Conan O’Brien: My next guest has written more than 30 books …

Radley Balko: McWilliams went on Conan O’Brien’s show to talk about his new book. His wardrobe was quintessentially Peter McWilliams: baggy beige slacks, a Beavis and Butt-Head t-shirt, and a blue blazer that looked as if he’d just thrown it on after a long nap. O’Brien’s first question: What is a consensual crime?

Peter McWilliams: A consensual crime is anything they can put us in jail for that doesn’t physically harm the person or property of another. And we’re talking about things like gambling, drug use, homosexuality, prostitution, helmet laws, seatbelt laws, all of that.

Radley Balko: McWilliams went on to break down the cost of consensual crimes in terms of the thousands jailed and millions more arrested every year. O’Brien followed by asking about drug abuse specifically, and if McWilliams thought selling or using cocaine is harmless.

Peter McWilliams: It’s as adults, it’s not harmless necessarily. But then if you look at the most harmful drug in the country, it’s definitely cigarettes. 500,000 people a year die from cigarettes.

Conan O’Brien: Right.

Peter McWilliams: All the illegal drugs put together, it’s less than 6,000 people a year. So in terms of actual harm, either we should be consistent, we should ban cigarettes, ban alcohol. [Crosstalk.] Or we have to let adults make their own decisions.

“He couldn’t stomach the thought of living in a society that criminalized the consensual behaviors of adults.”

Radley Balko: Three years after that appearance, Williams was diagnosed with AIDS and lymphoma.

Thomas Ballanco: He lived as much of his life as he could in his bathrobe, because of his illnesses. So he was actively medicating. What was called, at that time, the combination cocktail was a cutting-edge drug but had tremendous nausea side effect. And amongst the many coping mechanisms Peter had for the ever-present nausea in his life was soaking in hot water. So he had turned his entire swimming pool into, effectively, a hot tub. So a bunch of meetings were held in his swimming pool that was 98 degrees.

Radley Balko: Right around the same time that McWilliams got sick, California voters passed Proposition 215, which began to create a legal structure around medical marijuana. The ballot measure didn’t outright legalize marijuana itself, but it did protect doctors, patients, and caregivers from state prosecution. The law was seen as fairly radical at the time — this was 1996.

Although the federal government continued to prohibit the drug, the FDA had already recognized the medical benefits of cannabis for a decade. Here’s Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of the book “Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.”

Jacob Sullum: Back in the ’80s, the Food and Drug Administration approved a synthetic form of THC, which is the main active ingredient in marijuana, as a treatment, initially, for the side effects of cancer chemotherapy. And then later they approved another use, which is for AIDS wasting syndrome. And this was established through the kind of controlled clinical trials that the FDA demands.

It recognized that marijuana is effective at relieving nausea, restoring appetite, enhancing appetite, which is something people have recognized for a long time. But that was validated in a very systematic way in order to get FDA approval for what was Marinol at the time, and now we have generic versions of that. So how can you maintain that the main active ingredient in marijuana does have recognized medical uses, but marijuana does not have recognized medical uses? It didn’t really make sense.

Radley Balko: And patients like McWilliams ran into a........

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