Peter McWilliams was born on Aug. 5, 1949, and died in June of 2000.
That's right, Peter McWilliams is dead. A brief summary of what went on with Peter McWilliams: Mr. McWilliams was a major advocate for the legalization of, among other drugs, marijuana, and he was very much a libertarian. He wrote the wonderful and famous Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes In Our Free Country, for which the DEA has never forgiven him.
Mr. McWilliams suffered from AIDS and Cancer. There are, of course, various medications that will hinder the developement of said diseases, however they are terribly harsh on the stomach and tend to induce serious nausea. In the case of Peter McWilliams, as with many other people taking such medications, he often could not even keep his medication down--he would just vomit it back up, and therefore it did him no good.
Forunately, he was a resident of California, which had, in 1996, passed CA Proposition 215, which allows the use of medical marijuana if one has a doctor's reccomendation. McWilliams got one, and the marajuina helped him keep his medications down. He got a lot better, his depression eased, he was more energetic, and his viral load dropped so far down, it was almost undetectable.
Then the Federal Government came for him. They arrested him for funding the growth of what they considered to be an inordinate number of marijuana plants that he had been having grown to supply cooperatives that serve other medical marijuana patients. The government prosecutors painted him as some kind of drug kingpin, and the judge forbade any mention of him having AIDS, of medical marijuana, or of CA Proposition 215 in his trial. You see, even though it was legal in California to use marijuana for medical purposes, it was still illegal under federal law, and since this was going to be tried in federal court, the judge figured that these issues didn't apply.
McWilliams was released on bail, but he was placed under house arrest, and the judge ordered McWilliams to stop taking marijuana. No longer able to keep his medications down, his viral load sky rocketed. McWilliams slept sometimes for 20 hours a day or more, since he was far too weak to so much as move around.
He died from vomit. He was taking a bath, started to vomit, was too weak to expel it from his body or move around, and he choked to death on it.
The media has been eerily silent about his death, and strangely in a sick sort of way, his two websites about himself, www.mcwilliams.com and www.petertrial.com, make no mention of his passing.
His books can be found for free online at www.mcwilliams.com