Pot of trouble: grow marijuana for medical use in California, and you can get off. Do it in Oklahoma, and you can get 93 years.

• Author: Smith, Adam J.

Will Foster, a 38-year-old father of three who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis in his back and feet. Over the years, he has tried various drugs for his condition. They were not very effective, and most contained codeine, which left him groggy and irritable, making it impossible to work or enjoy time with his children. Marijuana, by contrast, relieved his pain without disrupting his life. To minimize the chance of arrest, Foster decided to grow his own supply, concealing a small garden in an old bomb shelter in his basement. The shelter was behind a steel door to which only Foster had the key. None of his children knew about the garden or saw the marijuana. It was important to him that his choice of treatment cause no confusion for his kids, that their childhoods be as normal as possible.

The police had different plans. Now Foster may face the equivalent of life in prison for growing and using a forbidden medicine. He does not seem like the sort of man who belongs behind bars. A five-year Army veteran who served as an M.P., Foster has operated his own software business for four years. He has never had so much as a fistfight; his most violent tendencies are bird hunting and, when he feels up to it, weekend war games with paint-ball guns. In short, he is a decent, productive citizen who threatens no one except drug warriors who cannot abide the notion that marijuana could be good for anybody. Will Foster is someone to keep in mind when drug czar Barry McCaffrey insists that patients and doctors who use marijuana as a medicine should be treated like criminals.

On December 28, 1995, the Tulsa Police Department's Special Investigative Division received a tip from a "confidential informant" that Foster was selling methamphetamine from his home. That information was enough to obtain a warrant, specifying methamphetamine as the object of the search, and late that afternoon there was a knock on the Fosters' door. Will's wife, Meg, disengaged the lock, only to have the door "explode inward" as the police knocked it in with a battering ram, knocking her to the floor, nearly on top of their 5-year-old daughter. "There were guns in my face," she recalls. "Men in street clothes demanding to know who I was. My daughter was terrified and screaming frantically the entire time: 'Don't hurt my mommy!' It was at least five minutes before I understood that these were police officers."

The police held Will, Meg, their daughter, and a...