A self-help group in California, composed mostly of those dying of AIDS and cancer, intend to make history with a civil rights lawsuit against the Feds over their right to use marijuana for medicinal purposes. The City and County of Santa Cruz have joined the lawsuit on their behalf.

An elderly woman leans unsteadily on her walker. A hip young paraplegic fellow glides his electric wheelchair past a dapper old man clutching a cane. Men wiry with AIDS sidle into folding chairs in the cramped meeting hall. A blind man hunkers at the edge of the throng. There is talk of housing and finances, discussions of dipping health and impending death.

They finish by flouting federal law.

Marijuana, deemed illegal by the U.S. for any purpose, is dispensed in small baggies to the group, most of them terminally ill with AIDS or cancer. They say their brand of medicine, justified under California's 1996 medicinal marijuana initiative, brings relief from pain and suffering.

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