[420 Girl]

Medicinal marijuana may be legal now in Michigan, but for Clyde Cathcart, it isn’t legal enough.

The 51-year-old Grand Blanc Township man said he wants marijuana to be “as legal as tomatoes — you can grow your own tomatoes,” and has taken the first step, starting a Web site, in his grassroots effort to have it legalized completely.

Sitting in his living room, one of the first things Cathcart, an Internet marketer, says is that he himself is not a user of marijuana.

He said he came to the idea after both his parents were diagnosed with cancer and had heard of stories and research suggesting marijuana — a term he doesn’t like, preferring cannabis, or hemp — could hinder the growth and spread of cancer cells.

The more he researched, the more uses he said he found for the plant, such as paper and biofuel, and said it raised an activist mindset in him that hadn’t existed before.

“There’s a whole lot we’re missing out on,” he said, calling marijuana the “holy grail of killing cancer.”

Cathcart has links to medical journals suggesting the impact THC, the active chemical in marijuana, could have on cancer cells. But Paul Adams, an oncologist at the Genesys Hurley Cancer Institute, said he’s not buying it.

“These are laboratory experiments. Now a lot of laboratory experiments don’t carry over to live tumors in people,” he said. “Right now we can certainly say there is no evidence that marijuana has any effect directly on the tumors as far as slowing growth goes.”

If there was evidence suggesting otherwise, Adams said he would have heard of it by now.

“That would be big news in the oncology community. That would ripple through fast. There are very few secrets in the oncology community. If something’s working everybody hears about it,” he said.

If the 2008 Nov. election is any indication, however, people may lean Cathcart’s way. In Genesee County about 130,000 people voted for marijuana’s legalization, versus the approximate 80,000 that voted against it.

Mandy Spears, of Durand, said her father-in-law recently received his medical marijuana card and her mother, who lives in Virginia, has multiple sclerosis and is working to get it legalized there.

“I’m all for it. I have people use it that are close to me,” she said.

Still, she thinks if it was further legalized, there would need to be boundaries.

“Do I see the need for keeping it away from certain age groups and certain aspects of people lives? Yeah,” she said.

Cathcart said his curing cancer argument is a “wedge issue” aimed at getting people to open up to the legalization of marijuana completely. He said he hasn’t smoked it recreationally in about two years, but thinks other people should be able to.

That doesn’t mean being an advocate for an illegal drug doesn’t come without certain worries.

“Am I going to have men in suits knocking on my door and saying, ‘Mr. Cathcart, you need to come with us,’? And I still worry about it,” he said.

He’s moving forward nonetheless.

“What’s next is to get the word out about this, to gain support,” he said. “I would love to see this be a nonissue.”

If he can rally enough support, he said he’d love to take his message beyond the world of the web by airing TV advertisements, renting space on billboards and sponsoring events. He’s currently ordering magnets shaped like the pink ribbons representing breast cancer, which his mother was diagnosed with. The only difference is that Cathcart’s magnets advertise his Web site and bear the words, “Legalize the cure.”

“That’s part of it,” he said he said of his movement. “But this is a start.”

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