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Medical marijuana activist McKee dies

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press
Published: December 7, 2017, 9:15pm

SEATTLE — JoAnna McKee, a pioneering medical marijuana activist in Washington state who went to sometimes difficult lengths to obtain the drug for the patients she served, has died at age 74.

McKee died Nov. 18, said her longtime friend and fellow activist Dale Rogers. He was not certain of the cause.

McKee was a fixture at marijuana policy hearings in the Legislature, where she often testified from her wheelchair, sporting a colorful eye patch and accompanied by her service dog.

She and her partner, Stich Miller, founded Seattle’s first cannabis co-op, Green Cross Patient Co-Op, in 1993, five years before Washington approved medical marijuana.

McKee worked to pass Washington’s medical marijuana initiative, but she threw her support behind the measure only after its authors agreed that it would not limit patients to having a certain number of plants. Voters approved it in 1998.

Among those who spoke at a memorial Thursday, on what would have been her 75th birthday, were King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg and King County Council member Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a former state senator who spent her career advocating for medical marijuana patients at McKee’s behest.

Satterberg recalled seeing her picture in the news after a 1995 bust with her wheelchair and eye patch. “I thought, who would ever want to prosecute her, and that had a profound effect on how the King County Prosecutor’s Office handled medical marijuana cases. Over the years, when we had a case that had a legitimate medical claim, I tried as hard as I could to make sure we weren’t prosecuting that case.”

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