LAWYER QUICK TO DEFEND THE RIGHT TO SMOKE POT

Fort Lauderdale lawyer Norm Kent's client -- one of eight Americans receiving legal weed from the U.S. government -- is on the phone, worried that the Supreme Court just crippled the medical-marijuana legalization movement.

In a case involving a California cannabis buyers club, the justices ruled 8-0 on May 14 that no medical necessity exception existed to federal laws forbidding the sale and cultivation of the plant which, when smoked, offers some seriously ill people unique relief.

Kent, 51, has been part of the movement since he attended his first NORML ( National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws ) convention in 1972, while attending Long Island's Hofstra University.

At Hofstra, where he also earned a law degree, Norman Elliott Kent stuffed towels under his dorm-room door and smoked his first joint.

Now Kent is a movement luminary, serving on the NORML board and much in demand as a speaker. He's appearing at summer "hemp fests" in Seattle and Boston.

In 1988, Kent successfully defended glaucoma patient Elvy Musikka -- the woman on the phone -- against possession charges, after police found plants at her Hollywood home.

Kent convinced a Broward circuit judge that Musikka, who'd undergone more than 20 operations, including one that blinded her right eye, couldn't tolerate the pain and pressure in her left eye without pot's soothing effects.

The judge agreed, enabling Musikka to join the rarified group of patients holding pot prescriptions under the federal Compassionate Use Act.

"He's been instrumental in making my life worth living," Musikka said.

Musikka is feeling threatened, though she now lives in California, where state law permits medical use.

"What's going to happen?" Kent repeated her question. "Everybody's going to go to jail."

It wouldn't surprise him, Kent tells Musikka, if a conservative Congress tried to revoke the Compassionate Use Act, the program for her and seven others.

Then Kent quotes one of his inspirations: Henry David Thoreau, visited by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson after Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay a tax with which he disagreed.

"What are you doing in here?" Emerson queried.

"More to the point," Thoreau retorted, "the question ought to be, what are you doing out there?"

As Kent sees it, pot smokers should "stand up and fight and be counted. Just because you use [pot] doesn't make you evil or corrupt or criminal. The people who put people in jail for doing it are the criminals."

That would be the state and federal governments, which spend $40 billion annually on the drug war, nearly $10 billion of it on marijuana enforcement.

Last year, 704,000 Americans were busted on pot charges.

To Kent, that isn't just hypocritical in an alcohol-saturated society, but - -- given the number of Americans who have smoked -- an absurd waste of money. NORML estimates that number at 70 million, 10 million of whom smoke regularly.

"Pot has been wrongly demonized," Kent said. "It has always had socially valuable uses."

He discovered that in more than a theoretical way after he was diagnosed two years ago with abdominal cancer, and endured a year of grueling chemotherapy. He lost most of his stomach, and his balance. Pot helped with the nausea.

"Norm's sympathy and willingness to help was always there," Musikka said, "but now he's one of us."

His office is a memorabilia-crammed shrine to his other passions and convictions: Baseball ( autographed balls ). Gay rights ( stacks of The Express, the gay newspaper he publishes ). Civil liberties ( political cartoons ).

When rights are at stake, ideology doesn't matter. He has represented bare-breasted hot-dog vendors, strippers, entrapped gays, talk-radio host Neil Rogers and anti-abortion protesters.

"I'm fiercely independent," Kent said. "I admire people who are willing to go out on a limb."