Grumpy Old Drug Smugglers

[CShine]

"I can be very frail if I need to be,'' Kate Stahl said recently as she unpeeled the ripe banana she carried in her bag for lunch. Frailty is not normally prized by political activists, but Stahl is an unlikely agitator. A retired medical secretary with nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, she is 85 years old, appears to weigh hardly that many pounds and spent much of her adult life in rural seclusion as the sole female resident on Little Dead Horse Lake, a small community about five miles outside Marcell, Minn. -- a town itself so obscure that it once sold T-shirts asking ''Where the hell is Marcell?'' Only in 1995, when her husband's lung disease kept him from chopping wood to heat their home, did Stahl and her husband move to an apartment in St. Paul. She describes her life until her husband's death, five and a half years ago, as the opposite of radical. ''I always had someone half a step in front of me,'' she said. ''My parents, and then my husband, then the children. I wouldn't have said boo to a turtle, literally.''

The first rumblings of Stahl's political awakening began shortly after moving to the city, when she and her husband signed up for a bus trip to Canada, organized by a local advocacy group called the Minnesota Senior Federation, to buy prescription drugs. They learned that they could much better afford his war chest of medicines by buying them abroad and smuggling them back across the border. Stahl didn't like the fact that in doing so, she was violating federal laws that prohibit anyone other than manufacturers from re-importing drugs, but she couldn't see what was wrong with saving 40 percent on the same prescriptions available at her local pharmacy. She soon began volunteering at the Minnesota Senior Federation because, as she explained, having benefited from the bus ride, it seemed the neighborly thing to do. ''If someone brings you a plate of cookies,'' she said, ''you can't bring it back empty.''

Following her husband's death, Stahl became an active federation member, leading to her two-year stint as president of the federation's metropolitan region. To this day, most mornings she drives her 1993 Chevy Euro from her daughter's house in suburban Shoreview, where she now lives, to the federation's office in downtown St. Paul, to fight for fair pricing on prescription drugs (one of the federation's three main causes, along with ensuring access to health care and affordable housing). She also makes regular bus trips to Winnipeg, amusing her fellow seniors on the way back by yelling out, Come and get me, boys! ''Can't you see the publicity?'' she said, stooping over an imaginary cane. '''Frail old lady put in jail because she couldn't afford her drugs in America and she had to do it in Canada.' I even have an old cane that I got at Goodwill. Can't you see it? 'Gee, Officer, I really can't afford a new one. They're too expensive and I just don't have the money . . . honey.'''

Stahl's public emergence as a hell raiser came in July, when Gil Gutknecht, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, seized on her as a political godsend and invited her to Washington for a news conference announcing his sponsorship of a bill to legalize drug re-importation. It was Stahl's first visit to the nation's capital, and in the blinding light of the flashbulbs, on a trip she called ''the adventure of a lifetime,'' she realized that being a bony, shrinking, widowed old lady, far from a liability, is in fact a great strength. Seniors are the fastest-growing voter bloc in the United States, expected to double by 2030, when 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or older. Politicians who don't respond to those kinds of demographics don't stay politicians. Stahl, whose total income consists of Social Security and her deceased husband's pension of $51.74 a month, counts herself among the many Midwestern widows, ex-stockbrokers, retired schoolteachers -- people with time on their hands and dwindling savings -- who have found a galvanizing political cause in the high cost of prescription drugs. Like the Vietnam War to so many college students in the 60's and 70's and nuclear proliferation to mothers in the 80's, the issue is so personal, so deeply tied to life, death and a sense of justice, that it is driving otherwise private and conservative citizens into the first activism of their lives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/magazine/30DRUGS.html

[truthisfreedom]

1. funny. good story.