Former University of Maryland pharmacologist Clinton B. McCracken has been deported to his native Canada, ending more than three months of limbo since he pleaded guilty in March to growing marijuana.
"I am thrilled he's back home," said his lawyer, David B. Irwin. He said McCracken, 33, was transported north June 29, 17 days after immigration authorities picked him up in Baltimore and sent him to a detention center in York, Pa.
The deportation ends an odyssey for McCracken that began last September when his 29-year-old fiancee, Carrie E. John, a fellow pharmacologist at Maryland, died in a drug-shooting session at their Ridgely's Delight rowhouse. John died after injecting what she and McCracken believed was a narcotic, though an autopsy found that her death was caused by an allergic reaction and that she had no drugs in her system.
In exchange for pleading guilty to the felony charge, McCracken was given a suspended five-year sentence. The plea made his deportation a near certainty. His lawyer said that McCracken had been eager to return home to Alberta because his father has late-stage kidney disease and McCracken could be a donor.
In May, McCracken published an essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which he called his drug abuse "a cautionary tale regarding the extreme dangers of intellectualizing drug use."