WAHOO -- Back in the '60s, Dana Beal was one of the original Yippies -- the radical, counterculture group known for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention and advocating legalization of drugs and a nation powered by people and not profit.

Years later, Beal organized marches calling for the legalization of marijuana and helped open a New York City clinic that dispenses pot to AIDS patients for medicinal purposes.

He's also the poster boy for the legalization of ibogaine, a plant extract that he contends can inexpensively and quickly cure addiction to heroin and methamphetamine.

But these days, the New York man says he's fighting for his life.

Beal, 65 and only nine months' removed from a serious heart attack, sits in a small-town Nebraska jail in an orange jumpsuit. He faces up to five years in prison after being arrested in 2009 near Ashland, riding in a van holding 150 pounds of baled marijuana.

Five years, he said, would amount to a death sentence because of his heart disease and would halt his work with ibogaine, a substance he says has saved countless lives.

So he has enlisted a novel legal argument: that he had a good excuse for breaking the law.