PADDY DOYLE is stretched on the floor in his Dublin office espousing the medicinal merits of the drug marijuana. The sleeve of his best-selling autobiography The God Squad, is pinned to the wall. Beside it hangs a droll Oscar Wilde quotation: "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train."

This week, Doyle found himself in the eye of a media storm that was sensational even by Wildean standards. His widely-publicised appeal to be allowed to use marijuana to ease his often violent spasms, one of the symptoms of his incurable medical condition has added a dimension to what is an increasingly thorny debate.

The Dubliner, a former winner of the People Of The Year award, has suffered with idiopathic torsion dystonia since the age of nine. "I have tried everything," be says. "Marijuana could be beneficial to me. I should be allowed to try it under medical supervision."

The controversy began when Doyle, severely physically disabled as a result of his condition, recently visited a consultant for a routine check-up. When the consultant saw him he was dismayed by the high level of involuntary movement in Doyle's body. He is constantly wracked by spasms - one expert concluded that a dystonia sufferer uses up as much energy daily as someone spending 16 hours in a gym. The packets of calorific powdered drinks on an office desk bear testament to this assertion. "It's like drinking cement mixer," says Doyle.

"It was me who initiated the idea of using marijuana," he says. "I had used it twice before at parties and found that the spasms were dramatically reduced."

Alcohol has the same effect, which means sufferers are faced with a choice. "Can I handle this constant movement or should I just have half-a-dozen gins? But, of course, then you are at risk of becoming an alcoholic and couldn't hold down a job."

The consultant, who has not been named, took Doyle's suggestion seriously. He wrote to the Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, seeking permission to prescribe marijuana to his patient. The letter was passed on to the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, who replied.

"I wasn't expecting an overtly compassionate response, but the clinically cold letter I got back surprised me," Paddy Doyle says.

In his response the Minister said marijuana was a Schedule One controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Acts 1977 and 1984 and that it had no recognised medical or scientific use. He said clinical research did not support medical claims made in favour of marijuana and that its use could lead to experimentation with other drugs. It was not, the letter concluded, the Government's stance 19 change the legal position on any drug including marijuana.

Doyle, who is married with three grown up children, was "amazed". "He didn't even contact my consultant to inquire about my condition. The implication was that I would be straight on to heroin if allowed marijuana," he says.

Ironically, the cocktail of prescribed drugs he is on would be the envy of many a hardened drug addict. "I have been prescribed a wide variety of drugs since I was nine and never misused any of them," he says. Doyle takes a mixture of anti-spasmodic drugs and muscle relaxants, but so far nothing has worked.

Meanwhile, he knows of a prominent consultant in the US who notes a "definite improvement" in four dystonia sufferers who were given marijuana. The drug has also been licensed for use by people with specified illnesses in some US states.

Now working in a large non-profit organisation, Doyle says he does not want to go looking for the prohibited drug "on the streets and pubs" of the capital.

"Why should I have to? I don't want to have to break the law to stop the spasms in my body. If I do decide to do that I will make it known and the authorities can take me to court because I can prove that it is for medicinal purposes only," he says.

The author of The God Squad is no stranger to controversy, having been pilloried in the late 1980s by those who saw his critically acclaimed autobiography as an attack on Catholic Ireland.

"And I know there will be some people who think, `He's off again, why can't that Paddy Doyle just leave well enough alone?'," he says.

"Well, the simple answer is that I can't. I'm not the type to give in. I like to think of myself as a friendly Rottweiler and I will be barking, maybe even snapping, at the heels of the authorities until this issue is resolved."

Last weekend, five weeks after the killing, two post graduate researchers at the faculty of the philosophy of law, Giovanni Scattone and Salvatore Ferraro, were arrested and charged with her murder. Furthermore, last week, the head of the faculty of the philosophy of law, Prof Bruno Romano, was put under house arrest, charged with having tried to obstruct the investigation.

The most puzzling aspect of the murder concerns not the killing itself but the extent to which faculty members of the philosophy of law appear to have become involved in a massive cover-up. The people and reasons remain unknown, but what is certain is that police investigators have, from the beginning,