Why else would 45-year-old Robin Prosser - why would anyone - go on a hunger strike to get medical help? Why would a devoted single parent of a teen-age girl force herself to go so long without food - 10 days, as of Tuesday morning - that answering the telephone leaves her weak and hospitalization could lie ahead?

The answer is desperation. And the desperation, startlingly, is for pot. Cannabis. Medical marijuana.

Prosser, a Missoula mom and talented musician, suffers from a lupus-related immunosuppressive disorder, an illness that for the past 17 years has caused her chronic pain, heart trouble, muscle spasms, nausea, bone fractures and migraines. She also has neurological problems similar to those caused by multiple sclerosis, she says.

Along the way, Prosser has tried nearly every prescribed potion and pill, including morphine and other painkillers (she's violently allergic to them), anti-nausea medications (ditto) and a long list of therapies (nothing works). Finally, on her own, she tried marijuana.

"It made the pain go away," she says, squinting against the incongruously cheerful sun working its way into her living room. The aura inside Prosser's Upper Miller Creek home, meticulously tidy in a street of like houses, is otherwise not unlike a sickroom. "The pain is never completely gone," Prosser corrects herself. "But with marijuana, it's manageable." With daily pot use, Prosser says she can compose music, write, take care of her daughter and live a fairly normal life. Without it, she says, "I'm sunk."

It might seem far-fetched to go on a hunger strike and hope to solve in a few days what in many respects is an intractable, decades-old legal issue. The matter of making marijuana available for medical use is mired in politics, zero-tolerance policies and a federal resolve to keep the drug illegal. Indeed, federal policy on such matters has recently led to federal shutdowns of two cannabis buyers' clubs in California widely used by cancer and AIDS patients to combat pain, nausea and weight loss.

But Prosser, who lost 28 pounds in the first seven days of her fast (she isn't thin, but "I had some to spare," she jokes), says she felt she had no other choice. And she won't eat, she says, until she gets some assurance that using pot won't land her in jail. In the past, she was well enough to make the long drive to Seattle and buy from the cannabis club there, but she no longer has the strength, she says. And she wants some public official to promise not to prosecute her for growing marijuana in her yard, strictly for her own use.

"I cannot do that," says county Sheriff Doug Chase. "In my position, I certainly could not legitimize that." If Prosser were to get arrested, Chase adds, it would be up to the courts to sort out whether she deserves an exemption or some special treatment.

"It sounds kind of inhumane and callous," Chase says. "But I'm certainly not in a position to say that I'm not going to enforce the law. It would be totally inappropriate for me."

Missoula Police Chief Bob Weaver is more blunt. "She'll be busted if she grows pot and we learn about it. The courts can look at mitigating circumstances."

Prosser, sitting in a T-shirt and sweat pants sipping juice so she doesn't get dehydrated and collapse, says she doesn't want to be a criminal. That's her point. "I don't want to break the law," she says. "But I don't want to be forced to live and be sick. There has to be some law protecting people like me."

A Missoula neurologist familiar with her case, Dr. Ethan Russo, agrees. "Yes," Russo says, "I believe that using cannabis is helpful to her condition."

What's unfortunate is that someone in Prosser's situation would feel the need to take such drastic measures, he says. "In other countries, unlike the situation here, the medical use of clinical cannabis has been recognized as a right of the people."

In Canada and parts of Western Europe, he says, people in need can get prescription cannabis. "But our government is still taking the position that this is a dangerous drug that has no medical use. And it basically is a pervasive lie."

"If I had another choice, some other medication to take," Prosser says, "I'd take it in a heartbeat."

She's joined political groups pushing for marijuana legalization; she's gone to rallies, written to legislators, and used the Internet to stay in touch with people in similar situations. She's joined a class-action lawsuit; it never came to fruition.

"It was either this, or cut and run - move to Amsterdam or some other country with legalized medical marijuana," she says. "I don't want to leave my daughter." She is near tears. "But I'd do that before I'd die on her and not make it to her high school graduation.

"I don't want to be a celebrity. I want to do this for all the hundreds of other people in the country who are ill and dying and are in the same boat, waiting for the laws to change. And I'm selfish, too. I want this for me and my daughter. If I could just have this one thing ..."

Prosser accepts an invitation to sit at her gleaming piano in the corner. Her hands race across the octaves, and then she settles into a lush melody that suddenly becomes recognizable: it's the first few bars of "Misty."

"Look at me," the words go, though she doesn't sing them. "I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree."

Note: In her ninth day of a hunger strike, Robin Prosser says she wants to be able to grow a small marijuana garden outside her Missoula home to provide pain relief and ease the nausea she experiences from a health condition.

Note: Woman turns to hunger strike to get right to grow medical marijuana.

Newshawk: Ethan Russo MD
Source: Missoulian (MT)
Author: Amy Linn of the Missoulian
Published: Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Copyright: 2002 Missoulian
Contact: newsdesk@missoulian.com
Website: http://www.missoulian.com/

Related Articles & Web Site:

Cannabis Now
http://www.cannabisnow.org/

Cannabinoids in Pain Management
http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/drr.htm

Missoula Woman Launches a Hunger Strike
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12650.shtml

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