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| How Pot Saved My Life |
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Posted by CN Staff on May 29, 2002 at 21:49:05 PT By Alison Myrden Source: NOW Magazine 
Another day like yesterday. excruciating pain in my face. My head halfway down the toilet "praying." I have just finished vomiting for the fourth time tonight, and it's only 5 am. Nice life. This is a typical start to a typical day in the life of me. Thirty-eight years old and this is what I have come to. I have been better than most, though, because of medical cannabis. Ten years ago I couldn't move from the waist down and could barely write my name. I was taking 32 prescription pills and 600 mg of morphine (yes, 600!) every day, enough to kill a horse, they told me, and spending most days in a wheelchair. I was diagnosed with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. Doctors told me I would be in a wheelchair full-time by the time I turned 40. So far, I am on the right path to prove them wrong, with the help of some wonderful therapists, some very patient medical professionals and a few natural therapies -- including cannabis. I am able to walk by myself again. The federal government doesn't seem to care, however. Now, six other sick and disabled Canadians and I are suing the feds on behalf of all sick and dying Canadians who choose to use pot as medicine. We don't all have exemptions to smoke marijuana as medicine. We believe the Medical Marijuana Access Regulations drafted by the federal government are unworkable. We want the government to release the medicine they've been growing in a mine shaft in Flin Flon to the many sick Canadians waiting so desperately for relief. The government refuses, saying the pot it spent millions growing was never intended for widespread distribution, but for clinical trials. So we have no choice but to continue to go out on the streets to fill our prescriptions. It's an injustice to me and the many sick people like me who can't afford to continue living this way. In the last eight years, my mother, Joyce, and my boyfriend, Gary Lynch, have spent over $14,000 each year to keep me in medical marijuana and out of pharmaceuticals. This has to be changed. It's only because of medical marijuana that I now have a life. Before I was reintroduced to the beautiful medicine, I was spending time in every pain specialist's office from Chedoke McMaster in Hamilton to Mount Sinai in Mississauga and beyond. No one could help. I was trying every new medicine on the market, including getting tiny spoonfuls of cocaine put up my nose and losing 11 pounds in one week on a heroin patch. Then one day, a friend offered me some smoke. After watching me shuffle between three pain specialists and my bed over the previous seven days, my friend begged me, could I please smoke this!! I wasn't convinced. I looked at the cannabis and explained very politely that it was something I would normally not use at a time like this. I was left in my bed (in the total dark) with the marijuana cigarette and a lighter. Ten minutes after I'd smoked the whole thing I was up singing along with the radio and making my bed for the first time in a week! What was happening to me? I had no pain for the first time in seven days! I cannot believe how much my life has changed because of medical marijuana. Please, Canada, help us win this uphill battle! Complete Title: How Pot Saved My Life: I Was Wheelchair-Bound Before I Found Weed Newshawk: puff_tuff Related Articles & Web Sites: The Marijuana Mission Canadian Links Suit Aims to Force Ottawa To Supply Medical Pot Ailing Canadians To Sue for Promised Pot Analysis: Canada Seeks Standardized Hash Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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Comment #4 posted by SoberStoner on May 30, 2002 at 20:24:55 PT:
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| thats willing to trust their life story on to someone will no official writing credits other than a few articles published on websites. If you want to write the story up, and then let me hack away at it so you can send it to a paper, email the story to me, and i'll give whatever advice i can. my comment style may lead you to believe i am not the best suited person for this job, but i only write this bad on the web because no matter how badly i write on the web, i can still sound more literate than 90% of the normal web population. Of course, i'd be willing to be everyone here is part of that literate 10%:) Like i said before, I want to see more stories like this in the paper and I'll do anything i can to see that happens..whether its writing my own letters or helping people write theirs. SS [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #3 posted by el_toonces on May 30, 2002 at 15:40:26 PT:
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| Heck, I feel like I could write one of these for some of our local rags, if I had a little editing help. Anyone up for it? This medicine has kind of saved my life, too:) [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #2 posted by paul peterson on May 30, 2002 at 00:21:56 PT:
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| E Johnson: remember "N of 1" from the IOM report? Les Grinspoon, god bless him, says one guy (or gal) can do alternating dose trials, etc., which they call N of 1, and that is absolutely good science-Why? Because that way you have quantified the "control group" as a person with identical attributes to the "active" group. That means of thinking avoids the troublesome "anecdotal" moniker and validates the story. Of course, the DEA don't want to think so.
Last summer, when I was negotiating with the DEA (they told me to talk with the NIDA), the NIDA people told me they would only authorize trials with a bed count of 100-200 persons. I wanted to get them to let me make a "green marijuana pill", and then let me take a handful of it and go around to cancer wards to try it orally. I considered that I would find one doctor, who would try it on one patient, then two, then five, then ten, then I might find a whole cancer ward to try, then I might get enough "doctor money" to fund a whole trial, then we could get to the FDA 100 bed plan. Then, believe it or not, the DEA guy told me they would cooperate with just that sort of plan. They would have "split approved" a plan to make a couple thousand pounds of pelleted "pill" material according to my "recipe", but I needed my state approval first.
Of course, since I live in the gestapo state of Illinois, they took my law license away rather than help me to get authorization from the DHS (the local agency that holds the rubber stamp for the 30 year old Illinois MM law!
Just for kicks, I called that DEA guy back last fall (after ASA Hutchinson got on board) No dice any more. Those guys were now afraid to even talk to me then! What a difference a feqw months can make. That's why they opened up a few new marijuana research programs last fall-because they were already in the works before ASA hit town-and he couildn't even get them shut down soon enough!
But the cat's out of the bag. Oregon is even publishing their proposals to authorize MM for ADD treatment! Something I've been learning and knowing for two years. Apparently this stuff is valid treatment for almost EVERY NEUROLOGICAL CONDITION, I'm thinking because when used properly, it "highjacks" the baseline neurotransmitter balance, and coopts the relative levels of dopamines and seratonins, and where there is some imbalance, replaces that with balance, etc. The key is to find the type and combination of neurotransmitters that works with your own setup. In time, this will be known and accepted by all. Sorry for all the MS people that have to live in fear until then. Good luck to you people in Canada that are ahead of us in this fight for freedom. paul peterson [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #1 posted by E_Johnson on May 29, 2002 at 22:27:06 PT |
| You're just anecdotal evidence and we can't do any real science because we just don't understand weed enough to grow it well enough to test. And even if we could, why, in the place where the sun never shines, where we keep our heads, it's too just dark to do any science at all. [ Post Comment ] |
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