MassachusettsMarijuanaMovementJournal: Cannabis as Medicine: Why Not?

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Cannabis as Medicine: Why Not?

December 2010, Vol. 21, No. 4 , Pages 171-173 (doi:10.3109/10884602.2010.481540)

President & Co-Founder, Patients Out of Time, Howardsville, VA, USA

Address correspondence to Mary Lynn Mathre, Patients Out of Time, 1472 Fish Pond Rd. Howardsville, VA 24562, USA. E-mail: mlmathre@hughes.net

On a national level, Cannabis is a Schedule I drug under federal law, but is recognized as medicine in 14 states and the District of Columbia, with many more states considering similar legislation. Internationally, change is occurring in many European countries, plus Israel, Canada, Australia, as well as in Central and South America regarding the legal status of cannabis. The emerging science on the endogenous cannabinoid system or endocannabinoid system (ECS) is providing numerous clues to help our understanding of how and why cannabis is so safe and effective for a wide array of conditions and illnesses. As I write this piece, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is in receipt of the recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services regarding a 2002 petition to remove cannabis from the Schedule I category of the controlled substances and is long overdue by its own regulations in its final decision (see www.drugscience.org).

Cannabis has been used medicinally throughout the world for centuries. It was an integral part of American medicine until the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which was based on reefer madness myths and lies (Bonnie & Whitebread, 1974). With the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, cannabis was erroneously put into the Schedule I or “forbidden drug” listing under its “new” name of marijuana, and remains there today, despite the fact that a synthetic version of the primary psychoactive component of cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC (Marinol®) is now in Schedule III. Cannabis remains in Schedule I despite the fact that the Shafer Commission appointed by the Nixon Administration concluded in 1972 that the harm from the prohibition of cannabis was greater than the potential harm from its use (National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse). As a result of the first petition to the DEA to reschedule cannabis, filed in the early 1970s by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana laws (NORML) and the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics (ACT), the DEA's own Administrative Law judge, Francis Young, ruled in 1988 that cannabis should be moved to Schedule II. He noted that cannabis was “one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man,” but his ruling was ignored. In 1982 the Institute of Medicine published their report, Marijuana and Health, in which they concluded that the prohibition is more harmful than use of cannabis and when used as medicine it seemed to work differently than standard medications (usually a green light for research on a new medicine). Then in 1999, the Institute of Medicine published another report, Marijuana as Medicine: Assessing the Science Base, which concluded that cannabis is safe enough for medical use, n-of-1 studies should be allowed, and although research should continue on alternative delivery methods, cancer and AIDS patients should be allowed to smoke cannabis as medicine now (Joy, Watson & Benson, 1999).
Beginning in the 1990s, numerous state nurses associations started passing resolutions calling for patient access to cannabis, followed by the ANA in 2003. The American Public Health Association passed its medical marijuana resolution in 1997, despite no support from the Substance Abuse Section. The American College of Physicians passed their medical marijuana resolution in 2008 and finally the AMA took a baby step by calling for research on medicinal cannabis in 2009.
A cannabis resolution was passed by the National Nurses Society on Addictions in 1995, but was later quietly rescinded during a board of directors’ conference call. The American Society of Addiction Medicine also had a medicinal cannabis resolution released, but only a few years later the organization back-pedaled on its previous recommendations for patient access and restricted their new resolution to call for more research. One might ask, what new finding would cause these two organizations to change their stand on this issue? Was there a new study released that identified some significant risk related to the use of cannabis? No. There is no risk from cannabis greater than the range of possible risks from most pharmaceuticals in use today. Could a person become addicted to cannabis? Yes, but the risk of addiction to cannabis is much lower than the risk of addiction to opioids or benzodiazepines. So why withhold support of legal access to this medicine? My investigation concluded that these reversals came as a result of outside pressure from the Office of National Drug Control Policy under the direction of General Barry McCaffrey.
It is very clear to me that the cannabis prohibition has nothing to do with science, common sense or compassion. History shows it was used as medicine, major reviews by health care professionals object to its prohibition, leading health care organizations support its use as medicine and 14 states have disagreed with the federal prohibition. There are many in the addictions field who recognize the therapeutic potential of cannabis. Yet, there are also a number of addictions specialists who agree with the DEA and the federal bureaucrats who cling to the notion that cannabis really is a very dangerous and highly addictive drug. This editorial is aimed at this second group.
When it comes to those who maintain that cannabis is not medicine, the question before you is “Why not?” I am suggesting that nurses, who accept the placement of cannabis in Schedule I, take a close look at the foundation of their thought processes on this topic. If for some reason, you as an addictions nurse, cannot support legal access to cannabis for patients, please stop and consider each of these questions carefully. Why is cannabis in Schedule I? Where is the evidence to show that it is highly addictive? How can you say that there is no accepted medical use in the US? How can you say that it is not safe for medical use (and don't dismiss this question with the excuse that you can't support smoking a medicine)? Why does the use of cannabis as medicine have to have such a high standard, when patients die every day from the use of common prescription and over-the-counter medications?
Here is a quick review of some of the common concerns:

It can be addictive—Fine, although the addiction rate is low for cannabis, those who have an addiction to it can get treatment.
Medicine shouldn't be smoked—It does not need to be smoked; there are other delivery methods. However, to his surprise, the leading researcher in this area, Donald Tashkin, MD from UCLA, found that smoking cannabis does not lead to pulmonary disease.
It can cause euphoria—That's not a bad side effect of a medication for a suffering patient.
Today's cannabis is stronger now with a much higher THC content—First keep in mind that Marinol is synthetic THC in sesame oil and it is in Schedule III. Second, other cannabinoids in cannabis (especially CBD) tend to modulate the psychoactive effects of THC to dampen them. With proper testing, patients will be able to get the right combination of cannabinoids that meet their needs.
It sends the wrong message to children—Forbidding a safe and effective medication to patients is the wrong message to kids.
People will fake their illness in order to get a cannabis recommendation—They are using it anyway so they might as well be monitored by a health care professional.
The dose may vary with the natural plant—It has such a wide margin of safety this is of little concern and under legal conditions patients and care providers will know the content.
It could be contaminated with mold or other chemicals—This could be a very serious problem that can be solved if and only when cannabis is legal and regulated.

Cannabis is a plant. It's a beautiful green plant that may be long and leafy or short and bushy or somewhere in between. It's great for the environment; its seed oil offers great nutritional value as a source of essential fatty acids; its biomass offers a clean source of fuel; its stalk consists of a valuable fiber for clothing, building materials and more. When grown for its flowers, the buds provide a great source of therapeutic agents from the various cannabinoids, flavonoids and terpinoids. This is the only plant with cannabinoids (phytocannabinoids) similar to the cannabinoids (endocannabinoids) made in our bodies that are part of our endocannabinoid system (ECS).¹

¹For research articles and presentations by cannabis researchers and clinicians go to www.medicalcannabis.com. Also on that site, you will find a link to online continuing education featuring the National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics series through the UCSF School of Medicine's CME website.

Doesn't it seem strange and wrong for our government to actually prohibit this plant? Cannabis is one of the most beneficial plants on earth so how do you justify its eradication? Wouldn't it make more sense (and a lot less suffering) if instead all these efforts went to eradicating poison ivy?Can you actually support the arrest and incarceration of someone for simply growing this plant (and they charge the person with manufacturing a drug)? Manufacturing methamphetamine is a toxic and potentially explosive venture, thus there are concerns about illicit methamphetamine labs. Cannabis is a non-toxic, highly beneficial plant. Wouldn't it simply make more sense for our law enforcement to “protect and serve” us in times of need and therefore focus on persons who commit crimes that harm others? The cannabis prohibition goes way beyond common sense with the inclusion of hemp. When cannabis is grown as hemp for its fiber and seed, the THC content is very low. Hemp farmers would not want any cannabis grown for its higher THC content (for medicine or recreational purposes) anywhere near their hemp crop for concern of cross pollination which would negatively affect their product. Yet the DEA will not even allow hemp to be grown by our farmers. Why not? Wonderful eco-friendly hemp products (clothing, lotions and soaps, hemp seed oil, clean fuel, and more) are available to Americans at a high cost because they have to be imported since we cannot grow the plant in the US. Our farmers in ND and MN look to their northern neighbors in Canada who grow hemp and wonder why they cannot grow this crop which will make them more money and is good for their soil.
Let's get back to the medicinal grade cannabis. How do you say no to an MS patient who is able to ambulate with the help of medicinal cannabis? What do you say when a patient with chronic pain is able to get off oxycontin with the use of cannabis? How do you explain to a patient that he cannot use cannabis even if it is the only medication that is able to control his intraocular pressure and prevent blindness? How do you tell the mother of a young child diagnosed with aggressive behavior disorder that she cannot give him cannabis when it is the only medicine that calmed her child and made the “noise in his head” go away? What do you say to the 30-year-old woman who could not work or drive a car because of uncontrollable seizures, but got her life back when she began using cannabis and the seizures ended? And what do you say to a combat veteran returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, who finds that cannabis is the only medication that manages his post-traumatic stress? Do you simply dismiss them as anecdotal accounts or that they are somehow being manipulated by “legalizers.” When patients ask why they cannot use cannabis do you simply say that it is illegal and ignore the reality that it helped them feel better or function better?
As addictions nurses, we understand the devastating effects of drug addiction or alcoholism and work to prevent or treat this enormous health problem. Any formal education on marijuana has been in the context of substance abuse or addiction. I’m asking that you re-examine cannabis through the lens of a health care professional and that means reviewing the science. Countless studies on the potential risks of marijuana have been funded by NIDA for decades. No serious adverse reactions have been attributable to cannabis that exceed the normally accepted risks related to medications. When conducting patient interviews to get a medical history, do you automatically put marijuana/cannabis under the header of substance abuse history as you were probably taught to do? Or do you ask your patients why they use cannabis and list it under medications when they say they are using it as medicine? When doing a substance abuse history, do you explore what health, social, legal or other problems the patient had with cannabis? Do you differentiate the “legal” problems with cannabis use by determining whether it was caused by the effects of cannabis or simply by the cannabis prohibition? In other words, if a patient with MS used cannabis to lessen the spasticity or pain gets busted for marijuana possession, do you consider that a legal consequence of marijuana addiction/abuse or a legal consequence of the prohibition of this patient's medication? These questions are not meant to infer that cannabis abuse or addiction does not occur, but rather to ensure that you are not making unfounded assumptions about a person's use of cannabis.
Most treatment programs have a zero tolerance for illicit drug use; however there are some clinics in states that have medical marijuana laws that are honoring a patient's cannabis recommendation from a health care provider. A pilot study of some of these patients found that they did as well or better than others in the program. http://7thspace.com/headlines/337214/medical_marijuana_users_in_substance_abuse_treatment.html. This seems to indicate that a patient can use cannabis as medicine and still do well in drug treatment. Historically cannabis was used in the treatment of other addictions—either as an aid in withdrawal from other drugs or as a substitute. In recent years many compassion clubs are finding that their patients have used cannabis to quit smoking cigarettes, get off opioids or cocaine, or to prevent alcohol relapse. The emerging science on the ECS, tells us that this system is critical in helping us maintain homeostasis or balance. Dealing with trauma, poor nutrition (processed foods vs. real food), and environmental pollutants add to our daily stressors and put a huge workload on this important system. Whether it is drug addiction or other illnesses or conditions, cannabis may just be the medicine we need to get our ECS back in good working order.

If a patient has the option of taking a toxic chemotherapy medication designed to kill cells with the possibility that it may kill the patient, how can a patient be denied cannabis, a medication that cannot kill a human? So it comes down to this: Medicinal cannabis—Why not?

REFERENCES	Section:

Bonnie, R.J., & Whitebread, C.H. (1974). The marihuana conviction: A history of marihuana prohibition in the United States. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Institute of Medicine. (1982). Marijuana and Health. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Joy, J.E., Watson, S.J., Jr., & Benson, J.A. (1999). Marijuana and medicine: Assessing the science base. Washington, DC: National Academy Press
National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse –RP Shafer, Chairman. (1972). Marihuana: A signal of misunderstanding. New York: The New American Library, Inc.
Young, F.L. (September 6, 1988). In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition, Docket #86–22, Opinion and Recommended Ruling, Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Decision of Administrative Law Judge. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration.

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STICKY GREENS homepage

(watch this site for a link to the STICKY GREENS Platform Page as it develops.)

— by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)
Announcing a new Green Party Caucus identity group working to Legalize Marijuana & end discrimination against its users, to promote the economic and environmental benefits of Cannabis Hemp, and to convince the Green Party of the United States to fully embrace and promote these priciples.

Today I renounce my lifelong membership in the Democratic Party, recognizing that what has been my Party increasingly panders to corporate elitists and, in serving as shill to those donors, works against the principles I hold dear. How much money would I need in order to have enough to bribe the Party leaders to turn honest? And even that wouldn’t work, because I don’t want Party leadership that responds so disgracefully to money. What I want politically is peace, freedom, human rights, economic justice, environmental protection, and honesty & accountability in Government. With the move I make today I hope to further these goals.
Here we stand at the precipice: Albert Camus’ existential dilemma as described in The Myth of Sisyphus: The most important philosophical question is Should I commit suicide? because, if the answer is Yes, then the other questions are irrelevant. Ignorance on climate issues is such a valued commodity that the US has advanced in this important field to Number One in the world. In many African countries and island nations, 90% of the populace knows how we get Global Warming. In the US, more than 100,000,000 people doubt the science. That confusion helps fossil fuel and chemical companies profiteer off pollution and market extinctions that will include our own, if we don’t stop climate change. The current Administration ignores the climate emergency: After promising responsible conscientious environmental stewardship, it has instead allowed increased emissions of every Greenhouse Gas, and has had its Environmental Protection Agency officially lie about Coal and Nuclear Power, reclassifying them as “Clean Energy.” President Obama this week endorsed corporate-sponsored superstition over science: He declared that he intends to fight Global Warming without limiting any Greenhouse Gases. But the fact is: Greenhouse Gases cause Global Warming: By increasing emissions of every Greenhouse Gas, we Cause Global Warming, not Fight it.
Sunday I attended the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party (GRP) Convention in Worcester. Because I was not a member of the Green Party, my name placard wasn’t colored green. GRP 2010 Gubernatorial nominee Jill Stein, co-chair of the state Party, asked me what she could do to change my placard to green. I do very much agree with Dr. Stein and Green Party concensus on issues. And during her campaign she spoke thoughtfully and forcefully about Legalization. Much more than other political candidates, she favors protecting my civil rights, as a medical user, as a religious user, and as a recreational user. In our informal group from Western Mass’s Pioneer Valley, I saw tireless hard-working dedicated activists in it for the long haul, committed to improving our country and our planet. I have long respected the work of a majority of individuals in the circle. These Are My People. I do belong.
100,000,000 US citizens have smoked Marijuana. The Democratic and Republican Parties do not want our votes. The Greens and Libertarians do want them, but no Party is doing what it takes to get them. Our campaign for Legalizing Marijuana carried 75% of the vote in Amherst, 65% statewide. Gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein only got 1.43% statewide. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties in Massachusetts are shedding members: Independents now outnumber both Parties in the state. 70% of people nationwide have said they don’t trust Democrats and 80% don’t trust Republicans. If only those two-thirds of Massachusetts citizens demanding Marijuana reform saw the Greens as allies, we’d control elections in this state. But people in the Marijuana/Cannabis/Hemp movement largely see the Greens as irrelevant, and are unaware of that plank in the Party’s official platform calling for Legalization of Medical Marijuana and protection of its patients.
Now, we the Green Party, stand at the precipice. Should we commit suicide? The Hemp movement is our natural constituency and its voters make up two-thirds of the state’s electorate. Most of us in the Hemp movement see the Greens as not caring about our rights or the rights of patients suffering and dying from lack of access to medicine. Greens are also seen as lacking important knowledge on the economic and environmental realities surrounding Cannabis Hemp, and in some cases are perceived as lacking working knowledge of Global Warming science needed to talk to certain voters. The Sticky Greens hope to correct these problems, by including on our homepage primers on the science, economics, and bigotry encountered by Hempsters.
At the Convention, our local Greens generated a list of concerns we can work on together locally that were cited in our circle. I made the first suggestion on the list, Legalilzing Marijuana. When emailed copies of the list of concerns arrived, I saw that Marijuana is included, at the end, separated from everything else, looking like an afterthought. This is the prescription for our Party’s extinction. The 20 items on the list above Marijuana all added together can get us 1.43% of the vote. Marijuana gets us 65% statewide and in Boston, 75% in Amherst, 82% nextdoor in Pelham, and 80% in nearby Wendell. I urge Pioneer Valley Greens, the entire Mass GRP, and Greens across the country to learn the language of Hemp activism immediately. And I urge the Green Party of the United States Accreditation Committee to quickly approve and accept our Caucus, as soon as we meet the requirements. We have a spectacular opportunity.
Shortly I’ll go downtown to re-register to vote, this time as a member of the Green-Rainbow Party. I’m posting these ideas to my firedoglake.com Diary blog The Daily Machine, and to MaMaMoJo, which is my partner Rachel Neulander’s non-commercial Massachusetts Marijuana Movement Journal. Beginning today, MaMaMoJournal’s left column is the Sticky Greens homepage. It will include political, historical, and scientific information about Cannabis and its integral relation to energy, climate, food production, health, human rights, and honesty in politics and business. We’ll note its relationship to LGBTIQ issues and racism. Most importantly, we’ll show how science can stop and reverse Global Warming using existing technology, and do it in time if we start right away.
I’m also sending it to our local Greens circle, to Jill Stein and her campaign staff with whom I worked, and to the Accreditation Committee of the Green Party of the United States. The Sticky Greens will quickly become an official local Green-Rainbow Party group when three of us agree to form it. To get Accreditted as a Green Caucus, better able to affect national Party policy, we’ll need 100 members spread throughout 15 states. Reaching 100 members seems easier than reaching 15 states. We’ll try.
To join the Sticky Greens just email shamanslibrary@yahoo.com & display “join” in the Subject window, and you will receive an email newsletter. But joining the Sticky Greens Caucus identity group of the Green Party of the United States requires a little more: (1) Email shamanslibrary@yahoo.com & display “caucus” in the Subject window; (2) if you are not a member of the GPUS, register to vote as a Green Party member within 7 days; and (3) in your email to shamanslibrary, include all of the following info that’s applicable: Your email address, your phone number, your name, your mailing address, and your voting address. Let's have a Party!
I have been a political activist fulltime without pay for decades, having consciously decided in 1978 to dedicate my life to the unending push for human rights, environmental integrity, economic equality, art, and culture. In the early 1990s I toured the country with the Cannabis Action Network at early Hemp Rallies on the early Hemp Tours. In that function I performed and spoke at rallies in 20 or more states, and at 30 or more colleges. Coming off tour, still in the early 1990s, I founded SPACE: The St. Petersburg [Florida] Alliance for Cannabis Emancipation. Two years and five Hemp Rallies later, we disbanded the group having achieved our objective: Educating the press and public on the issue: By our fifth Rally, both our local middle-of-the-road newspapers (the St. Petersburg Times & Tampa Tribune) published editorials favoring complete Legalization. That was in a Republican-majority city in conservative Florida. One of my fellow activists in the Massachusetts Hemp movement, John Leonard, did a study recently showing how Hemp voters can be influenced to vote for issues and Parties they knew little about. We saw how it worked at our state convention, where Katelyn Golsby was the first speaker of the Party’s Campus Leaders. I had met Katelyn and her friend Eric Cameron at the local busstop and invited them to the Rock Opera I wrote and was soon to perform at the University of Massachusetts in an event sponsored by the Cannabis Reform Coalition there. Jill Stein spoke to begin the event, then took questions. Katelyn and Eric left carrying Jill Stein campaign signs. The Rock Opera was the most attended Jill Stein event of the entire autumn campaign. And as one student activist pointed out, we’d have had ten times as many attendees if we’d had two weeks to promote it.

Our Story So Far:

Norman B writes a blog-diary on the Seminal page of firedoglake. He is a longtime political activist and bard poet-performance artist-hedge scholar. He is passionate about history and those ignorant people we are doomed to watch repeating it, classical literature, current affairs, human rights, ecology, greenhouse gases, global warming and other environmental crises and overthrowing multi-national authoritarianism with poetry. He fights the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the eradication of japanese knotweed and other invader plant species.

I, your humble correspondant and editor, Rachel N, am the doting mother of two well grown sons, a former professional fundraiser with The Share Group in Hadley, MA, a member of the International Union of Mail Artists and WORMOAK, Women Opposed To Regular Meetings Of Any Kind. I am passionate about my kids and about Norman, and my community, a loosely knit subcultural global continuum of die hard hippie treehugging seed saving pacifistic anarchistic street theatre performing gate storming video camcording witnesses, ethnomusicological preserving folkloric record keeping cultural archivists of our parlous times.

In our spare time we would like to save the world. We tried opening a channel on Youtube called medicinesocks hoping whatever memes we might emit therefrom to that effect would either immediately save the planet or immediately inspire other people to do so, or at the very least make us instant suddenly famous millionaires. We soon found that YouTube doesn't exactly work that way, or at least not yet. Saving the planet is going to be a real challenge and I don't mean to nag or sound like your mother but this mess isn't cleaning itself up, ya know?

Norman has been working on a book for years, a monster research project that keeps embiggening in scope and depth. It's about global warming and ways to stop promoting it and heal the damages which, in its development, has opened a can of worms most people can barely comprehend. It is hard to keep loving a man whose genius so often elicits blank stares or skeptical downturns of his listener's mouths but I do. I believe he's really onto something significant we all should understand about the problems of anthropogenic causes of pollution and climate change... if you thought the carbon footprint was bad, you ought to get a load of the Other Greenhouse Gases & further noxious poisons we're unleashing. We must be vigilant against the deliberate deceptions of corporate advertising campaigns which tout a new improved so-cheap-it'll-pay-for-itself nuclear industry, clean coal, "safe" fracking, off-shore drilling and the biggest pseudo-green deception of all, the so-called "Smart" Grid.

Norman's research keeps coming back around to HEMP, and the more he looks into it the more he is convinced that growing lots of hemp ASAP could be the greenest, cleanest key to recapturing excess carbon dioxide and getting it out of the atmosphere, and that an abundant, easy to extract hemp derived natural constituent, terpenine, can (and should!) be used to replace and abolish the fastest growing current industrial application of SF6. Sulfur hexaflouride, SF6, is a filthy greenhouse gas which is 34.500 times even more pernicious than carbon dioxide in its environmental impact. Can you guess who makes SF6 and what for? Can you imagine how much money there is to be made in the timely peddling of faux green poisonous solutions to real, global environmental crises? You've heard of the carbon footprint I presume. Pretty bad, that, huh. They tell us they're working on getting Beyond Petroleum (haha, joke) because they care, they *know* now that America can't help it, even Bush said we're all junkies, addicted to this bad druglike product from under the sea and Alaska and the mysterious Orient, called oil, which we need to get from or through domination of places like Iraq, and Afghanistan, where of late we've coincidentally been bombing to smithereens the 'enemy" we presume must be hiding among the veiled women, the poppy farmers in the pay of the CIA, the hungry kids, the goats and sheep and villages we're heroically raiding and razing, in a campaign to win hearts and minds and spread whatchamacallit... where was I?... oh yeah, oil, we're there for the oil, right? Confusing, rather, and that we know, too, how oil leaves that nasty honkin carbon footprint. Which nobody can deny. Make a chart. Depict the carbon footprint in actual relative scale to the giant Bigfoot Monster footprint of SF6, and you'll begin to see, I hope, what Norm's research has uncovered. It turns out SF6 is the chemical they just quietly put into a gazillion soon to be switched on leaky switchgear boxes for those big megalo windmill farms of the future (you've probably seen many slick oil company sponsored ads about them). DON'T BELIEVE WHAT THE ADS SAY, THE SMART GRID IS STUPID! Follow the Terpenine Station Segment of this new Blog for more details.

Personal Narrative:
Monday Morning, in the wee hours.

Pain is.... such a pain.
It feels like talons, or invisible welts left by a baseball bat, on my neck, shoulders, lower back and hips,
and to make matters worse my legs are all thick,puffed up and watery and they will not move at all without cramping, it's hard not to cry... my toes aren't working right, my eyes are all swollen and blurry, my forearms and hands are seizing up and stiffening like claws, my jaw aches, my face hurts.

This is AS, ankylosing spondylitis, with a concurrent flare up of what the rheumatologist calls fibromyalgia- god, I really didn't want that second diagnosis. That's another one of those diseases half the world thinks you're faking and even the believers, the doctor who diagnosed me, for example, can't do much for. Sure, there are pills (... no thank you!) And diets and excercises and theories up the yin yang and even superlative claims on the internet of total cures possible if only you purchase so & so's book.

I buy into the diet theory, believing that yes, you can make yourself feel better or worse depending on what and how you eat. And excercise.. well, that's a challenge when I'm feeling like pulverized crud but I move and stretch and breathe in ways I learned as a youngster practicing yoga and this also is helpful. Sometimes I just stay as still and calm and centered as I can and just focus on keeping breathing, like a zazen practitioner, and that's the only way through the worst moments. My mantram; Don't just do something, sit there!

Most people I know cannot sit still for long without feeling terribly guilty and remiss about the things they aren't getting to. Some people can't help but betray the subtle judgment they feel about inactivity, the suspicion that a person who hardly moves for days on end is really reprehensible... so many of my friends, no matter how exhausted they are will continue to push themselves through harrowing daily routines, complaining cheerfully and swilling coffee at regular intervals (with many wry, self-depracating references to their evil caffeine habits) in order to fuel and sustain the hectic pace of their lives. There is merit and self worth to be attained by pushing through one's tiredness and pain, none in attending to it, or in stopping when the body says to stop. You're never supposed to stop. Everyone I know has a personal narrative in which they heroically fight the overwhelming need for rest and soldier on through a tedious series of obligatory tasks, after all there's so much on the To Do list, so little time to do it all in.

The way I live around my pain is the mirror bizarro world image of that approach. In a world of pain, there is time, lots and lots of it, long elastic stretches of it, and veeeery very little to do in it. A vast stillness. So much time. But it's hard to think when you're in pain. it's hard to organize a thought, let alone a plan...

But I surprise myself, sometimes. If you can't exactly think, you intuit. And what you focus on grows, so I focus away from the pain and do what I love: examples: I talk to Norm, I rub his back, (this has helped him immeasurably and taught him how to massage me...) Intuition is contageous!

Sometimes when my hands free up I can play guitar: while playing, the music is everything, there's no pain.

I cook, I clean haphazardly, water the plants, play with the cats, I talk to one son on the phone and email the other, I make art (drawings, collage), & I made, until recently when the old Mac computer went pop! fizz...croak, videos. I've shot and edited more than two hundred short videos in the past three years...

A few times a year I get civic somehow and with the other volunteers or in whatever context I'm being active I complain cheerfully about how exhausting and daunting it is to do anything, and drink coffee and chime in along with everyone else about the terrible situation out there that we're trying to stop or change or at least wake other people up to that's so much more important than our insignificant (by comparison) aches and pains.

Why did I start this blog? What have I gotten myself into? It's too hard! I try to add more google gadgets, and dammit they aren't adding! Why??? HTML script? What tha heck is that... Wait... No! I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to give voice or fuel of any sort now to the inner saboteur. Shut up, inner sabo.

I started this blog, Dear Reader, because of the pain, mine and not just mine, yours, everybody's, and because of the one thing I know about getting anything done; that if I focus on this project, even a little bit each day, if I pace myself, and rest through the flares of illness, this project, this movement will grow. My little effort will grow it... I wish it were all spiffed up and beautiful already! I wish I had found a way to upload the articles that came in for today. John Dvorak has graciously contributed, Terry Franklin is on board and has promised to write, Norm, too says he'll write something... I wish the *other people* I've contacted would get back to me... (hint hint!)

This Saturday a local wizard who helps folks with disabilities with computer support will be reinstating my home video editing capability. That's good because there's already a whole hour of documented Massachusetts Hemp Historical Narrative sitting in my camera waiting to be edited into pithy zen koan highlights of the discussion and offered up for your perusal.

People, thanks for your attention. I am tired. The pain is huge and amorphous now, and very rude, clamoring for my attention, and I want to resist it and pay attention only to Project MaMaMoJo, but it's time to stop for now. I'm going to put the MaMa, and me, to bed for a while, and allow your kind attention to wander where it will.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Cannabis as Medicine: Why Not?

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