FEATURES DECEMBER 2009

Out of the Cannabis Closet

Marijuana policy reform movement gains momentum
regionally and beyond.

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Bookmark and Share By Leona Baker


Most people wouldn’t peg Anne for your stereotypical pothead.

She’s in her late 50s, politically conservative and a grandmother of four. Yet when I met her for the first time at a Hardee’s restaurant not far from her home in Hampton, it wasn’t hard to pick her out. She was dressed in a soft yellow T-shirt with a floral print on the chest and casual cropped blue slacks, her wavy salt-n-pepper hair swept back into a ponytail. But it was her bent posture and pronounced limp that gave her away.

“I’m in pain every day,” she explains. “I cannot walk from here to the corner without being under extreme stress. I can’t stand for long periods of time without having something to hold on to.”

A degenerative bone disease led to her first back surgery in 2004. Until then, she’d worked off and on as a waitress and a bartender. Afterwards, work was out of the question. Another surgery followed in 2006. Her doctors have suggested she might need a third, but she’s not going for it.

She’s tried traditional pain management. Codeine pills, the morphine patch.

“They’ve tried me on every type that there is.”

Codeine-based drugs caused itching and nausea, which meant more medications.

“I would be taking so many medications that I could not function,” she says. “I couldn’t drive a car. I’d just stay in bed because I was sick all the time.”

So she decided to stick with smoking marijuana. She admits she’d done it casually since she was in her 20s. Now, it seemed like her best and safest option for a decent quality of life. It doesn’t eliminate the pain, she says, it just takes the edge off.

“I have muscle spasms. That’s the worst thing, when the pain gets so bad that my muscles start to spasm. As long as I’m smoking, it relaxes my muscles and I don’t have the spasms.”

The fact that she still has to obtain it illegally frustrates her (her real name is not Anne, by the way), making her a potential poster child for proponents of legalized medical marijuana.

And those proponents—in Virginia and across the country—have become more visible and more vocal in recent months, riding the latest wave of public sympathy for an issue that has drifted in and out of the national debate since the 1970s. Many believe an end to the prohibition of marijuana in the United States is closer at hand than ever.

The Virginia Nurses Association was the first in the country to come out in favor of medical marijuana in 1994. Shortly thereafter, Mary Lynn Mathre, a central Virginia-based nurse and addiction specialist, co-founded Patients Out of Time (POT), a non-profit that has been very active in the fight to reform marijuana laws and green-light research supporting what many medical professionals have long believed are the drug’s therapeutic effects.

 

For the rest of this article see the December issue of Hampton Roads Magazine

 

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