Medical Cannabis Journal

Speaking Out for Medical Marijuana

By Bradley Doucet (Ontario)

09-10-2010

The above pic is an actual shot from the Treating Yourself Medical Marijuana and Hemp Expo, where I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with Eleanore. The packaging is from Health Canada, Canadian federal medical cannabis is foreign to us patients in the United States.

Eleanor Podmore is a 56-year-old mother of two. She and her husband live in a nice, split-level home in a nice, professional neighbourhood in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. He has a good job working in the insurance industry. She used to work for a major energy company as a manager for corporate locations and franchises for the province of Ontario.

But five years ago, Eleanor came down with a severe case of sciatica, a painful and debilitating medical condition. She could barely move, much less keep working at a job that required a lot of driving.

“My whole left side just shut right down,” she says. “I couldn't drive anymore. It got so bad that I couldn't bend enough to get in the car to drive.”

Marijuana has helped Eleanor in her difficult and ongoing struggle to reclaim her lost mobility. It has helped her in her struggle to get her life back.

Now, she's speaking out in order to let other chronic pain sufferers know what she knows. She hopes that if people like her, credible people, raise their voices, marijuana will start to get the respect it deserves as medicine.

Not that Eleanor just sits around toking up all day. She still uses a whole battery of more typical pain medications, muscle relaxants, and sleeping pills. She also includes swimming, ballet exercises, chiropractic treatments, and massage therapy as part of her regimen in an effort to reverse the loss of mobility she experienced. Thanks to her hard work, Eleanor figures she has regained ¾ of the mobility she lost. But it's been painful every step of the way.

What marijuana has allowed her to do is stabilize her other medication. People in similar situations tend to up their dosages as the pills they take become less and less effective over time. For the last three and a half years, Eleanor has not increased the dosage of any of the other medications she uses. Her liver will thank her later.

Baby boomers in pain

Chronic pain, Eleanor points out, is becoming more of a serious issue now that baby boomers like her are starting to age. “We plan on living a while,” she says. “But I don't want to be in pain for the next 30 years.” Whereas people used to be in pain for the last couple of years of their lives, modern medicine has made it possible to live for decades with many conditions. “This isn't going to kill me,” Eleanor says of her sciatica. “I'm not dying. I just feel like I want to some days.”

Eleanor maintains that marijuana is better at relaxing her muscles and easing her pain than all of her other medications combined. She is even hoping to wean herself off of all her pills by year's end. And she hopes other people her age with similar conditions get the message.

“I'm really hoping a lot of chronic pain sufferers get on the phone to their doctor and ask to see a pain specialist, because they are going to be so much happier,” she says. Marijuana works for chronic pain. It's not a ruse. “I want to shout it from the rooftops, to middle-agers. 'Hey, baby boomers! Remember dope? Good old dope? Guess what? We need it now.'” Most people her age, though, don't know it, because their doctors aren't telling them.

“Do you know how many people there are in their 50s and 60s and 70s whose medicine cabinets look like mine?” Eleanor asks, displaying her many bottles of pills, from OxyContin to Apo-Diazepam, from Toradol to Tylenol 3s.

As more and more people start to experience the benefits of medical marijuana, governments will have to loosen their grip. “It's going to come from my age group,” Eleanor says. “We all did it when we were young, and then we all grew up and went on with our lives, and now we're back and we actually do need it medicinally.” People aren't listening to 18-year-olds, she adds, but people will start listening when it's older people calling for the legalization of marijuana.

Legally stoned

Medical marijuana has been legal in Canada since 2001, but that doesn't mean legal marijuana is easy to get. First of all, you need an ATP (Authorization to Possess) Card from Health Canada, and to get one of those, you need a recommendation from a doctor. Not just any doctor, either; it has to be a specialist.

When Eleanor started supplementing her medication with marijuana three and a half years ago, with her GP's informal blessing, she did so without getting official permission from the government. But she was uncomfortable knowing that she was technically breaking the law.

“It was awkward going through this while raising teenagers who we're trying to teach to be law-abiding citizens,” she confesses, “except this law. We're going to ignore this law.” The family was basically living in hiding, not telling friends, relatives, or colleagues. It never really felt right, and finally they decided to go through the arduous process of making it legal.

It took Eleanor nine months to get her application processed. “Nine months!” she repeats. “I could have had a baby!” She still can't quite believe how long she had to wait. “Have they got one person working in the office for the whole country?” she asked her doctor. “And is he stoned all the time?”

Her doctor was furious that it was taking so long. “As far as he was concerned, he had written me a prescription for pain medication, something he believed in and something he knew was better than all of that,” Eleanor says, pointing to her pile of pills. “And with any other prescription, I could have taken it to Shoppers and I would have had it within the hour.”

But Eleanor is lucky she was never arrested for smoking dope as a young adult. “I jumped through every hoop they threw me to jump through to get this card,” she says. “And the only reason I got it is because I have no record. I'm clean as a whistle. If I had had a drug bust when I was younger, I wouldn't have gotten it.” She thinks this is ridiculous. “From what I've heard, anybody who's had a bust before can't get a card now. Well, how many people is that?”

As of June 5, 2009, only 4,029 Canadians held ATP Cards. [See http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/marihuana/stat/_2009/june-juin-eng.php] “How long have we been promoting ourselves as a medical marijuana country?” Eleanor asks. “For the past decade, we've been going around the world saying, 'We're ahead of the game. We're enlightened. Well, there's a lot more than 4,000 sick people in this country.” Of course, if it takes nine months to process an application, it's little wonder so few cards have been issued.

A mother’s first protest

On March 31, police raided the Toronto compassion club Cannabis As Living Medicine (C.A.L.M.). Although medical marijuana is legal in Canada, and C.A.L.M. has been in existence for 14 years, compassion clubs do not follow the letter of the law. In fact, they can't, since according to Health Canada, [see http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/ftr-ati/_2010/2010_94-eng.php] “holders of a production licence can produce marihuana for a maximum of two individuals,” and “the maximum number of production licences at one site is four.”

Eleanor was incensed by the raid, so she went to her first protest. “I spent most of the day talking to the police, because they were on the sunny side of the street where it was warm,” she recalls. Needless to say, she and her husband stuck out like a couple of sore thumbs.

It was at that protest that Eleanor started to get a little bit more informed about compassion clubs and the work they did. “I started hearing about cancer patients who were dying while they waited for their ATP Cards, and that really upset me.” In addition to pain relief and muscle relaxation, marijuana famously gives people the munchies, which is incredibly beneficial for cancer patients feeling nauseous from chemotherapy.

Eleanor was also very upset when she learned that Canadian marijuana activist Marc Emery had been extradited to the United States. “I think both governments look really bad,” she says. “What a bunch of wimps. I'm disgusted with both of them.” President Obama, she thinks, must have forgotten that he once smoked marijuana.

In fact, she says, waving her arm to encompass the upstanding citizens who populate her neighbourhood, “They've all forgotten. And that's the problem.”

Some days after attending the protest, Eleanor was sitting in a park near her home when she realized that if she pulled out a joint right then and there, all the women around her would immediately begin gathering up their children. “And I thought, 'Oh, that's just all wrong.' Because I could take out any one of my pills and no one would think twice. There really is a perception problem.”

As she sat on that park bench that day, Eleanor decided she needed to speak out. “I'm not Martin Luther King,” she says, laughing. “I'm not Mark Emery either. I don't want to go to jail. That's not who I am. But I think it might help other people in my age group to know there's a different alternative for them.”

Just tax it

Another angle Eleanor thinks should resonate with people her age is the prospect of taxing marijuana. The Canadian pot industry is huge. “Where's the government's cut?” she asks. “We should be taxing this.” Young people might not care much one way or another, not having paid a lot of taxes yet. “But middle aged people get the fact that they've been paying taxes for a while now, and there's a product out there bigger than prairie wheat, and we're not taxing it? We're letting how many billions go every year?”

Indeed, instead of reaping a tax windfall, governments spend millions of dollars every year trying in vain to stamp out the whole industry, and millions more keeping otherwise law-abiding pot-users in jail. Legalization would put an end to all of that waste.

Having seen the issue from both sides now, the only problem Eleanor sees with marijuana is the illegality of it. “Marijuana is not the problem,” she says. “The fact that it's illegal is the problem.”
“I'm not for legalizing everything,” she clarifies, “but I'm definitely for legalizing marijuana. Let's get this money out of the negative financial sector and into the positive financial sector.”

Eleanor also thinks the insurance industry has reason to support the wider availability of medical marijuana. Her husband, who works in insurance, agrees. He's seen what it's done for his wife, how it has set her on the path to getting back to work. If marijuana can get even ten or fifteen percent of people on disability back to work, that's something the insurance industry can get behind.

And how does Eleanor's husband feel about his wife speaking out publicly on the benefits of medical marijuana? “He sees what I've gone through. It hasn't been a lot of fun for the people living with me. Sciatica didn't just hit me. It hit this whole house. And he's been really supportive. He's been great.”

Her kids are just as supportive. When she asked her daughter, who's set to start work on her master's degree in cancer research this fall, what she thought of her mother speaking out, her response was, “I'd be so proud of you, Mum.” Her teenaged son, who is in culinary management at George Brown, echoed the sentiment.

“I wasn't ready to be 85 at 55,” Eleanor says, “and that's where I was.” Thanks in no small part to marijuana, a drug that is still illegal for most and hard to get for all, she has made great strides toward what she hopes will be a complete recovery. Maybe someday, as more and more people like Eleanor Podmore speak out against restrictive government rules and cultural stigmas, we will all be free to pursue our own health and happiness as we—and our doctors—see fit.

© This article is copyrighted by Medical Cannabis Journal 09-10-2010

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zcssvw
Posts: 5

VbXrcSSTKFDgn
Reply #5 on : Tue July 26, 2011, 00:18:27

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Caro
Posts: 5

oODbYTft
Reply #4 on : Mon July 25, 2011, 10:22:42

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That saves me. Thanks for being so sesibnle!

Kacy
Posts: 5

lsIECnKH
Reply #3 on : Mon July 25, 2011, 09:25:27

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Woot, I will craetilny put this to good use!

Prue
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HkdIDMVgnFQM
Reply #2 on : Sun July 24, 2011, 17:11:05

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Heck yeah bay-bee keep them cmonig!

Mick
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EXCELLENT ARTICLE
Reply #1 on : Mon November 15, 2010, 04:59:11

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You are spot on about the joint in the park - its an outdated perception problem world wide. This needs changing, and you and us need to keep pressuring the governments to legalise weed. Not just for common sense sake, but for public perceptions sake also, to change the 'looking down the nose' attitude thats so rife in Australia and I am guessing the USA also. Its a disgrace that older people accept pills but not the 1 drug thats natural and heals better than any other - cannabis. Well done, you are 100% right and don't forget it. The parents at the park are wrong, so wrong. Obama needs to get his back side into gear.
www.legalisecannabis.org.au