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(More customer reviews)What if you had an illness that caused you pain, made you unable to eat, and was going to cut your life short, but there was an herbal medicine that could provide relief of the symptoms? Would you use it? What if using the medicine was a crime? George McMahon doesn't have to worry, much, about that. He has a strange congenital illness called Nail Patella Syndrome (NPS), which clogs his kidneys, causes his bones to break with little stress, and brings on muscle cramps and chronic pain. The federal government provides McMahon with the medicine he needs to ease the symptoms and live a relatively normal life. Only six other patients get it, because the federal government frets about the medicine - it has no worrisome side effects on McMahon, but the government worries that others will use the medicine as a drug to get high. McMahon is one of seven people in the United States who can legally smoke marijuana. How this came about, the difficulties it has presented for him, and the problems of other patients who could use the drug if they could get it, are the subject of _Prescription Pot: A Leading Advocate's Heroic Battle to Legalize Medical Marijuana_ (New Horizon Press), which McMahon wrote with his friend Christopher Largen. Read it and you might not think of marijuana in the way you do now.
Demerol and Percodan worked for the pain of NPS (codeine made him throw up) but they also put him into a brain-addled haze. In the sixties he smoked pot; although his fellow tokers got intoxicated and giggly, he simply got... better. The spasms eased, the pain was not so debilitating, and he could move around more. But it worried him. He didn't want to have a problem with drugs. Looking back on it, he knows he should have been concerned by the prescription pills he was swallowing which made him a junkie. He eventually found a doctor who jumped through all the paperwork hoops to enroll him into the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program. Eventually, the doctor started receiving shipments of McMahon's medicine, ten joints a day. It continues to be his regimen, and he continues to do well.
McMahon's story isn't proof that marijuana works as medicine; it is actually just one anecdotal case history, though it is told with appealing humor and modesty. There are the stories of others told here, just as anecdotal (and some from those who have to get the pot illegally), but also just as affirming. However, there have been a limited number of studies on the few patients who get the drug legally, and the data is not just anecdotal: glaucoma, chronic pain, anorexia, nausea, and spasms can all be helped by it. That seems to make little difference to the government. In 1992, the legal medical marijuana program was closed to new applicants by the first Bush administration. The problem, as the White House saw it, was that there were too many new applicants because of the AIDS epidemic. The real problem is that the government has trouble accepting that marijuana can be anything but bad. It does not seem to matter that these patients could all be getting prescription joints, grown in a federal facility, rather than being doped up on other medications. Marijuana cannot be made easily available as a medicine, because non-patients enjoy it for fun. Given the sorts of scientific studies reported in books like _Understanding Marijuana_, continued heavy criminalization of pot use makes little sense, but as _Prescription Pot_ shows, denying it to patients who need it is simply immoral. McMahon goes out on the stump to try to convince legislators of the benefits of the marijuana he is lucky enough to get legally, and his and Largen's book is yet another part of that program. It is hard to disagree with it; patients simply deserve this option.
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