Boston’s own real-life “Weeds”

(Boston Phoenix) Even though it’s a crisp November day, the flower boxes of Mary Jones’s neat little bungalow are overflowing with brightly colored blooms. The bubbly mother of three has her utility vehicle parked in the driveway. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, her blond highlights glimmer in the late-fall sun. She looks like she could be a real-estate broker, and seeing the rock on her manicured finger, I imagine for a moment that her husband is a doctor or a lawyer. Mary would, in fact, be the ideal soccer mom, except that one of her now-grown sons played football, and rather than working in real estate, she grows and sells marijuana.

She’s Boston’s own real-life Nancy Botwin, the protagonist of the Showtime dramedy Weeds.

Mary is no small-time peddler simply adding to her income with a $20-bag here or there. She has dozens of plants, which she methodically harvests every eight to 10 days, scattered throughout the house. She sells her crop to a mature, recreational-using clientele.

Nor, however, is she a ruthless street dealer. Instead, she has a bit of a Robin Hood streak — she gives away her product to those in chronic pain or with severely debilitating disease who can’t otherwise afford it (even paying for delivery out of her own pocket). In doing so, Mary has signed on to an underground, global anti-pharmaceutical revolution that is gaining traction in this country, one which believes that the natural pain relief of marijuana is substantially more effective and less addictive than FDA-approved painkillers like OxyContin, to which the government, doctors, and Big Pharma typically steer sufferers.

Mary’s unlikely path to marijuana advocacy began when, while working in the medical field, a freak accident nearly cost her a leg, and left her with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD), a wretchedly torturous condition for which there is no cure. The National Institutes of Health describes RSD as “continuous, intense pain . . . which gets worse rather than better over time” and as an affliction in which patients can experience “unremitting pain and crippling changes in spite of treatment.”

“They said I’d never walk again,” she recalls.

She was then a patient of the Center for Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and her pain-management treatment was so complicated that her doctors had to work together to coordinate a plan.

“I was on MS Contin and MSIR,” she says — noting two types of morphine, one quick-release and one controlled-release — along with an impressive list of other pharmaceuticals, including Percocet, Dilaudid, Valium, Prednisone, Phenobarbital, Flexeril, Lidocaine patches, Diazepam, Klonopin, and more. Not to mention the stool softeners, anti-nausea pills, and antibiotics for staph infections, all taken to offset her treatment’s side effects.

“I told my doctor [about nodding out at my son's reading group] and he said, ‘That’s good. That’s how we know it’s working. We want you to feel like that, so you’re not aware of the pain. That’s what pain management is for.’ ”

But she grew more and more frustrated with her walking-comatose-like state, until a doctor suggested that she try marijuana to help control the pain. The idea did not appeal to her at first. Since her Catholic high-school days, she’d thought smoking anything, even cigarettes, was “gross.” And she’d always been anti-drug, especially since becoming a mother. But she was desperately unhappy with how dysfunctional she felt while on the pills, so she gave pot a chance. It wasn’t long before she was making the transition from morphine to marijuana.

I spoke with her son Peter, now 19, who enthusiastically supports his mother’s journey from pill popper to pot user. “Before my mom started smoking, and she was on the pain pills, she was pretty zombied out,” he says. “She stayed in her room a lot. Marijuana helped her be a parent again.”