[Charles] Monson, 45, was paralyzed in 1979 when he and a friend decided to go for a swim. “I dove under a wave, hit a shallow spot and broke my neck,” Monson recalls. “I was paralyzed instantly and was floating face-down.”
Monson, who is confined to a wheelchair and has lost most of the use of his hands, tried to remain active. Nevertheless, he says he lives in constant pain and discomfort.
“My brain isn’t able to constantly able to monitor the muscles in my legs,” he says. “Any little stimulus like being touched or moving my wheelchair or sitting still for a while and then moving will trigger a muscle spasm, big ones, that will yank my body to the side.”
As a result, Monson was chronically sleep-deprived to the point of falling asleep behind the wheel of his specially equipped van. Doctors prescribed muscle relaxants and various other seizure medications, but Monson says he didn’t like the side effects.
“I had tried Valium, Baclofen, Gabapentin. That gave me a sense of not being sharp in my mind and just feeling kind of woozy,” Monson says. “I tried Marinol, which is synthetic marijuana. It’s very hard to dose. It’s either not very effective, or when it gets to the point of being effective, you’re loopy.”
Monson says a friend recommended marijuana in the 1980s and after trying it, he said he found relief: “I smoked it in bed and I slept better than I ever had. The other thing that makes cannabis so much more effective than any other of the spasticity drugs is that it allows me rather than just treating my spasticity to manage it.”
So naturally, on October 30, 2007 at 7am, police were dispatched to the home of this legal California medical marijuana patient, armed with assault rifles and bullet-proof vests, handcuffing this quadriplegic man and his care provider, and ransacking the house to discover 16 plants, 2½ ounces of medicine, and an elaborate grow system. After confiscating it all as evidence, the district attorney declined to prosecute the case.
Now Charles Monson can add post traumatic stress to his list of ailments, as the raid so terrified him that he refuses to grow again until his case is resolved. He fortunately has the assistance of a local dispensary, Nature’s Wellness, which itself was raided by the DEA back in March.
If only the Orange police department would get the message that the district attorney clearly has: the people of California passed Prop 215 partially because they thought SWAT team raids on quadriplegics were cruel and unnecessary.
