First it was Marie Claire magazine with their “Stiletto Stoners”, followed by a sympathetic follow-up on the NBC Today Show. Now* Elle Magazine prints 2,758 words from another Stiletto Stoner who has discovered that cannabis is a superior medication for her generalized anxiety disorder than the Zoloft and Paxil her doctors had recommended.

(Elle Magazine) A thimbleful is all it takes. After a day’s work, I pinch off a small amount of marijuana and put it in a steel-tooth grinder. The flowers, covered in tiny white diamonds of THC, release a piney scent when crushed. I turn on the TV, and instead of taking a glass of wine with my evening news, I take out my vaporizer and set it on the coffee table.

One could say I diagnosed myself in high school, when I recognized my symptoms in a psychology textbook. Finally, I had “generalized anxiety disorder” to describe the dread I felt of some future event that was overtaking my present. I usually sensed the panic attacks first in my chest. Then my vision would start to go to static, and my body would crumple to the floor. There I’d ride it out until the adrenaline ran its course.

Soon after I started to suffer several of these episodes a day (and so often that fear of another one kept me indoors), I sought out a psychiatrist. I told her about the times I’d be driving and convince myself that I was about to spin off the road—the looping, invented terrors. A little talk therapy and a prescription later, I discovered that Zoloft only exacerbated my panic and depression. I stopped taking the little white pills and cut out caffeine instead; I exercised and practiced meditation. For years I abstained from medication, and aside from the occasional pot smoking with friends, I swore off drugs entirely.

About four years ago, another psychiatrist put me on lithium for what he described as my “Paxil-induced hypomania.” When it made me violently sick, I decided I needed to replace pills altogether and turn to a regimen that relied on what was, to me, the only proven drug. I headed down to the five-block stretch of marijuana advocacy groups known as “Oaksterdam.” There, I explained to an understanding doctor, wearing Lennon glasses and cargo shorts, that marijuana eased the symptoms of what studies showed and I knew to be a genetic disorder. (My two younger brothers have been diagnosed as bipolar, and my grandmother suffered from anxiety and depression.)

The writer continues by explaining how she is able to keep her job and be productive thanks to marijuana, and that her friends that use marijuana are all successful productive people she’s proud to know.  She worries about the legal complexities, especially how the California Ragingwire decision still allows employers to fire people for their medical use.

From a media standpoint, I believe when you’re having women speak favorably of marijuana in Marie Claire, the Today Show, and Elle Magazine, you’re winning the hearts and minds.

*By “now”, of course, I meant July 18, 2008, when this article was written.  I really need to watch the bylines on these stories that I pick up off the Fresh Stash.

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HELENA — A bill that would increase the amount of medical marijuana that registered patients can possess cleared its first hurdle on Friday as the Senate Public Health, Welfare and Safety Committee passed the measure on a 5-2 vote.

The bill also adds to the list of chronic or debilitating medical ailments the drug could be used to treat, including diabetes, post-traumatic stress disorder, hepatitis C, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, agitation of Alzheimer’s disease, nail-patella syndrome, dysmenorrheal, anxiety and insomnia.

The original form of the bill sought to increase possession limits from 1 ounce to 12 ounces. The committee passed the measure after adding an amendment by Sen. Dave Lewis, R-Helena, which limits to 3 ounces.

Lewis told the committee that he didn’t intend to look carefully at the bill until after hearing from a friend and constituent who suffers from ovarian cancer.

“She slipped a note in my pocket that said this method of treatment was the only thing that was keeping her sane,” Lewis said.

He said he then spoke with law enforcement officials who said they would be satisfied with a 3-ounce possession limit.

“I’m hoping to … at least try to get some support for the bill,” Lewis told the committee.

The measure passed with Lewis and Sen. Terry Murphy, R-Cardwell, siding with the three Democrats on the panel to vote in favor of the bill.

via Panel OKs medical marijuana expansion | greatfallstribune.com | Great Falls Tribune.

I am really happy to see anxiety, insomnia, and PTSD being added to the qualifying conditions.  A three-ounce limit is still too restrictive for the neediest patients, but any increase from an even crueler one ounce limit must be applauded.  When these law enforcement types oppose higher limits, I wish they could understand that lower limits just help subsidize black marketeers.

At a 24 ounce limit, a patient can grow and store enough medicine to make it through a few months, and donate medicine to other patients, keeping all of them away from the small-volume street dealer.  At a one ounce limit, a patient is constantly forced to keep acquiring small amounts of medicine.  Since marijuana plants don’t produce one ounce at a time in a time-released fashion, this means patients sometimes have a bounty of so much medicine they are in violation of the law.  But most of the time they have to go without or try to find an ounce or less from a dealer.  A weed dealer would love to have a returning customer buying the smallest amounts that net the highest markup.

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“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

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