BRAVE, PAINFUL BATTLE

True grit comes in the most surprising forms. Alison Myrden, so bubbly and
full of smiles she could light up a room, and one of southern Ontario's
emerging new voices in the battle by activists to have medicinal marijuana
supplied to the sick and dying in Canada, has been fighting chronic,
progressive multiple sclerosis for almost a decade -- with a lot of help
from the weed. So far, she isn't in a wheelchair.

She smokes marijuana every two hours, to ease a crippling facial pain
associated with the disease. She began smoking it seven years ago, and has
watched, too, as her leg spasms have disappeared as a result. Depression,
too, is a major problem for anyone with MS, she said. Marijuana, which she
began smoking daily for medical reasons seven years ago, has helped
easethat as well, she said.

"It gave me back my life," said Myrden, one of 292 people in Canada who are
either sick or dying and who have been granted a federal exemption from
section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act allowing them to
smoke marijuana for medical reasons.

Myrden was the 34th in the roster of seriously and terminally ill to
receive an exemption, in March, 2000. Ottawa began granting them in 1999.
"I had to jump through a lot of hoops. My mother and my doctor and myself
all wrote (Health Minister) Allan Rock, begging for me to have access to
medical marijuana. I was taking over 32 pills a day at the time, and 600 mg
of morphine."

This week, Myrden and her graphic artist boyfriend, Gary Lynch, of
Mississauga, have organized their second annual medical marijuana
fundraiser to help pay legal bills of about $15,000 accrued by Toronto's
Jim Wakeford, a 56-year-old AIDS patient and medical marijuana activist who
has been growing marijuana for himself, and 15 others, including Myrden,
until earlier this year, when York police seized his crop and charged him
with possession and possession for the purpose of trafficking.

Last year, the couple organized a fundraiser at the same tavern for an
ailing Toronto musician who needed marijuana medicinally, and to help him
cover some of his medical costs. They raised $6,000. This year's fundraiser
is expected to raise a similar amount for Wakeford, who is now visibly
emaciated by AIDS but still fighting to make marijuana freely available to
the sick and dying.

"Jim is my hero," said Myrden. "That man has been fighting in the courts on
this since 1998 for access to medical marijuana."

New regulations that went into effect last week give permission to approved
patients, on doctors' recommendations, to grow sufficient quantities for
personal use.

Canada's only legal marijuana growing operation, at a remote site 650
kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, is expected to begin harvesting soon for
tests to determine the crop's potency.

After clinical trials, it will be made available as early as February for
those who qualify for its use as a pain reliever.

"To date, all we've achieved is symbolic recognition of the right to smoke
marijuana as medicine," said Wakeford's lawyer, Alan Young, a professor of
law at Osgoode Hall law school who has represented a number of medical
marijuana users.

Young, in a letter sent to be read at the fundraiser in his absence, said
"the battle still rages on".

"People don't understand that the government did not want to get involved
in medical marijuana and they threw as many obstacles in our path as they
could. Only through our tenacity were we able to cut through the bull and
convince a court that sick people should have the right to choose marijuana
as medicine."

Wakeford and Young plan to take their case to the Ontario Court of Appeal,
asking for the federal government to build protections into the law for
medical marijuana growers.

Myrden, who last year launched a web page called the Medical Marijuana
Mission, constantly needs marijuana. She relies on her widowed mother, who
lives in Oakville, and her boyfriend of 14 years, to help pay for the
marijuana she must buy from illegal sources.

The cost ranges from $600 to $1,200 a month, Myrden said.

"With all my medical problems, I don't want to be a burden to other people.
I don't want people to be carrying my medical marijuana bill, but I need
some help with it."

And without marijuana, she said, she would have no quality of life.

On good days, Myrden can walk a short block. She lives, on a disability
pension, in a two-storey apartment near Guelph Line, with her large devoted
dog Jake, and two cats. She goes up and down the stairs as physical
therapy. She does 200 sit-ups a day. She takes 3,000 mg of efamol evening
primrose oil a day, plus 1,000 mg of salmon oil, which a friend, a
scientist, recommended after doing his own extensive research. She is
determined to make wrong the doctors who predicted she would be confined to
a wheelchair by the time she is 40, she said.

"Any attention for medical marijuana we love, because it gets the word out,
it tells the government we still are sick and dying people, and we still
need a source (of marijuana), that some of us are not going anywhere.
Others who are dying are not going to be fighting for long. I'm not dying."

As Myrden carefully prepares a joint of marijuana to smoke in her apartment
during an interview, her dog lies cuddled at her feet, sound asleep. She
believes her pets, and their therapeutic presence, have also helped her
stay stronger than her doctor or pharmacist every expected.

She isn't shy about taking her message to others. This weekend, for
example, she is a speaker at the third annual Hemp Fest, being held this
year at Sault Ste. Marie, aimed at educating the public about the medical
properties of marijuana.

But she's angry at the government, she said. "They've left us hanging.
We're just sick people who want our medication available to us."

Myrden, a former corrections officer who worked with young offenders in
custody, stopped working in 1995, when flareups of MS forced her into a
wheelchair and to use a walker, for a time.

Asked what her source of strength is, she answered, "I think a lot of it is
the will to get out of bed every day."

She said she believes the evening primrose oil -- the kind that is not cold
pressed, she stressed -- and the salmon oil she takes help keep her out of
a wheelchair. Marijuana significantly eases her facial pain, called
trigeminal neuralgia. "Four per cent of people with MS get this awful pain
in their face. I have it anywhere on the left side of my face, 24 hours a day."

Myrden was first diagnosed at age 28. At the time, she weighed 360 pounds.
The evening primrose oil helped her shed 50 pounds a year, she said, until
she is now at 160 pounds. "My pharmacist calls me a walking miracle. He
thought I'd be dead within three years of meeting me when I was diagnosed,"
she said.

As a result of her Web site, there are some days she has dozens of calls
from strangers around the world seeking information about medical
marijuana. "It has totally changed my life," she said. The marijuana
contains gamma linolenic acid, which is also in evening primrose oil, she
said. It is what she believes is helping to halt the progress of her
disease, as well as help her get through each day.