PATIENTS HEATEDLY DEFEND SMOKING WEED

She works nights as a nurse in a cancer ward outside Boston, tending to the
sick and the dying. Not a day passes when she isn't asked the same
raspy-voiced question: "How can I get some marijuana?''

Like many caregivers across the state, she guides the supplicant to someone
who can help - a hospital staffer with a stash, perhaps, or another patient
on chemotherapy.

Pot, she is convinced, eases the suffering and indignity of cancer.

"You can really see the difference,'' she said, discussing only on
condition of anonymity the way medicinal marijuana circulates in cancer
centers. "Patients are more interested in food. They do not look so
physically wasted. They engage more with their families.''

As this nurse and others make clear, while the law may deride it, the use
of medicinal marijuana is commonplace in Massachusetts.

Some people, like Robert Angelesco, 50, of Revere, started smoking after
contracting Hodgkin's disease in 1995. For him, as for other cancer
patients, pot mitigated the wretched nausea and wooziness of his drug
treatments. Others, like Marcy Duda, 39, of Ware, turned to pot after
suffering a series of near-fatal aneurysms. A few puffs on a joint, she
said, staved off the debilitating migraines that would otherwise knock her
out for days at a time. "Before marijuana, I was a legal-substance
abuser,'' said Duda, an activist who wears a headband made of silk cannabis
leaves and who makes speeches, leads petition drives and writes to
legislators seeking legalization of medicinal pot. "Demerol, Percocet,
Valium, this stuff was prescribed to me. It left me sick and useless.

"With pot,'' she said, "I smoked a little and 20 minutes later I was
functional for the rest of the day.''

And then there's "C.J.,'' a father from the southwestern part of the state
who was on federal disability for years for bipolar disorder and other
psychological problems before turning to medicinal pot. ``I'm finally off
(disability) and working now,'' said C.J., who asked that his name be
withheld but agreed to be photographed. "It's ironic. Pot has made me a
taxpayer again.''

Duda, Angelesco and C.J. all say they have tried Marinol, a legal
prescription drug in pill form that contains a synthesized version of the
active ingredient in marijuana.

At $10 a pill, they say, it is not only costly but nearly impossible for
nauseated chemotherapy sufferers to swallow. The effect in pill form, they
add, is slower and less soothing than that of smoke.

"Marinol has never worked on anyone,'' said Robert, a 45-year-old Web
designer and distance cyclist from the North Shore who smokes marijuana to
alleviate the asthma he developed after experiencing brain and kidney tumors.

"The docs put me on it, they put me on powerful steroids and
amphetamines,'' he said. "None of it worked. I was desperate. A friend
convinced me to try a little pot, and I couldn't believe the result.''

Robert, a conservative whose neighbors include police officers and state
troopers, said his wife was so skeptical and fearful, she made him stop
using the herb. A week later, he said, his asthma had returned in earnest
and he again lost whole days to illness.

"Of course I asked myself, 'How can smoking be any good for your lungs?' ''
he said. "It doesn't make sense. My daughter is very antidrug. She was
hypercritical. So I researched it. Sure enough, this is a very well
documented phenomenon among people with asthma.

"I don't smoke at work or at home,'' he said. "I'm a responsible adult with
serious clients. I smoke maybe the equivalent of a joint a week. This drug
should be legal. I'm worried all the time about arrest. I can't believe my
government has put me in this position.''