THE HEALING POWER OF POT

In A World Of Chronic Pain, Terminal Disease And Exorbitant
Prescription-Drug Costs, Why Is Medicinal Marijuana Left In The
Lurch? Four Sacramento Pot Patients Tell Their Stories.

It's early spring in Sacramento. Trees are filling out with leaves;
buds are beginning to flower. The morning air is fresh, crisp, clean.
A security guard at a downtown medicinal-marijuana dispensary checks
IDs from behind a security door. A customer slips a card through the
slot. The metal screen unlocks.

"Come on in."

The young man posing as a customer brandishes a handgun.

"Listen up!" the gunman yells. He wants the money. And the weed. He
points the gun at the guard's face. "Do you want to die today?"

Bad move.

The guard may sport humdrum blue-gray garb, but his tattooed arms,
shiny bald head and no-nonsense demeanor hint that he can hold his
own and then some.

"I'm not going to die today, motherfucker!" he yells, reaching for
the man's gun and forcing him to the ground. A scuffle ensues.
Another man armed with a sawed-off shotgun storms into the dispensary
lobby. Two-on-one. Out of nowhere, a patient joins the fight against
the two intruders. Then an employee. The trio wrestles away the
shotgun and force the gunmen out the door. Furniture is tossed. A
stair railing breaks loose. The suspects flee. Thankfully, nobody is
severely injured. Cops arrive. Later, a KCRA helicopter decorates the
cloudless sky.

The robbery attempt is all over the local 5 p.m. news.

"Attempted robbery at pot club! Suspects at large! Stay tuned!"

It's the same old story every time medical marijuana hits the
mainstream media. Missing are the other 364 days of the year that
patients visit Sacramento dispensaries and safely access affordable
medication that significantly reduces dependence on expensive
prescription drugs and dramatically improves the quality of their lives.

Voters approved the use of medicinal marijuana with the passage of
Proposition 215 over a decade ago, yet there's still the perception
of pot as an illicit street drug. For one, medical marijuana is still
illegal under federal law, a fact that makes the Sacramento County
Board of Supervisors nervous. In fact, in March, they refused to
implement the state ID card program in the county, a move that
prescription-pot proponents say decreases safe access for patients.

Missing from the news reports are the patients themselves, who suffer
from a panoply of diseases and disorders, ranging from AIDS to cancer
to post-traumatic-stress disorder. Some of the patients have even
fought for democracy in Iraq, only to return home and find the will
of the people of the state of California thwarted by political
expediency. They're fighting overseas, then returning home broken
physically, mentally, or both, only to be denied the one thing that
brings many of them relief: medicinal marijuana.

Is this a great country or what?

Sgt. Jason Franks regularly traveled Route Irish, a Baghdad
thoroughfare littered with IED potholes, for months without incident.
When he arrived one February morning at Baghdad International Airport
and veered left into a secured area, it was as routine as routine
gets in war-ravaged Iraq. Suddenly, a blinding flash and an
ear-splitting explosion. His truck immediately died, its front
windshield shattered, blown out. Debris rained down. A car bomb had
exploded right behind him. His ears rang like psychedelic chapel
bells at high noon.

Franks escaped unscathed, but the ringing lingered. A year later, in
January 2006, an accident while he was stationed back in Texas
irrevocably altered his life.

"We were moving a bunch of [artillery], and a lot of it fell on me,"
Franks says matter-of-factly. X-rays showed two herniated discs: one
bulging into the spine, the other low on fluid, both permanently
damaged. Doctors were quick to prescribe the holy trinity of
painkillers: OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin. Three times a day. Each.
He became "a walking zombie." The men under his command covered for
him at first, but finally, in July 2007, Franks received a medical
discharge and moved to California.

The prescriptions kept coming.

"[Veterans Affairs] gave me a bottle of 500 Vicodin just like that,"
Franks recalls. He took the drugs, but he felt worse. The ringing
returned. "I've been having ... I'm not going to say suicidal
thoughts, but crazy thoughts, where some guy's gonna piss me off and
I'm going to end up beating him up, like road rage or something
stupid like that," he confesses. A father of four, the veteran lives
with his wife and kids in Citrus Heights. Days-old stubble gathers on
his chin, an Army cap shades his vulnerable-looking eyes. "That's not
me," he says.

Daniel Aquino also knows about physical and mental pain. Last
September, while tubing at Discovery Park on the American River, he
suffered a horrific boating accident.

"I didn't even want to go boating," he laughs now. "Or get in the
water, because I think the water's filthy."

Aquino took his turn on the inner tube, and even had a good time.
Then it was someone else's turn.

"Right when I grabbed the back of the boat I felt a current, and my
foot hit the propeller, the middle of it," Aquino remembers. He
panicked, then screamed. "A rope caught my foot, then the propeller,
which pulled me down into it and caught my swim shorts. I was so
worried about drowning that I couldn't feel the propeller ripping me
apart." He made it to the surface, where he saw his right leg was
torn to shreds. He was relieved: It was only his leg.

"Then I looked down again and realized all my intestines were hanging
out," he says. An ambulance came. "My six-pack was looking so good.
Then that propeller ripped it right in half."

At the hospital, he learned he had permanent nerve damage. Multiple
hip fractures. Aquino was sedated, a vegetable. Morphine. Percocet.
He'd been on pharmaceutical drugs before, so he knew the drill. At
15, he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic--he claims he was
misdiagnosed and blames it on hormones, divorced parents and living
in two homes. "I was just a pissed-off kid," he says. Doctors put him
on antidepressants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. Risperdal.
Haldol. Paxil. Cogentin. Zyprexa. "Take a pill so that you don't get
the side effect from other pills," he explains. "I started going kinda crazy."

Aquino drank and experimented with street drugs. He'd get worse, then
get more prescriptions. By age 20, he was overweight, with man-boobs
and a potbelly. His hair was falling out. "For about six years of my
life, I was pretty much sedated."

In pain, immobile and sickened by the side effects from his
pharmaceutical regime, Aquino decided to seek out alternative treatment.

The same thing happened to Ruby Ring.

"I'm an ex-heroin addict," Ring reveals. "I did heroin for 26 years,
and I've been clean for almost 22 now." Hard drugs; alcohol; new,
harder drugs--Ring's a classic case of self-medication. "At one
point, I was taking 200 milligrams of morphine a day," she remembers.
"When you take a lot of morph, you don't sleep soundly." Add a bit of
Norco and OxyContin, and you're dealing with a powerful Big Pharma cocktail.

Ring was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and surgery to remove tumors
included a complete hysterectomy. She also has hepatitis C, which has
progressed to stage-three liver fibrosis. She endured the flu-like
symptoms of interferon/ribavirin therapy to no avail. "I'm like that
one in 250,000 where the hep C treatment makes you worse," she says.
The treatment failed, leaving her with two new problems: Type 2
diabetes and high blood pressure.

Big Pharma failed Army veteran Louis A. McDaniel as well.

The 37-year-old Louisiana native's come a long way since the first
Persian Gulf war, when he was a 13 Bravo cannon crew member blowing
stuff up at Fort Drum, N.Y. "We didn't have the eye and ear
protection that they have now in the military for the field that I
was in," he explains. "I'm working around an instrument that emits
more sound than any concert you've been to, but I've got 89 cent
Wal-Mart plugs in my ears." Ruby Ring has battled addiction and
illness her entire life. Pharmaceuticals made her a zombie; medicinal
marijuana keeps her on the move. PHOTO BY JEREMY SYKES

Decibels up to 300 MHz, discharge clouds that caused near-zero
visibility and lugging 100-pound crates of ammo across upstate New
York took its toll on McDaniel. "Sometimes we'd have a mission where
we'd have to expend all ammo, which means we would just let off every
round that we had. Just to clean shop." He and his cannon crew would
spend endless hours detonating artillery. Forty-five seconds a cycle.
Hundreds and hundreds of rounds.

McDaniel was medically discharged in November of 1990. He was weighed
down by insomnia, chronic pain and a vision disorder called Fuchs'
dystrophy, which makes objects appear blurry because of corneal
swelling. His eyesight is 20/100 in each eye and getting worse.

"I was completely out of the loop with all the pills I was taking,"
he says. "The Vicodin. Soma. The 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. I
wasn't thinking clearly. I was tired, listless."

In 2005, he moved to Sacramento, quit the drugs and got a
medicinal-marijuana prescription.

This April, UC Davis published unprecedented findings on the
relationship between marijuana use and pain. Thirty-eight
neuropathic-pain patients, with diseases such as diabetes and
multiple sclerosis, were given a high-THC marijuana cigarette, a
weaker one or a placebo. During each session, patients took a uniform
number of puffs. Those that smoked marijuana experienced
"significantly" reduced pain, relief that lasted as long as five
hours, with "inconsequential" side effects.

Other major studies in the past 10 years also have dispelled the
theory of marijuana as a useless stoner drug. Cannabinoids have been
proven to inhibit cancer and tumor growth. Pot's a known pain
inhibitor and can improve quality of life for terminal patients. It
can reduce symptoms of appetite loss, depression, nausea, anxiety.

For McDaniel, marijuana was a last gasp. He quit pharmaceutical
drugs, got a marijuana prescription (or "215," as they say) and began
using a topical ganja cream to heal his ailing leg and ankle. "If I
don't have my medication present--and by medication I mean medical
cannabis--then I'm pretty much stuck in the house the remainder of the day."

He doesn't drive, so he takes light rail from Rancho Cordova to get
his medication at a Southside-area dispensary. That's a lot of
walking, so his leg has to be ready for a workout. Ganja cream, a
THC-based lotion with a mild mango-butter smell, eases McDaniel's
pain for hours. One $12 bottle usually lasts six weeks. For him, it's
nothing short of a miracle drug--especially in a world of
thousand-dollar prescription tabs. "Just dab a little bit around my
ankle and leg when I get out of the shower," he explains. "From the
very moment that I begin massaging it in, I feel results." McDaniel
also smokes and eats food that contains marijuana. And, on that rare
occasion when the pain's too much to bear, he'll make a cannabis-leaf
tea infusion with hot water and honey.

There are two types of marijuana strains to choose from, and each
produces different but beneficial effects. Indica strains are more
effective for relieving pain. Sativa strains work better on mood
disorders. McDaniel smokes indica marijuana as a painkiller, but if
he has to work, he uses a sativa/indica blend. "I'm able to function
through the day regardless what I smoke," he says. "It doesn't make
me a vegetable" or get him too high.

Ruby Ring has been sober for 12 years, off heroin for 22 years and
hasn't used tranquilizers or sleeping pills in six years. She started
smoking marijuana because she was in pain from chronic disease and
her pharmacopeial options were nil. "For me, medicinal marijuana is a
way of functioning," she explains. "I'm not one of those people that
sit on the couch all day, stare at the TV and smoke pot. I like the
option of having an alternative to being drugged out on narcotics."

Ring uses a $700 medical-grade Volcano-brand vaporizer, which allows
a patient to inhale only THC and no smoke. She says the effect of
smoking without smoke is a more calming and therapeutic, which allows
her to function and remain focused throughout the day. "Medicinal
marijuana is not for everybody," she realizes. "Personally, it helps
me tolerate my everyday pain and discomfort."

For Daniel Aquino, pot's a cure-all. When he was 20, improperly
diagnosed as schizophrenic and jacked up on a rainbow of pills, he
became frustrated with side effects and decided to quit all of his
prescriptions and gave medicinal marijuana a try. Pot calmed him
down--no more craziness, unpredictable behavior or zombification. He
could do things; he started working out. "The doctor should have told
me 'go ride a bike' instead of prescribing the pills," he said. No
heat stroke. No dizziness. No high blood pressure. He got a job in
construction. He worked out so much, he eventually became a personal
trainer. By 22, he quit using marijuana, the erratic behavior of the
past behind him.

Five years later, after being chopped up by a boat propeller, Aquino
got out of the hospital, quit the pain meds and went back on medicinal pot.

It eased the pain, but he was depressed. "I'm a personal trainer. All
my friends are personal trainers. All they talked about was 'Hey, I
lifted this today.' I didn't care. Get out of my room." Would he
become his 20-year-old self all over again? "I woke up every morning
in pain. I wanted to cry. I was told it'd be one year to recover."

He lost 20 pounds and loafed around the house ripping blood-soaked
bandages out of his wounds and repacking them with fresh gauze. But
the weed helped, giving him a positive outlook and the strength to
work out. He was "85 percent recovered" after only eight months of
rehab, well ahead of his doctor's prognosis.

In a way, prescription drugs caused more damage than that spinning
propeller blade. "It's pharmaceuticals that actually kill people," he
says. "It's liquor that actually kills people."

That's an opinion apparently not shared by the Sacramento County
Board of Supervisors. In March, the five-member board broke suit with
40 other California counties and nixed a plan to implement
medicinal-marijuana ID cards for patients, which would have ensured
safe and standardized access to medication.

Supervisor Jimmie Yee wore a gray suit and blue tie the day
Sacramento County killed patients' hope for safer access to medicinal
marijuana. On that afternoon, Yee and Supervisor Roger Dickinson
argued for the IDs, but a 3-2 vote by the five-member board voted not
to issue cards to local patients. Sacramento joined 17 other counties
that have sided with the federal government against enforcing state
law. And while patients still can access medicinal marijuana,
proponents contend the rejection of the state card is a major setback.

"There are clear advantages to having ID cards available to patients,
especially in law-enforcement situations," explains Bruce Mirken of
the Marijuana Policy Project. For example, if a patient is pulled
over, cited for marijuana but only has a doctor's prescription, a
law-enforcement officer must verify with the physician the veracity
of the 215 recommendation. If the doctor's unavailable--as so often
they are--the patient may have to spend some time in jail.

With the state ID card, there's no confusion. Patients don't get
hassled, and law-enforcement doesn't waste time or money arresting
individuals who can't be prosecuted.

"To fail to provide these cards, as per state law, is just
irresponsible," argues Kris Hermes of Americans for Safe Access, an
Oakland-based member organization that promotes legal access to
cannabis for therapeutics and research. "This decision does nothing
but increase the potential for confusion and for people who are
entirely innocent to be arrested and put through unnecessary misery."

Supervisor Yee joined Dickinson in support for the ID program, but in
the past had voted against similar programs. "I did change," he
confesses. "It's just that I'm becoming a little more sympathetic to
those that could use medical marijuana in the proper manner. I'm
starting to listen to those that say the use of medical marijuana is
truly a relief."

Currently, only five people in the United States can legally smoke
marijuana. Each month, the U.S. government mails these patients a
circular tin filled with 300 joints. They're the last of a defunct
federal compassion program from the 1970s. Everyone else using pot,
recreationally or medicinally, even in California, is in violation of
federal law.

But in Sacramento, state and local authorities don't prosecute
legitimate patients with proper prescriptions. Neither do they go
after the dispensaries that provide the weed. Problem is, the
dispensaries have to regulate themselves: They pay millions to the
Franchise Tax Board and employ local residents, but the county forces
them to operate in a quasi-clandestine netherworld. "We want to be
regulated," says one dispensary owner, who equates regulations with
safer access to medicine for patients.

Ruby Ring volunteers two days a week at her dispensary. She also
takes advantage of free yoga classes held on the premises, something
she's never done before. "A lot of people think dispensaries are just
places to buy pot," she says. "That's not what it is. You have to
know how to use it to make yourself feel better. It helps me keep
myself involved in life."

Louis A. McDaniel also gives back. After he quit pharmaceuticals and
regained his strength, he became a certified massage therapist and
now volunteers four days a week at his local dispensary. As patients
come and go with bags of medicine, some stop and visit McDaniel's
portable massage table in the surprisingly chic dispensary living
room. The place is a veritable community center.

And the Drug Enforcement Administration could take it away at a
moment's notice.

The last eight years under the Bush administration have seen an
unprecedented federal crackdown on California medicinal-marijuana
dispensaries and legitimate growers, who each day live in fear of
having their businesses shut down, losing their families and going to
jail for 25-plus years. Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has
gone on the record stating he'll force the DEA to end raids in
California. For a patient like Iraq war veteran Sgt. Jason Franks,
safe access is a right he's most definitely earned, if anyone has.

In January 2005, Iraq held democratic elections. For three days
straight, Sgt. Jason Franks guarded a polling place at a local school
on Haifa Street in Baghdad. Franks didn't sleep a wink. "I can't nap
when someone might shoot me."

Later, after the car-bomb explosion and his subsequent back injury,
he was prescribed anti-anxiety meds. Franks couldn't stay awake.
"They gave me some stuff for anxiety, but when I took it, I just
slept all day." Clonazepam. Five milligrams. A hefty anxiolytic dose
by any standard.

A physician recommended that Franks see a medicinal-marijuana doctor,
so he got a pot prescription and headed to his local dispensary. It
changed his life, and he now only takes high-blood-pressure and
stomach-acid medication. He's no longer lethargic or in a quasi-coma.
He has enough energy to be a good dad. "We don't hide it from them,"
Franks explains of his pot meds. "They know what I take. My
12-year-old daughter is open with me about it. She says she likes me
better on marijuana than on the pills."

This week, Franks is hitting the books hard, studying for finals at
American River College. He wants to teach high school, but studying
comes second to being a father. "I wait till my kids go to bed, and
then I have time to do my homework."

Life's still a struggle. He can't go out to dinner with his wife
because he's uncomfortable in crowds. At his kids' school events, he
stands in the back near the door. "I have fear of suicide bombers,"
he says. "It's a seeded fear that I have. I get real anxious, then
it's 'OK, I've got to go.'" He's seeing a therapist for his
post-traumatic-stress disorder. The marijuana helps. He even started
a veterans' meet-up at his local dispensary. They talk and go fishing
near Discovery Park. Things are looking up, thanks to medical
marijuana. He's not sure how he'd get along without it, especially
now that he's been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI, from the war.

"I'd probably end up back on pills, honestly. I hate to say it, but
there's really not much else for me at this point," Franks says. "I
should have the right to access marijuana safely. I fought for that
freedom. That's how I look at it."