USING CANNABIS TO TREAT HEALTH PROBLEMS

There was a time when I despised the smell of marijuana;
inconveniently, it coincided with my college years.

So it would probably surprise those who knew me then as a
violin-playing, straight-A student to discover that today, at 33, I
cruise the streets of Los Angeles with a pot prescription. Then
again, maybe it wouldn't. But it surprises me.

As the child of pianists who took trips to Carnegie Hall while others
tripped out to The Doors, I always thought of marijuana as a "gateway
drug", a bad weed that could only lead to suicide or, worse, failure
in the arts. When I gave it more of a chance in my late twenties, it
wasn't to boost "creativity". In fact, I don't even know if I like
cannabis yet, given all of its strains and forms.

Late last year, I simply began to experiment with it in search of
relief for some vexing medical symptoms.

I was living in the right city at the right time, to be sure, but I
lacked the positive and extensive marijuana history that so many of
my peers enjoyed.

In 1999, I took my first hit as a college junior from a pipe that
belonged to my younger brother.

At the time, I was feeling even more invincible than other young men:
I had recently survived Hodgkin's disease and a stem-cell bone marrow
transplant, following sub-lethal chemotherapy and a failed romance
with an engineer. If I could endure such objective toxicity, I
reasoned, something natural couldn't cause too much harm. I was
right, but all I remember is coughing like an emphysema patient and
obsessing about (imagined) cockroaches on my walls.

A few years later, I tried pot again, while working in Manhattan as a
music writer.

But after a similarly bad experience at a Radiohead concert, with my
undead pal the Maharishi, I ended the relationship.

Then my life changed dramatically: in 2005, after I moved to Los
- -Angeles, I began to experience the onset of mysterious after-effects
from my "cured" cancer, including peripheral nerve damage and a
potentially malignant lesion in the base of my skull, something that
few doctors could make sense of, much less treat.

Fortunately, California life proved to be therapeutic in itself: I
found solace in the sylvan hills, the surf, the Pacific dolphins.

My new crowd included more creative, fewer type-A people.

And of course drugs were every-where. The first day in my new
apartment, I "lunched" at a neighbouring rocker's pad. In a scene
like something out of Annie Hall, he offered me a dent out of a
miniature Matterhorn of cocaine.

Later that winter, I attended a Christmas party at the home of a
wannabe-dancer-turned-television production assistant. Instead of the
usual ornaments, her Christmas tree dangled bags of weed, joints and
hash. "How'd she get all that stuff?" I asked a studio musician. "She
goes to one of those, like, medical places. She's 'sick' with 'insomnia'."

"Opposite world" is how my New York-based brother described my new
dimension. He was on to something.

Not only did everyone seem to survive in this city without a job, but
the green crosses on storefronts with signs reading "Compassionate
Care Collective" weren't advertising chemists.

It was a new century, and these were a new breed of "legal" medical
- -marijuana dispensaries stores that sold medically approved weed in
California even though the drug was proscribed under US federal law.

As pot shops spread, there was a growing pride in the laidback
medical--marijuana subculture, with everyone from celebrities to
staid professionals indulging as rampantly as the TV show Weeds
- -featuring a pot-dealing soccer mom would have you believe. Gourmet
chefs offered "secret" upgrades on the pot brownie; weekend classes
sprang up to teach medical-marijuana business skills; you could buy
$100,000 cultivation trailers at dedicated trade shows. Hand in hand
with all this came a growing public acceptance that cannabis could
help people with chronic conditions, from cancer and multiple
sclerosis to Aids and attention-deficit disorder and a tacit
acknowledgment by LA authorities that the legal ban would henceforth
go largely unenforced.

The medical marijuana system was easy to work. All you needed was a
doctor to recommend cannabis to treat diagnoses as vague as pain,
anxiety or insomnia.

Then, you could join a local "collective" and take your pick from
different varieties of medical-grade weed, which in some places you
could buy with a credit card. To find a doctor, you could visit a
dispensary for a referral if you didn't want to cold-call a number
from an alternative newspaper or road sign. Professional weed doctors
charged $100-$250 for a recommendation letter that was valid for a
year. Some even provided a credit-card-sized version.

Armed with that, you could buy nearly as much marijuana as you liked
(up to 8oz) in various forms, including starter plants.

It was revolutionary: stronger strains, more choice and no drug dealers.

Of course, it could have been all that vitamin D shining down on me
as I worked poolside, but if LA culture and chronic illness had
taught me anything, it was that people should live as they like; I
wasn't about to crusade against abuse of the medical marijuana laws,
particularly when long, expensive visits to the country's best
hospitals had failed to relieve my legitimate neuromuscular symptoms.
But I was also victim of a cognitive disconnect: after seeing how
successfully chemistry and -physics cured cancer, I didn't think much
about alternative medicine.

And so I watched the medical marijuana scene from afar, my nerves and
muscles continuing to scorch and twitch under T-shirts and denim.

Then, in 2006, a men's magazine sent me to Virginia to report on a
religious teenager with Hodgkin's disease who had been taken into
temporary custody for disavowing chemotherapy in favour of herbs and
natural food. I soon found myself ensconced in the case and wanted to
take my health into my hands using "natural" means.

That led me to Donald Abrams, head of University of California San
Francisco's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, a conventionally
trained oncologist who had also studied under wellness guru Andrew
Weil. Abrams put me on a successful anti-inflammatory diet and
recommended acupuncture. But unbeknownst to me at the time, he was
also a prominent cannabis researcher whose studies confirmed the
plant's success with easing neuropathic pain.

And so, last winter, when I decided to give my mystifying skull-base
lesion more attention by scheduling an innovative procedure with a
leading neurosurgeon, I contacted Abrams, too. By this time, my
attitude towards pot had matured: if I could authorise a doctor to
drill into my head and suck a tumour out through my nose, how bad
could weed be? Still, I wanted to go about this properly, by first
asking a trusted expert whether this "treatment" could actually help.
I sent Abrams an e-mail, and within minutes received a resounding
affirmative along with a digitally signed letter on UCSF letterhead
recommending medical marijuana for pain. For once, it was enviable to be me.

Walk into West Hollywood's premier dispensary, The Farmacy whose
owner was a pharmacist before becoming a cannabis entrepreneur and
you could be in a Malibu cafe. There's a well-lit waiting room; the
couches are chic and comfortable; and the light-wood grain of the
furniture blends calmingly with surfboards and black-and-white Ansel
Adams-style photos on the walls.

On my first visit, last December, a smiley woman who looked like
Alanis Morissette was sitting at reception.

In front of her stood a jar of quarters for people who needed coins
for the parking meters. After some pleasantries, Alanis took my
recommendation letter, phoned UCSF, and had me sign in. Then she gave
me a "passport", a customer loyalty card of sorts: stamp it after
each purchase so you can earn a free score.

I also received an introductory discount coupon, and soon was
escorted behind a wall into the actual store: a pot-smoker's
dreamspace replete with a quasi-coffee house counter, gourmet
chocolates in a glass case, a refrigerator filled with marijuana
soda, and a freezer storing marijuana gelato.

The clerk, or "budtender", asked about my "preferences". A deadringer
for the actor James Franco, he looked unfailingly chill. "Nothing too
strong," I said. I explained my symptoms and that I'd heard about two
opposing types of marijuana indica and sativa the former more of a
downer, the latter more like an upper.

"I want indica," I said. I wanted to slow overactive nerves.

Franco nodded and let me smell three different strains.

One smelled like lavender, another like peat. I took the most basic.

Franco seemed confident that it would work and also sold me marijuana
chocolate bars with almonds.

I bought the "edibles" because I don't like smoking anything, really,
and because I lacked an expensive vapouriser such as The Volcano, a
$700 product that today's upscale weed-lovers use to inhale the
active ingredients in marijuana without the ash. In minutes, I was in
my car, and within the hour I was home, eating a confection with my
wife in front of a documentary film. My crampy muscles soon relaxed,
yet I remained completely lucid.

No giggling, no forgetting. No paranoia.

Three days later, early on Saturday evening and I'm ready to go to
the next level. so far the Farmacy chocolate bars have worked well:
Divided into single "doses", they gradually ease my peripheral
nerves, which often feel like fraying electric wires shorting out,
sizzling, popping.

I don't experience a "head high" (no imaginings or unprovoked
laughing fits) and I'm now confident enough to try the Farmacy weed.
It's called Sensi Star, which Google tells me took first prize at the
1999 High Times Cannabis Cup. But what do the experts say about how
it actually works?

Well, according to the Marijuana Strain Library at the site
Kindgreenbuds com (the world's leading cancer experts have yet launch
a weed site), the strain's THC levels hover around 20 per cent (THC
is marijuana's most active ingredient), rendering it a "one-hitter
quitter" while its CBD content measures 0.9 per cent (CBD, another
but less prominent active ingredient, has been shown in studies to
alleviate pain and inflammation, and appears in Sativex, a mouth
spray available in Canada for multiple sclerosis patients). Of
course, I don't know what any of this means, really, but this is
already more than I learnt at the dispensary simply that Sensi Star
is "really nice".

I smoke while my wife works on her dissertation. I forget the
"one--hitter quitter" rule and soon I've taken enough to fill up half
my glass pipe's bowl a small proportion of the eighth of an ounce
that I had purchased.

I take rapid inhalations I'm not just bad at smoking, I'm annoyed
that I'm bad at smoking; California hasn't killed all the type-A in
me. So, gallantly, I smoke more, and 20 minutes pass.

Suddenly, I'm calling out for my wife. "I don't know what's
happening," I stutter. "Everything's changing; I'm for-forgetting;
everything I say; wait, what did I...? Maybe we should put those
knives away; they look sharp!" I point to the cutlery on the kitchen
counter, terrified, watching my hold on my consciousness slip away.
I'm walking forward and backward, and obsessively shifting from one
leg to another. "I'm dying; I'm not me, please save my life!"

I don't know who I am, and as Lina starts to rub my arms, asking me
if I feel her hands on my skin (I don't), I wonder who she is, too.
This isn't paranoia.

I'm crying one moment, laughing hysterically the next, my "self"
plunging deeper into the abyss. "Please take me to the hospital," I
scream. "I am losing myself, who am I? Ha! Oh shit, this is getting worse.

It's faster.

It's faster!"

I'm lucky that Lina, a psychotherapist knowledgeable about substance
abuse and psycho-pharmacology, doesn't tell me that she's never
witnessed such a severe reaction; what she would later describe as
"part-temporary psychosis, part-temporary dementia". I look at her in
a newly 3-D rendering, no James Cameron necessary, and for one
pleasant moment, think, this is one attractive girl; it might be nice
to kiss her.

Lina calls The Farmacy. "Awww man, that SUCKS," the budtender says.
"Do you have any bananas?" The potassium in them, he explains, could
help. The weed I smoked was "too stimulating"; my high could last all
night. Oh, and put on some soothing music. "Just no Alice Cooper," he
warns. "Once, someone did that for me, and it freaked my shit out."
Lina remains dubious, but has me eat bananas and drink water.
Meanwhile, I'm seeing colours I don't recognise and I lack a sense of
time or spatial depth.

One minute feels like four years.

And it's getting worse, rapidly. "No it's not," Lina says. "Just
relax, it's slowing down." Later, Lina will tell me that she was
lying; my erratic personality changes were getting more frequent and
were scaring her.

Six hours pass, and Lina calms me with trivia questions from a
Seinfeld game. I get all the answers right.

By midnight, I'm drowsy, but only after I pop 0.5mg of clonazepam, an
anti-anxiety pill that my neurologist prescribes for muscle twitches.

The next day, I awake feeling normally stoned.

I am "burnt" all day, as stoners say: sensitive to light, giggly, tired.

But I don't experience pain or twitching or cramps, and my muscles
feel like whipped cream cheese.

I tell Lina that I am "off pot for ever", but I am already basking in
what it feels like not to have to worry about my symptoms.

Maybe I will try weed again.

It's 24 hours since my first puff of Sensi Star, after the scariest
night of my life, about which I feel terribly guilty, but I'm already
breaking my promise. "Maybe I didn't buy the right kind," I say.
"Maybe I smoked way too much?"

"You are not trying that stuff again," Lina says.

How can a drug work this way? How come we don't know more about it?
How can I learn about types and dosage?

Do I have to survive nights like this just to build up my tolerance
so it eases my symptoms but doesn't drive me batty?

Come February, I'm back from successful brain surgery the only
experience that I might call scarier than My Highest Night. I'm
currently on a break from experimenting with anything; normalising.
The one thing I don't forget, however, is how, for all of their
psychoactive properties, the hospital's extremely addictive and
dangerous narcotics didn't help my headaches or nerve pain. At home,
painkillers and gabapentin, a popular neuropathy drug, are only
mildly effective.

Recently, Californian activists won a chance to vote on legalising
marijuana completely come November. This, after the city council had
just approved a new law to limit LA's dispensaries to 70, requiring
hundreds to close, and creating "buffer zones" around schools.

The city hardly has the cash to raid each dispensary operating
illegally. But it will probably threaten injunctions. The mayor,
reticent on this issue for years, has signed on, too.

It's a curious predicament: a massive amount of research and
education remains necessary to persuade some people to think of pot
in a constructive light.

But the economic benefits of taxing marijuana may actually drive
voters to legalise the drug this autumn.

In the meantime, I've met a number of other LA residents using
marijuana for legitimate medical reasons, operating happily and
productively here in Opposite World. A 23-year-old multiple sclerosis
patient studying to be a therapist offered me a compelling argument
for marijuana reform: "This in-between state does not work," she
said. "Pot helps, but even though my neurologist wants me to use it,
she wouldn't officially recommend it. I try new kinds often, and take
as little as possible, especially at work." A 30-something composer
for Hollywood movies who uses low dosages to stay pain-free agreed.
"I'd hate to have to use a drug dealer," he said. "And I don't want
chemicals in my body."

Despite my oh-so-exciting adventures, I'm still interested in
learning more about marijuana, especially if I can find a strain that
helps and doesn't induce (any additional) insanity.

Abrams recommends more CBD and less THC. "The THC is what's
psychoactive," he says. "Cannabis has functioned as medicine for
2,700 years. It's just the last 70 years that it has been considered
something else."

I just hope the new crackdown and potential legalisation keeps prices
low and availability high. I already pay way too much for
FDA-approved drugs one a branded version of an element from the
periodic table that currently costs $200 a month.

Who knows?

Blending cutting-edge interventions surgery and neurologists with
something old and legitimate might work. I'll just have to make sure
that in the future I ask more questions and stay well away from Alice Cooper.