Cancer Patient's Message:

MEDICAL MARIJUANA REALLY DOES HELP

Partway up the Ninemile Valley west of Missoula, in a house tucked in
a fold of the wooded mountainside, Roger Chalmers lies in a dim,
shuttered bedroom, awaiting the end.

His skin is ashen, his beard white, his face slack. A small,
rectangular plastic controller rests in his lap, its attached wire
snaking to a rack behind him where hangs his "pain bag" - a sack of
the powerful painkiller Dilaudid, which slowly, mercifully drips into
his abdomen via two tubes, damping the red-hot pain caused by the
late-stage cancer that has spread from his kidney into his back, his
hip, his shoulder, his bones.

But there's still another fire in Chalmers' belly, one that he
doesn't hesitate to enunciate the moment a newspaper reporter walks
into the room where he will likely die.

"I hate to see this great state fold underneath us veterans again,"
he says, his voice urgent yet as soft-edged as a yawn. "Not that it's
exclusively a vets' issue; but it's been a touch-and-go kind of
experience with the medical marijuana here in Montana. One day it's
sanctioned, one day it's not. The country backed out from us before,
and now they're doing it again. I'd like to see our state get behind
the issue like it cares; because marijuana is truly the only thing
that has really helped me get through."

Thirteen months ago, at the very time when concerns over the
exploding growth of the medical marijuana industry were becoming a
hot-button political issue in Montana, Chalmers was diagnosed with
renal carcinoma. By then, the disease was in its so-called fourth
stage - the most advanced stage before death.

Ten chemotherapy treatments later, Chalmers has reached the end of
his treatment options. He won't get better.

He only hopes to live out his remaining days in relative comfort in
the "little dream castle" he shares with his wife, Ada Marie, and an
assortment of affectionate pets.

About 140 miles east of here, Montana's state legislators are
gathered in Helena, considering bills that would either repeal the
voter-approved law that legalizes the medical use of marijuana, or
severely curtail the industry that has sprung up to serve Montana's
28,000 registered medical marijuana users.

While that game of political football plays out, Chalmers can't even
make it to the sidelines. His strength sapped, he hasn't walked in a month.

Yet, if voters who passed the medical marijuana initiative in 2004
had any mascot in mind when they cast their ballots, it was surely
someone like Roger Chalmers, a man who served his country dutifully
for 10 years, who has no interest in getting high but rather just
wants to peer through the veil of pain and sleep through the night a
little while longer.

"The marijuana is by all means the only good thing that has come
along to help me out," he says. "It puts the lights out at night for
me where this other drug (Dilaudid), we're still struggling with it.
Marijuana helped me get my appetite back.

"I'm out after this stage," he says, his eyes scanning slowly,
blankly, back and forth. "It's taking me apart piece by piece. It's
terrible to have to point out how do you hurt, where do you hurt, are
you hurting today? The constant answer is, 'yes,' I hurt. And in
knowing that things are going to be turned upside down, it just makes
it worse."

Even before he was diagnosed with cancer, Chalmers was no stranger to
the medical benefits of marijuana. That's because, for decades now,
he was no stranger to the chronic maladies that are most effectively
treated with medical marijuana.

It all started for him back in the early 1970s, when he was still in
the Air Force, serving as a weapons control officer in Korea during
the Vietnam War.

"I was out working on the runway, and they issued us flight frames -
these partially dark glasses," he recalls. "When I put those on, I
could tell right away there was something going on with the light and
being relieved of it. After that, I couldn't not be in sunglasses."

After consulting with doctors, Chalmers was diagnosed with glaucoma,
a disease that causes painfully high fluid pressure in the eyeballs.
Untreated, glaucoma can eventually lead to blindness.

Shortly after his diagnosis, Chalmers met with a base doctor who
quietly suggested he try marijuana to relieve the pressure in his eyes.

"At first I was like, you're shitting me," he recalls. "So one day, I
came in for an eye pressure reading and he took me home to his house
for a quick lunch and we smoked. When I went there, the pressures in
my eyes were 11 and 13. When he took the pressures after, they were
like three and five. I was like, wow, that'll save my sight. So I
started using marijuana right there."

Despite receiving some relief by using marijuana, Chalmers' eyesight
slowly deteriorated over the years. After his 10-year stint in the
military, his disability left him unable to work a regular job. He
made his way for some time as a guitarist.

He met Ada Marie in the winter of 1980, while living with his brother
in Polson. She was the keyboardist in a band called Country Gold, and
was looking for a second guitarist.

"Word got around that there was this good guitar player in town, so I
chased him down and we started working together," she recalls with a
sweet smile. "Been together ever since."

As the years went on, Roger began to suffer from another painful
malady, gout. It, too, responded well to treatment with marijuana.

To be sure, he tried the prescribed treatments from doctors - ocular
drops for the glaucoma; other medicines for the gout. Only the
marijuana helped.

"The marijuana has saved my sight, without a doubt," he says. "I
wouldn't have as much sight as I do now. The ocular drops, they
didn't seem to do anything. They were willing to try all these other
weird drugs on me; why wouldn't they be willing to try the marijuana?

"With having all those things and then the cancer, it fits like a T -
the classical definition of the medical marijuana use," he continues.
"It's kind of hard to believe one person could have all these things.
It's shocking to me."

Yet, until marijuana was legalized for medicinal use in Montana, and
until the Obama administration announced, in late 2009, that it would
no longer seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers who
comply with state laws, Roger Chalmers was forced to purchase his
marijuana on the black market.

"Having to sneak around and buy it on the black market is not any fun
for anybody," says Ada Marie.

Ironically, with the costs of his advanced illness and expensive care
taking their toll, Roger and Ada now can't afford to purchase even
legal medical marijuana. They receive it free of charge from Rick
Rosio, a Missoula caregiver who provides medical marijuana at no cost
to qualified Hospice clients.

Rosio says that in the debate over the future of medical marijuana in
Montana, the symbiosis between patients who are well enough to pay
for their own medical marijuana and those who are too ill or
impoverished to do so has been overlooked.

"We have to have the 20-something-year-old ADHD (attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder) kids who function better on cannabis than
Ritalin and who can earn a living, to balance with the people in
Hospice," he says. "Our mission is to help people like Roger who are
suffering and who get some benefit from cannabis. You don't play
politics with dying people. But at the same time, this issue is also
about helping people who have lots of life ahead of them, who can
benefit and become more productive."

As Rosio speaks, Roger Chalmers lies quietly in his bed, a marijuana
pipe cradled loosely in his left hand. His eyelids slowly close, and
his chin drops toward his chest.

Peaceful sleep has come.

"The thought that this man might become a criminal again?" Rosio
muses in the dim light. "It's a terrible thought."