Monday, 10 December 2001
.....
George McMahon knows he hasn't got much time to live. On this spring day, he sits in his car beside a crowded beach and opens a metal canister filled with marijuana cigarettes. McMahon lights the joint pressed between his lips. He's not in Amsterdam but in rural Texas, home to a prison system renowned for zero-tolerance sentences. Even so, he's not concerned about legal repercussions. He can smoke pot in any state of the union without being prosecuted.
McMahon, age 51, is the fifth United States citizen to receive legal marijuana from the federal government. He gets 300 prerolled joints a month, courtesy of the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program, run since 1978 by the FDA. The U.S. has a history of allowing the use of experimental pharmaceuticals, but progress toward legitimizing medical pot stopped in May, when the Supreme Court ruled that "marijuana has no medical benefits worthy of an exception" from the Controlled Substances Act. In its ruling, the Court made no mention of Uncle Sam's pot farm at the University of Mississippi, nor of the machine-rolled joints sent to sick people like George.
For now, the program continues because, officially at least, it's considered a research project. The feds are supposed to be collecting data on the therapeutic effectiveness of marijuana, but George says they have never sought much information on that. "I am just so pleased to be able to use what they send me legally," McMahon says. "To be relieved of some of the pain and still be within the law means so much."
The FDA's "compassionate" approach hasn't been available to many. The agency implemented the program under Jimmy Carter, following a lawsuit by Robert Randall, a glaucoma patient who demanded the government acknowledge the necessity of his marijuana use. He was joined by cancer patients and people with multiple sclerosis or spinal cord injuries, who smoked federal pot for relief from nausea, pain, and muscle spasms. As the AIDS epidemic swelled, so did the number of applicants. Overwhelmed officials in the Bush administration stopped accepting applications in 1992, throwing hundreds of requests away and forcing the chronically or terminally ill to seek medicine on the black market. The government agreed, however, to continue supplying the 34 patients, like George, who had already been accepted. Today, only six remain.
His pain momentarily quieted, George steps onto the grass and limps toward the wooden dock that reaches into glistening water. He suffers from Nail Patella Syndrome, a poorly understood genetic condition. NPS can attack major organs, including the kidney and liver, and cause bones to be deformed, become brittle, and break. It affects the joints, limits mobility, and causes chronic pain, muscle cramps, and spasms. Some NPS patients also have serious immune system complications from the disease, which is incurable.
George winces as the breeze carries a cloud of smoke toward the lake. Although he's well-acquainted with pain, he lived without a concrete diagnosis for years. As a child George contracted colds and the flu frequently. Muscles in his arms didn't develop normally; lifting weights didn't help. He frequently had broken bones, especially in his hands and wrists, and he lost his teeth by the time he was 21. He felt exhausted and could stand for only a few minutes without experiencing unbearable pain. Spells of nausea, fever, chills, and night sweats were common for him. He suffered from hepatitis A and B and tuberculosis, and there were times when his pain was constant -- whether he was walking, lying down, or sitting up.
The herb has brought McMahon the relief he couldn't find in traditional pills and with fewer side effects. "Most people don't know that I'm sick unless I tell them," he says. "The marijuana has really been that effective in controlling my symptoms. I don't need statistics and research. I am living proof that marijuana works as medicine."
For people like McMahon, the goal to relieve suffering seems obvious, as does the need to grant relief to others. His own medical history includes 19 major surgeries, seven of them performed in one week. Throughout his life, he's been prescribed morphine, Demerol, Codeine, Valium, and other sedating medications. He has been rushed to emergency rooms with severe drug-induced conditions, including respiratory and renal failure and hallucinations. The medications did little for his chronic pain and spasms, and he was both mentally and physically incapacitated.
Convinced that using small amounts of pot daily helped ease his discomfort better and without life-threatening side effects, McMahon smoked marijuana illegally for 20 years. Finally, he found a doctor in Iowa who took an interest in helping him get marijuana legally. He put McMahon through an investigation protocol and evaluation. Then McMahon contacted the people in Iowa senator Charles Grassley's office and was pleased at their willingness to help.
After yet more tests and stacks of legal paperwork, George received his first shipment of marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse in March 1990. These days, he goes to a designated pharmacy where he picks up the marijuana, stored in a silver tin with a prescription tag. McMahon keeps his supply with him at all times. As a general rule, he tries to be discreet, in hopes of not offending people. "I cope with the pain," he says. "Some days are better than others, but if I go more than a few hours without my medicine, I can get myself in trouble."
Sometimes, though, he lands in a jam by taking it. McMahon says few cops seem to be aware of the program. On one occasion George and Margaret, his wife of 30 years, were attending a conference sponsored by NIDA, where he intended to contradict the agency's specious claim that marijuana was addictive. George had meandered away from the crowd to smoke his medicine, when he was approached by two police officers, one of whom began hitting his fingers, trying to knock the joint out of his hand, yelling at him to put it out. "He called me a 'motherfucker', called my wife a 'fucking bitch', and told me to shut my fucking mouth," he says. "They treated me like a criminal. It was one of the worst feelings I've ever had."
Today he lives quietly on disability insurance at his modest home in an East Texas community. He has a certificate of heroism for participating in the President's Drug Awareness Program in 1990, signed by former first lady and prohibition advocate Nancy Reagan. McMahon is a reluctant hero, and he expresses gratitude to his family, particularly his wife, who has seen the difference cannabis makes. "If he did not receive the marijuana," Margaret says, "George would probably be dead by now from all the other narcotics he would be taking for pain."
In addition to struggling for survival, McMahon is fighting for the decriminalization of medical marijuana. Since government weed contains only a moderate level of the intoxicant THC, McMahon remains lucid and eloquent. He has traveled the country, speaking with university students and faculty, legislators, physicians, and law enforcement officials -- all while smoking 10 joints a day.
The recent Supreme Court decision to ban the Oakland (California) Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative from distributing medical pot set the campaign back, even as it exposed governmental hypocrisy. According to legal documents, the compassionate program that helps George McMahon was a cornerstone of the cooperative's cause.
Recent polls indicate 70 to 80 percent of the public approves of medical marijuana. Yet when decriminalization advocates push for reform, the government counters that there isn't enough research to warrant the reclassification of a potentially dangerous drug. This call for evidence operates in a circular way; the drug laws have prevented the accumulation of much data. Legitimate scientists who seek to perform controlled studies on cannabis face a daunting bureaucratic gauntlet. Additionally, officials have repeatedly ignored the findings of their own commissioned research panels, which argue that marijuana is a relatively safe substance and has medical applications. Meanwhile, sick people like George McMahon continue to be arrested, harassed, and inconvenienced.
George extinguishes his government roach as the sun descends behind him. It seems unreasonable to him that our nation locks patients in prison, strips them of their voting rights, confiscates their property, and destroys their families, all because it seeks to eradicate a natural herb that has no fatal side effects, was used medically for thousands of years, and is less harmful and addictive than tobacco or alcohol. "I want people to know that I am just a normal guy," he says. "I'm not an activist, but I do believe that every sick patient in America should be able to make these personal choices without going to jail."
This is Federal Rx: Marijuana <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/798>