It’s probably hard for some people to believe, but by Thanksgiving, medical cannabis could be legalized in California. That’s assuming Oakland advocates have indeed obtained enough signatures to put a measure legalizing it on the Nov. 2 ballot – and assuming that voters agree. But already, some longtime political observers are wondering whether 2010 could be the year.
“Two years ago you couldn’t have done this,” says Aaron Smith, director of the Marijuana Policy Project, the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the country. “It’s a combination of everything. A perfect storm of events occurred last year, beginning with Michael Phelps – the bong hit seen around the world; the economy is
in ruins at a time when marijuana arrests are at an all-time high. I think all these things together have really made people consider whether they want to continue this nonsense.”
Not everyone thinks it’s nonsense, however. Los Angeles City Council recently passed a medical cannabis ordinance that restricts dispensaries from operating nearer than 1,000 feet from schools, libraries, parks, or other dispensaries. Smaller cities, like Long Beach, immediately to the south, are fidgeting with their own ordinances. And, in late January, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that a dispensary in Eagle Rock had to stop selling medical cannabis – a decision city prosecutors immediately said was most likely the first to find that state law does not give collectives the right to sell medical cannabis.
Yet even as local authorities try to narrowly define our access to medical cannabis, many of our cultural attitudes toward it have broadened, and become perhaps more progressive than our media – and other societal institutions – realize. This is even true among seniors, and especially true among ailing seniors, the segment of our population which uses it, and probably needs it most – despite the fact that some of them are old enough to have seen “Reefer Madness” in its original release.
“I don’t think people are ashamed about using it; I think they’re worried about the repercussions,” says Jackie, an employee at Woodland Hills Treatment Center in Woodland Hills. (Full disclosure: W.H.T.C. is an advertiser in The 420 Times.) Case in point: Jackie – who has another, full-time career – asks that her last name not be used, to avoid jeopardizing her other job.
Open just more than three years, W.H.T.C. – under new management this year – fits the profile for hundreds of similar concerns across the state, whose owners are reinventing the traditional image of the medical cannabis outlet, and in the process are gaining seniors as patients.
Like the census, statistics on senior use of medical cannabis are in dire need of updating; but Chris Hermes, spokesman for advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, refers a reporter to a December 2004 study by the American Association of Retired Persons which found that 72 percent of those surveyed who were ages 45 and older thought that adults should be allowed to “use marijuana for medical purposes” if it were recommended by a physician.
The same study also found that 59 percent of everyone the AARP surveyed – not just seniors – believed marijuana has medical benefits; and 55 percent of those surveyed said they would provide it to “a suffering loved one.”
“What I’m surprised about is how many women in their 60s come in, because you would think there’s still a taboo associated with it,” Jackie says. “They look like the grandmas you see walking around Gelson’s and taking care of their grandkids.”
Using cannabis may no longer be quite the taboo it once was, but Jackie admits that seniors are cautious about using it medically – even though, for some of them, it has meant the difference between life and death.
“I still don’t think it’s something that the 63-year-old grandmother talks about,” Jackie says. “Maybe she’s not ashamed of it, but she’s not going around saying ‘This is how I treat it.’ I think in time that will lower, because I
think right now, it’s looked at as a drug where you smoke it or consume it, and you get the giggles.”
However slight the shift, perceptions of medical cannabis are changing, and 84-yearold cannabis user John Donohue of Long Beach is thankful he’s here to see it. “I was out in a rainstorm and I jumped over a puddle, and I fell over and hit my knee. I go to the Veteran’s Administration for my doctor, and I had arthroscopic surgery,” says Donohue, a World War II veteran who credits medical cannabis with reducing the pain in his knee
following surgery – and eliminating his stress.
“One thing I am absolutely certain of is that it’s a substance that reduces your stress, and a great cause of a lot of illnesses now is stress,” Donohue says. “That’s my claim – that it has helped my stress. People still refuse to believe it is what it is. I want to get bumper stickers that say ‘Show Me the Crime.’ ”
Not everyone is so vocal. One W.H.T.C. client, a Los Angeles resident and cancer survivor named Dora, is 67, and had never used cannabis – medically or otherwise – until two years ago, when she found herself nauseous and unable to eat during chemotherapy.
“I never used drugs in my life. For me, this is strictly a medical treatment,” says Dora, who underwent a double mastectomy. She declined to use her last name because she is not entirely comfortable with others knowing she has brewed medical cannabis into tea, and eaten it in pastries.
“I couldn’t get up from the bed. This makes me feel much better – I have appetite again,” Dora says. “When you have a little bit of help, it’s good. I feel much better doing this than with [using] prescription drugs. I don’t know if I’m part of something big or not. I think people who go through a lot of pain. they have to consider [medical cannabis].”
In Orange County – traditionally considered one of Southern California’s most conservative regions – many people are doing just that. At Laguna Woods Village, a gated retirement community that is part of the city of Laguna Woods, ailing residents formed their own collective last summer. More than a hundred residents regularly attend meetings to discuss everything from medical cannabis’s benefits, to the ever-changing laws that govern it, to cultivation tips.
“The average age of our resident is 78, so the city council believes that here we probably do have people here with end-of-life illnesses,” says Laguna Woods City Manager Leslie Keane. “They came right out and said, ‘We want to do this if this is something our residents want.’ ”
Residents do; Laguna Woods resident Barbara Reinig, who attended a recent collective meeting with husband Ed–and with their son–said pointedly that medical cannabis has changed her life for the better.
“You write that I’ve tried everything else in the world, and nothing else works but the brownies,” says Reinig, who suffers from crippling arthritis, and found that epidural injections were ineffective and soon wore off. One of the most difficult issues to resolve before she used medical cannabis, Reinig says, was telling her son:
“When my son was 16 in the ’60s, we gave him the lecture about it leading to other [drug use],” Reinig says. Then when she told him she was using it – “We laughed for an hour,” she says. “I couldn’t get him to stop.”
And even with her son’s blessing, Reinig – like other Laguna Woods residents; and, one suspects, seniors across California – was careful to go through the proper channels to obtain medical cannabis.
“We’ve all got the letter of recommendation from the doctor, so it’s all legal,” she says. “We wouldn’t want to set a bad example for our kids.”
- Theo Douglas
Source: 420 Times
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