cannabisnews.com: Mother Says She Owes Her Life To Medical Marijuana





Mother Says She Owes Her Life To Medical Marijuana
Posted by CN Staff on July 13, 2003 at 07:54:48 PT
By Jennifer Carnig - Staff Writer
Source: Alameda Times-Star 
A rabbit's foot, a wedding ring, a photo of the kids - the little things in life that people keep close by. For Angel McClary Raich, it's a blue- and gold-flecked glass pipe packed full of sticky green marijuana. ``My whole life depends on cannabis,'' the gaunt 37-year-old says unapologetically, the thin pipe held tight between her bony fingers. ``It's my medicine. I would die without it.'' 
Raich, the wife of a prominent Oakland attorney and mother of two teenagers, is a medical marijuana patient. Every two hours, she either smokes, eats or inhales marijuana through a vaporizer, consuming more than eight pounds of cannabis a year. She cooks with thick green marijuana olive oil and is massaged with a creamy hemp balm. Though she says she hates it, the dank smell and earthy taste of the drug now permeate every aspect of her life. It's come to be her sustenance and her lifeblood, and without it, both Raich and her Berkeley doctor say she would become gravely ill. Diagnosed with a laundry list of ailments, including an inoperable brain tumor, scoliosis, wasting syndrome, seizures and chronic pain, Raich has no choice but marijuana, he says. ``She has tried essentially all other legal alternatives to cannabis, and the alternatives have been ineffective or result in intolerable side effects,'' says her physician, Dr. Frank Lucido, explaining that most medicines make Raich vomit violently or induce hot and cold flashes, shakes, itching or nausea. Though she eats at least 3,000 calories a day, she's emaciated, carrying only 97 pounds on her 5-foot-4 inch frame. She's in constant agony and is often so weak that she can't get out of bed or even take herself to the bathroom. On a recent ``good day,'' she couldn't pull out a dining room chair to sit down without the help of her husband, Robert. But, before the marijuana, it used to be worse, Raich says. She was partially paralyzed on the right side of her body and had to use a wheelchair for four years. The cannabis - ``my medicine,'' as she calls it - is the only treatment that's ever worked for her. It gave her ability to walk again and relieved the paralysis. ``Marijuana is my miracle,'' Raich says. ``I just wish the federal government and (Attorney General) John Ashcroft would see it that way.'' Such is the clash between California's medical marijuana law, which allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs, and the federal government's rejection of the state's 1996 voter-approved initiative supporting such acts. A high-profile federal crack down on the treatment has resulted in the closure of cannabis clubs throughout the state - including Raich's club, the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative - raids on growers and arrests of activists like Oakland's ``guru'' Ed Rosenthal, who was convicted of cultivating marijuana but spared a prison sentence last month. And who's left in the middle as the state and the federal government duke it out? About 30,000 patients like Raich, who say they need marijuana to cope with chronic pain, improve their appetite or otherwise soothe the effects of cancer, HIV and AIDS, and degenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis. So Raich has taken an unusual step. Instead of idly waiting for a raid on her or her two anonymous suppliers, she's gone on the offensive, seeking an injunction that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting her for using the plant she calls her ``life-saver.'' While she lost the case in March, she and her husband/lawyer have appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Robert Raich, who in 2001 argued unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme Court in another medical marijuana case, says he expects his wife's case to make it before the high court as well. He and other medical marijuana advocates hope that Angel's case will be the Roe v. Wade of the cannabis debate, deciding once and for all that using cannabis as a medication is protected by the Ninth Amendment. Angel hopes so, too. ``I feel like the government wants to execute me for being sick,'' she says. ``Well, I'm not going to let them do it. I'm not going to give up on my life. I have two children, and I promised them while I was in that wheelchair that I would fight to stay alive, and I'm certainly not going to give up on that promise now when I can move. I love my children too much to allow Ashcroft to take away their mother.'' As Raich slowly shuffles around her sunny Oakland house in blue booty slippers, taking deliberate, small steps to move, her determination is clear. Though each step hurts - ``my pain level is either on high or overload 24 hours a day'' - she refuses to allow it to keep her down on days when she has enough energy to be active. She loves crafts and cooking. Her home is decorated with ceramic animals she made in high school, and she bakes her own hemp zucchini bread and carrot cake, as well as separate dinners for her family. But her real passion is gardening, and Raich is turning her back yard into a ``sanctuary.'' The plot of land is filling in with sweet-smelling jasmine and bougainvillea, and plans for a small pond and waterfall are in the works. But it's a slow moving process since it takes so much out of Raich. The last time she worked on it was almost a month ago. ``I love it, but it just kills me,'' she says. ``I'm down for weeks after I do anything so it's going to take me a lot of stages. But I need to have a meditation and gardening is my outlet for that. There's something kind of healing about having your hands in the dirt.'' Though she's visibly frail - her cheek bones and large, sunken in brown eyes are her most striking features - Raich shows strength most people could never dream of. Just breathing causes pain. Sometimes, on real bad days, if her husband or her kids just brush against her, her body will jerk and convulse in pain. But she persists. ``Angel has one of the strongest spirits I've ever seen,'' says her husband, Robert. ``That's one of the things that initially attracted me to her.'' The couple met three years ago through the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, where Raich used to go to get her drugs and where Robert is an attorney. Though activism brought them together, the pair are more silly and sweet together than militant. In baby talk voices, they call each other ``Moosey,'' a pet name referring to Robert's college days at Harvard. ``We wanted our own thing, not like honey - we wanted something special,'' Angel Raich says, laughing. ``Moosey just kind of fit. We're the Mooses.'' Their house is decorated appropriately. The living room is overrun with moose stuffed animals - they even have a plush ``mooseskin'' rug, with a big Bullwinkle head on it - and statues and dolls of angels. For their wedding, a storybook affair that took place last summer at Oakland's Dunsmuir Historic Estate, they even had a special pillow made for the rings - a moose in a tuxedo with golden angel wings. ``I still pinch myself,'' says Robert Raich. ``I can't believe things have worked out so perfectly. Since the day we met, I've never looked back. I immediately fell in love with her.'' Which is why Angel's illnesses take such a toll on him, she says. ``He's my hero, my knight in shining armor,'' Raich says, her eyes tearing. ``I learn more and more about unconditional love from him every day.'' But it was her own unconditional love for her children, a 14-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son, that first brought Raich to medical marijuana. Raich has faced serious illnesses since adolescence. Now that she had children, she began to see it take a toll on them. ``My daughter used to cry so much because her mom was in a wheelchair and she didn't understand why her mother couldn't do all of the things that her friends' mothers did,'' Raich says, her voice low and shaking. ``It was breaking my heart - I couldn't do anything to comfort them. I couldn't even hug them sometimes because it hurt so much.'' And then, a few weeks later, on Aug. 3, 1997, Raich's and her children's lives changed forever. She was at a hospital in Stockton, where she grew up and was living at the time, when a nurse who had been working with her for a while approached her. The nurse saw that no treatments were working on any of Raich's conditions and that she was depressed and miserable. ``So she pulled me aside and asked me about medical marijuana,'' Raich retells. ``And I was totally offended. I was really mad at her for even suggesting it because I was totally against drugs.'' But when she went home that night and her daughter was in tears yet again, Raich made up her mind to start reading up on the issue. Soon she was seeing a doctor to get a prescription. It was then that she says her life shifted for the better. Still, there's not a day that goes by that Raich doesn't wish she could find relief from another source, she says. ``I hate that I have to take cannabis. If I had a choice, I'd take the choice in a heartbeat,'' she says. ``But I don't have an alternative. Cannabis is my only alternative.'' With each puff she takes, Raich breathes in new life, she says. And even more importantly to her, she exhales new life and longevity into the time she has left with her children. ``I promised my kids I would fight to be alive and I'd do anything I could to be here for them,'' she says. ``I won't go back on that promise.'' Until she dies or finds another miracle, then, inhale and exhale will be Raich's only medication. Complete Title: Controversial Treatment: Wife, Mother of Two Says She Owes Her Life To Medical MarijuanaSource: Alameda Times-Star (CA) Author: Jennifer Carnig - Staff WriterPublished: Sunday, July 13, 2003Copyright: 2003 MediaNews Group, Inc. Website: http://www.timesstar.com/Contact: triblet angnewspapers.com Related Articles & Web Sites:O.C.B.C.http://www.rxcbc.org/Ed Rosenthal's Pictures & Articles http://freedomtoexhale.com/trialpics.htmMedical Pot Clubs Thrive Discreetly http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16571.shtmlU.S. Judge Rules Against Medical Pot Patients http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15690.shtmlJudge Says Woman Not Immune from Prosecution http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15688.shtml
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Comment #8 posted by FoM on July 13, 2003 at 18:21:24 PT
A Correction
I called them bales. I don't know what I was thinking because they were big bags of white powder tied at the top. There I feel better. I'll blame it on my sinus headache I have today. 
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Comment #7 posted by FoM on July 13, 2003 at 14:22:21 PT
About Pharmaceutical Companies
Years back I went with my husband on the road and I'll never forget when we had to pick up drugs from Merck in Massacheutts I think that's the right state. What I won't forget is they loaded very big bales but they were round and tied shut at the top. We had just finished hauling seriously toxic substances and they loaded those big bales of white powder on the floor of the trailer we were using. I thought to myself how unsanitary. When I was in the building they were all lined up and plopped on a dirty floor. That turned me off instantly. Who checks drugs for contamination?
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Comment #6 posted by Virgil on July 13, 2003 at 14:14:34 PT
Correct me when I am wrong-comment4
Actually it is Merck that was sweating over wrongful death lawsuits related to AIDS as it was in their hepatis B vacines that put the gays Africans off to an early start in the AIDS demographics. The Africans got it in their vaccines also. Some people wonder if it was intentional. It surely was undertested.Cannabis Prohibition is surely a fraud supported by vast ignorance.
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Comment #5 posted by JR Bob Dobbs on July 13, 2003 at 13:25:03 PT
Speaking of Eli Lilly...
... why did Bush pick former Lilly head Randall Tobias to head his new global AIDS coalition?
http://www.guerrillanews.com/sci-tech/doc2357.html
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Comment #4 posted by Virgil on July 13, 2003 at 12:55:19 PT
Remember the AZT failure
When the pill companies had a long lasting disease that could mean a person would be on pills, they did not hesitate to bribe and conjure up AZT as a legal drug. It did not have 5000 years of use by hundreds of millions of people and was very hard on the body and did little if anything to help AIDS patients.Oil companies write energy policy. Airlines get bailout from taxpayer representatives. Insurance companies get limit on terror attack damage from Congress. Pill companies get government money at their prices for medicare/medicaid. Eli Lilly got exemption from lawsuits over AIDS virus in Homeland Security bill along with the other vaccine makers. Halliburton will beat lawsuits by crying to Mommy Congress that $3.5 billion for killing people with asbestos should not make the courts. Congress just passed authorization for people to get legal medicine from Canada if FDA says it is safe. Yeah, right. Why the ef did the waste their time pissing up that rope.Well here is the preamble to the Constitution. It sure seems to me the so-called representatives have sold out to big business and big money. I say we have taxation with no representation. Big money is represented buy not WeThePeople.We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
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Comment #3 posted by FoM on July 13, 2003 at 11:56:45 PT
EJ I Agree
I don't use any prescription drugs. I've lost all my faith in them. It seems once a person gets on one or two drugs the next thing they are on more drugs to counter side effects from drugs they are already taking. My sister in law and I are the same age and she is a mess because she is on many different drugs for that reason. She never did any illegal drugs or drink alcohol either. I'm concerned that the medicine she is on might kill her.
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Comment #2 posted by E_Johnson on July 13, 2003 at 11:39:59 PT
Something people really need to know
""She has tried essentially all other legal alternatives to cannabis, and the alternatives have been ineffective or result in intolerable side effects,'' says her physician, Dr. Frank Lucido, explaining that most medicines make Raich vomit violently or induce hot and cold flashes, shakes, itching or nausea."Aside from the cannabis issue, I think it is dreadful that the news media is so bad at accurately reporting the true effects of all of these modern miracle medicines.For example -- prednisone. That's a pretty awful drug. When it is discontinued after having done its work, patients have to be withdrawn from it a half millgram at a time. Even then it's beyond miserable. It takes more than a year to be withdrawn from prednisone and some people end up never being able to go off it.There are going to be a lot of very shocked baby boomers in America when that generation ages to the point where they learn about the side effects of the so-called miracle drugs produced by Big Pharm.
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Comment #1 posted by Virgil on July 13, 2003 at 08:28:39 PT
How would the list really go 
"Cannabis is more medicinal than we thought"Best thing for hangover.Ancient healer of migraines and headaches.Prevents skin cancer and other cancers.Most balanced proteins on the planet to fix that cholesterol problem and prevent heart disease.Nothing better for anxiety.Helps certain brain problems like ADD, ADHD, bi-poloar, and the bluesBuilds the apetite for the AIDS wasting syndrome and such.Works where nothing else does like the fibromyalgia-sp Might push back onset or delay advance of MS. Who knows. We have Biz Ivol saying "Give me cannabis or give me death" as an MS sufferer."It has no medical value" is treason. Not reason for sure, but treason. It is mass murder for real. People won't believe dangerous drug when the warning labels on GW Pharma products zoom across the Internet. Just think how bad the alcohol problem would be without cannabis. Some people need to meet a hemp rope. 
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