Medical Marijuana, A Casual User's Tale

[420]

I am not one of the "seriously ill Californians" that Proposition 215, the state's medical marijuana law passed by voters in 1996, was designed to help. I'm a 31-year-old marathon runner who's generally in peak health, unless I've had a few too many margaritas. But two months ago, I decided to read Proposition 215 to find out just how sick you had to be to obtain marijuana legally.

I made a startling discovery. The state health code listing the conditions for which marijuana can be recommended by a doctor includes migraine right after AIDS, cancer and glaucoma. Every month or so, I get a migraine headache from dehydration or the stress of a deadline. Although I had a hard time believing someone like me might qualify as a medical marijuana patient, there it was in cold print.

In the previous few years, some three dozen Amsterdam-style marijuana markets had opened up in San Francisco, their forbidden aromas spilling out from behind closed doors in nearly every neighborhood. I had a perverse desire to sample the wares of my local marijuana shop, the way I shop for a wheel of Brie at my neighborhood fromagerie.

This was all before last Monday's ruling by the United States Supreme Court that users of medical marijuana, in the 11 states that permit it, can be prosecuted by the federal government. But neither the State of California nor the City and County of San Francisco has yet announced any plans to change their medical marijuana policies as a result of the decision.

Even though a doctor's note won't prevent medical marijuana patients from being arrested by the federal authorities, such prosecutions have been extremely rare. To judge by the laissez-faire attitudes that I encountered - - from the health department, to sympathetic doctors, to the marijuana emporiums - little seems likely to change for those seeking access to medical marijuana in San Francisco. And gaining access was remarkably easy.

To get in the door of my local marijuana store, the Green Cross, you need a city-issued identification card showing you have a doctor's recommendation for marijuana use. The only person I knew who had ever had one of these "cannabis club cards" was a dialysis patient. But after reading the letter of the law, it looked possible that even I might be entitled to one. I decided to try.

I had just switched health insurance providers to Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest H.M.O.'s in the country. The doctor I made an appointment with had never met me before.

"I have chronic migraines," I told her.

"Mmm hmmm," she said, typing on her computer.

I dropped the bomb. "Will you prescribe me pot?"

She stared at me with a surprised, slightly titillated expression.

"Nobody's ever asked me that before," she said. "I don't know what Kaiser's policy is."

After checking with her colleagues, my doctor told me the unofficial policy is to prescribe marijuana only for "end of life scenarios." My migraines did not qualify.

I called Medicann, a clinic I'd seen advertised in one of the city's alternative newspapers. I was told I needed to come in for a doctor's evaluation, pay $120 and have a copy of the records describing my migraines. I ordered them from Kaiser.

The clinic's anonymous looking storefront was at Sutter and Polk Streets: an area mainly catering to homeless hustlers and their johns. The morning of my appointment, there was a brawl outside, and the streets reeked of urine. Inside, three patients - one with bloodshot eyes, another with long straggly hair and the third wearing a glittering medallion - sat with me in the waiting room. The doctor who called me in had a hoop earring in each ear.

In his windowless office, he asked me if I'd tried prescription migraine drugs, and heartily agreed when I complained they felt "too chemical."

"Most of those drugs are garbage," he declared. He was once a traditional doctor working in a hospital, he said, until he clashed with his supervisor over recommending medical marijuana. He'd recommended medical marijuana to his patients, he told me, after seeing them become dependent on prescription opiates.

"I didn't want to be responsible for turning people into drug addicts," he said passionately, handing me a written recommendation for marijuana. He scoffed at the federal laws and never asked to see my records.

All I needed to do now, the Medicann receptionist told me, was to take my doctor-signed marijuana recommendation to the city's Department of Public Health, and they would issue me my cannabis club card.

I checked the health department Web site and learned that I could take along three people to act as my "primary caregivers." They would get cards entitling them to the same rights and privileges , even though they're not sick. That way, in case I was too infirm to buy my medicine, they could pick it up for me. My real-life primary caregiver, my husband, had failed to grasp the point of my whole experiment, insisting that "pot is basically legal anyway and isn't hard to get." So I took along two good friends instead.

The three of us stood in line inside the health department building for a half hour. When we were eventually called into the back office, a city worker photographed us with a camera festooned with a toy gray mouse wearing a top hat, and said festively, "Look at Smokey!"

A few minutes later, our laminated cards were in our hands. Next to our pictures, they simply read "Patient" and "Caregiver." Our names were left off, to protect us from being identified by federal authorities, it was explained to me at a city government hearing. Some weeks later one of my caregivers and I visited our local club, the Green Cross. It is on a quiet street lined with Victorian homes between the bohemian enclave of the Mission District and the yuppyish Noe Valley neighborhood. We buzzed the doorbell, and a young man with a long ponytail opened the door. We flashed our cards, and he let us in.

Several young men were browsing at a long display case while ambient techno music played. I felt as if I were in a hip clothing boutique.

We checked out the line of glass candy jars full of 50 varieties of marijuana. A cheerful young man behind the counter in a T-shirt that read "SF Ganja" asked,

"First time?"

We nodded, and he offered us a free sample of the baked goods containing marijuana. I selected a vegan brownie.

We paid $40 for a few buds of a cannabis strain called "Thai Princess," which the employee said was the shop's top seller. That also got us a gram of "Trainwreck," and for good measure, a gram of "Super Trainwreck."

Back on the street with a brown paper bag of drugs, I felt naughty, as if I was walking around in only my underwear. I had to keep reminding myself that everything I'd done was on the up-and-up, at least according to state law. The entire process of legally buying marijuana had been shockingly easy. Concerned that the excitement of our first medical cannabis transaction might trigger one of my migraines, my caregiver suggested that we practice some preventive medicine back at my apartment. "Thai Princess" had excellent therapeutic qualities, and I was pain free for the rest of the afternoon.

In fact, our behavior was just what some of the critics of medical marijuana have warned against - that its easy availability opens the door to recreational use and encourages an aura of tolerance, at a time when marijuana abuse is a problem among young people. But I believed that the causes of addiction were more complicated than that.

Now, the fact that I might lose the legal rights I'd only so recently discovered I had was causing me some distress. In fact, I could feel a headache coming on.

Pubdate: Sun, 12 Jun 2005
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2005 The New York Times Company
Contact: letters@nytimes.com
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/