Stigma in the Cannabis Industry

I am a goody two shoes. I don't just mean a generally good kid, I mean I break out into actual welts when I feel like I'm disappointing someone. My breathing gets choppy, I sweat, and I want more than anything to make that person happy with me again. Then I was crushed like a ball of paper inside a metal tomb going 55 miles an hour and I learned some new lessons.

I was suddenly flooded with medications for pain and for sleep and for healing. There were so many pills I had to get one of those old lady pill boxes and make fun of myself as I filled it out for the week. The strong opiates they had me on were ruining my life and I didn't know. I had many surgeries across my stomach because that's just what happens when you have a seatbelt hold you in place as you crash at highway speeds. My seatbelt saved my life, but it also smashed all the squishy bits inside my abdomen, making me much more sensitive to medications like opiates. If you're unaware, they effect your liver and slow down digestion. Which is really freaking bad for a girl who's just lost big chunks of her insides. Not one doctor warned me or told me the reason I kept ending back up in the hospital was because the strong pain killers were passively murdering me.

Then there's the addiction. It starts slow, but you find you need more and more of the medication to keep the pain at bay. Until one day, you look down at your pill bottle and you've finished them a week ahead of time. Then two weeks. Then it starts to own your mind. You worry about it all the time. You count what you have left. When you run out, not only does the pain come for you with sharp teeth and a smirk, but you shudder with the ache of withdrawal, and sweat through your sheets, and wish for the death they've saved you from; drowning in the irony and shame.

I finally got up the courage to ask my pain management doctor about switching to something else, perhaps cannabis, as it had just become medically legal in my state. He looked at me like I had suggested doing esctasy to fix my unending pain instead of a nature given plant thats been used for centuries for pain and anxiety and a hundred other maladies. He wouldn't prescribe it. Or even help me wean down off the opiates. He just kept encouraging me to take higher ande higher doses to address my chronic pain. I wasn't sleeping. Because as soon as the meds would get my pain down enough to sleep, the always crouching withdrawal was waiting to shock me back into awareness with a sharp bite. It was so codependent, my pain was a like a pet. A vicious pet I didn't trust and had to kept constantly fed, but something a part of me all the same. I could barely keep anything down. I finally was in my ninth hospital stay with a morphine drip in my arm and screaming because it was like throwing a drop of water onto a raging flame; when it came to me, I couldn't do this anymore. I didn't just need a change, I was going to die without one. I knew this with every cell of my body. So I told my mom. She hated it. She lectured and told me cannabis would make me lazy and useless. That I would smoke my future away in foul smelling clouds of haze. I pretended to listen, but when I could walk again, I went to a doctor and got a medical marijuana license.

I didn't even know how to smoke. I had to watch YouTube videos on how to roll a joint and how to properly use a bong. I was so scared but my desperation overroad a childhood of false information and "Just Say No" drug fear mongering you're indoctrinated with since elementery school when you live in the South.

The first time I smoked, I cried. Sobbed on my couch like the pain would never end when the reality was the exact opposite. The pain, oh God, the neverending pain I had thought I would spend my life filled with; it was gone. Not just dulled. Gone. I don't know how to express to you the relief of having accepted that your life was just always going to be in a constant violent battle with itself, and then finding out there had always been a solution. I had just been too stubborn behind the wall of my own stigmas to try it before then. I had to hit rock bottom. I had to have no where else to turn. Nothing else that could offer me comfort.

I was furious. Burning with a fire of cold rage that I had been made to suffer so endlessly when my relief was just one suggestion away from doctors who should have known better. I won't get into how messed up the pharmaceutical system is in my state. I'll just say that I found out my pain management doctor got cash back kicks for every oxy he prescribed me. I couldn't trust the people I should have been able to trust my life to, and it was a shocking revelation at the time.

I started to explore medication like Rick Simpson Oil (a very concentrated oil that was actually created by a cancer patient who needed intense pain control.) I tried everything I could get my hands on and figured out slowly what I needed to take every day to gain my humanity back. Suddenly, I was funny again! I'd forgotten I even had a sense of humor! I didn't sleep all day, I actually had the energy and spunk to do things again. Within the limits of what my body would allow, but that wasnt holding me back! I could hold a book, and that was a million worlds and adventures inside my mind. I made step count goals and met them. I still felt pain, but I could eat again and the pain was manageable. I felt like I had been exorcized of a demon who would have had my soul in the end. For the first few months of cannabis use without the pills, I cried with joy almost every time I smoked.

I still found myself feeling guilty though. A lifetime of being told how evil cannabis was had my brain fighting an internal battle. My family stopped talking to me for a while. Hated me for making the choice I had to make. Even though it was clear the pills had been the monster under my bed. They saw me thriving, and its almost like it angered them. They loved me, but they loved their indoctrination more.

The orthopedic doctor who told me originally that I would never again walk without a cane or aid of some kind dropped me as his patient after seeing me walk un-aided under the influence of cannabis. I was only welcome among a new community I found online on Instagram of people with stories so very similar to mine, who told me I was normal and sane and perfectly in my rights to turn to the medication that actually helped me. Opiates pretend to help and then ruin your life. Trust me, just because a doctor tells you its the safer option doesn't mean it is. Use your mind and make your own decisions. I did, and I got my life back. It's insane that the words and propaganda mostly based on racism and Nixon's bullshit are what most people trust over trying cannabis themselves. We're better than this, people. I believe in us. Things are already getting better. Let's just finish the race. So many others are suffering and we can help them.

I feel good today. I smile and I laugh and I love. But there will always be the almost imperceptible claws in my shoulders of the painkillers, trying to pull me back. I feel them even on my best days. On my worst, I can feel the acrid breathe on the back of my neck, whispering that it was always my real friend. I know its a lie now. But I'll never not wear those scars and carry the weight of past addiction and need inside myself. Now to smoke a bowl. And maybe shed a tear or two at the relief offered so freely and openly.