MI first met Jack in 2007, and have been with him through chemotherapy and radiation treatments. During the past four years, he has suffered countless symptoms related to lung damage from cigarettes and from side effects of cancer treatment.
The short list includes back pain, chest pain, and cough from radiation; and he has shortness of breath from cigarettes to the point where he uses oxygen daily. He is also legally blind, though that condition is unrelated to his cancer.
When I recently showed him a picture of my children, he was able to identify only the color of their shirts.
Jack first asked me about medical marijuana in 2009. “What do you think of it?” he asked. I took a neutral stance, neither endorsing nor condemning it, and asked what he thought of it. “Well, I think it works,” he said. I inquired exactly what was better with it. “I can actually sleep a full night when I use it. I’ve only used it twice,” he said. “It helps me sleep, and it helps my back pain.”
We talked about where he received the marijuana, and if his primary care physician had prescribed it. “She wants nothing to do with it,” he said.
“I got a joint from my daughter, and she got it from her dentist.” I then asked Jack to think about if he wanted to complete the required paper work, so that he could receive medical marijuana himself. A month later, in January, 2010, we finished the paperwork together, and he submitted the application along with the $90 fee.
Five months later, he still hasn’t heard back from the state.
Regardless, he has used it three times this year. Although he feels marijuana still helps, he notes that “it turns you into Looney Tunes”.
He says that even with one puff he gets so disoriented that he doesn’t feel safe going outside after using it.
Although our clinics serve hundreds of patients each year with chronically debilitating symptoms, cancer, and pain, only one has solicited treatment with medical marijuana. We could acknowledge that the potential benefits of such therapy might still be under-appreciated, and it’s only a matter of time before more patients request treatment.
However, it might also be fair to conclude that it’s not a panacea, and that it’s only one potential therapy among many available for complicated patients. The political dialogue in Colorado is focused on non-patient topics of licensure for marijuana growth and community regulation of dispensaries. Politicians have neither acknowledged, nor discussed, a few important facts.
First, the medical reality is that there are probably quite small numbers of patients who would actually receive substantial benefit from marijuana. Second, if the dispensation were simplified and medical marijuana were handled like any other controlled drug available at pharmacies, then both physicians and patients alike would have an accountable and familiar system where medications – synthetic or natural – would be available when needed, without creating a complicated and duplicate system for prescribing and dispensing.
Jeffrey Sippel, M.D., M.P.H., lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
