The deep furrows in Craig McClain's brow slowly ease as he feels the first effects of the marijuana smoke he has just inhaled. His pain-wracked body relaxes, as he sits gingerly on the special bed in his Vista home.

"I'm already feeling better," McClain, a Vista business owner, husband, father, and spinal-cord injury victim, said this week. "Just after a couple of hits. I can take just a couple of hits and feel my spinal cord relax.

"I don't know why they (the federal government) can say there is no merit to marijuana," he said. "So many doctors know it. But yet, the federal government doesn't want to recognize it."

McClain is just one of several seriously ill or disabled residents who have pleaded with San Diego County supervisors to withdraw the lawsuit they have filed to try to overturn California's medical marijuana law, on the ground it should be pre-empted by federal law which says that all marijuana use is illegal.

Since voters approved the "Compassionate Use Act" in 1996, California law has said it is legal for people such as McClain to use marijuana as medicine.

But San Diego County supervisors, asked late last year to create a medical marijuana identification card and registry system to support the 9-year-old law, instead decided to sue the state to try to overturn it. The suit, which was switched this week from federal to state courts and has not yet had its first hearing, is the first to try to overturn any of the medical marijuana laws that voters have approved in 11 states.

People who have opposed the idea of medical marijuana have worried that it would increase abuse of the drug, tell children that drug use is "OK," and give "potheads" with imagined illnesses a legal route to use an illegal drug.

Pain Is Evident

One look is all it takes to recognize that Craig McClain is in constant, unrelenting pain.

His spine crushed by falling steel girders in a construction-related accident in 1990, McClain stands these days with the help of a cane and brace for his left leg, bent stiffly at the waist - where inside his back, six long screws hold his spinal cord together.

Early this week, arriving home after his morning physical therapy - where a therapist applied acupressure in his spinal area to try to reduce the twisting that now naturally occurs around his injured spine - McClain inched his way from his car into his home, groaning openly with each movement.

The X-rays he gingerly held up to the light showed the six screws, along with a pump that delivers drugs into his system to help combat the pain and spasms he continually battles.

When the accident happened, McClain said, doctors told him he would never walk again, and that his working days were over. But today he owns his own store, the "Old Toy Soldier Home" in Vista, where he sells figurines that he has hand-painted, a hobby he turned into a new life after his accident.

In the early days of his injury, McClain and his doctors discovered that he was allergic to many of the traditional pain relievers, including morphine.

"That's why I have to wear this medical alert medallion," he said. "I can die if I go into a hospital and they give me morphine or Dilaudid. Vicodin, codeine ... I'm allergic to all of those."

'Medical' Marijuana

Two years after his accident, when his spasms - which have sent McClain into hospitals twitching uncontrollably and curling into a fetal position - had gotten to the point he could barely function, a Stanford doctor suggested he try marijuana.

It was 1992, four years before Prop. 215 made "medical" marijuana legal in California.

"I thought he was joking with me," McClain said. "Because, you know, that's a party thing. I had never thought of it in terms of a medicine."

Seeking a legal alternative, McClain first tried Marinol, a synthetically created form of tetrahydrocannibinol - THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Ironically, the federal government says that synthetic marijuana is a legal drug with recognized medicinal value - but says that grown marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug, without medicinal value and on par with heroin, LSD and mescaline.

But McClain and others say the synthetic drug is extremely unreliable - although he still uses it at night - sometimes taking hours to take effect, sometimes never taking effect.

Eventually, McClain ended up at the Cannabis Cultivators Club in San Francisco, the first marijuana "dispensary" in California.

He said that since he started smoking it, marijuana has helped him control his wracked body.

"If I don't have pot, then I go into severe spasmodic attacks," he said. "And they're extreme - to where I have to go to the hospital to get it under control. Sometimes these attacks last for five hours. Sometimes they can be 10 days. If I burn a joint, then it will relax enough to where possibly I get a hold of the situation."

He became an advocate when Prop. 215 was placed on the ballot in 1996, collecting signatures and speaking before state legislators.

When Prop. 215 passed with 55 percent of the vote, McClain said he felt safe. That, he said, has disappeared with the county's decision to try to overturn the measure.

"When Prop. 215 went through, I said, 'Oh, thank God. Now I'm just a regular person again. I'm not a criminal,'" McClain said. "The safety thing was being OK in my state. Now I don't believe there's any safety."

He said he smokes marijuana - "a couple of hits off a joint" - sporadically during his day. Often, he does so before the physical therapy that he attends five days a week, sometimes during the day, and always before he tries to sleep. McClain said taking Marinol, smoking "part of a joint," and taking Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, he gets three to five hours of sleep a night.

McClain said coming forward to speak out again about his marijuana use - he took part in a protest of the county's Prop. 215 lawsuit and testified before county supervisors last month - was not easy. He has a business, a wife and son to protect.

He said he feared that his 12-year-old son, who attends a Lutheran school and belongs to a Mormon Boy Scout troop, could take "flak" from outsiders. He said he doesn't smoke around his son, and that he and his wife have explained that the marijuana he smokes is medicine.

But he said the county's lawsuit left him no choice. He had to speak out.

"I thought after this long a time, the controversy over this thing (medical marijuana) would have gone away," he said. "It's a step backward."

Other Patients

Like McClain, La Mesa resident Rudy Reyes has pain that is all too evident.

Reyes, 28, was burned over 75 percent of his body, including nearly all of his upper body, during the October 2003 Cedar fire that killed 14 people in San Diego County. Reyes said last week that he spent eight months, two in a drug-induced coma, in a hospital after the fires.

Like McClain, Reyes said his body also rejected morphine, and that his doctors tried several different kinds of drugs to help ease his constant pain. Some of the drugs had terrible side effects.

Then, one day, Reyes said, a doctor asked if he had ever tried marijuana. He said no. The doctor, he said, suggested that he have his friends bring in some "special" food with marijuana in it.

"And they started bringing me in the cookies and the brownies," he said.

In two weeks, Reyes said, the doctors told him they saw improvement in his condition - that his muscles were contracting less and that his blood pressure had dropped - helping his torched body recover.

Now out of the hospital, Reyes said he no longer eats marijuana, but uses it as a cream to spread on his wounded body.

Reyes said the burns exposed the nerves on his skin, leaving him with a "constant throb and itch that never goes away."

The marijuana tincture, he said, eases his problems. If he didn't have it, he would probably be put back on such as Oxycontin or Vicodin - strong drugs with side effects.

" I use it as a cream," he said. "I don't smoke it. I don't use it that way."

A Dying Patient

San Diego resident Pamela Sakuda is dying. Sakuda was diagnosed with terminal colorectal cancer three years ago, and was given six to 14 months to live, she said last week.

Despite the terminal prognosis, Sakuda said she wanted to fight her illness, to stay alive as long as she could. That has entailed a continuous barrage of chemotherapy, a treatment that basically consists of having patients drink down anti-cancer poisons in an effort to kill off cancer cells, without killing the patient.

Sakuda said the result was nausea, vomiting and a diminished appetite, all of which threatened to leave her so weak she could no longer take chemotherapy treatment.

She said she uses marijuana, inhaling it through a vaporizer, or sometimes eating it, to stimulate her appetite and soothe her nausea.

She said the drug has helped keep her alive and spared her husband, her caregiver, emotional pain.

"I don't think people like me, who are suffering from an illness, should be in jeopardy of being put in jail," she said. "The people of California voted for this ... it was an act of compassion."

Newshawk: Richard Lake
Pubdate: Sat, 04 Feb 2006
Source: North County Times (Escondido, CA)
Copyright: 2006 North County Times
Contact: letters@nctimes.com
Website: http://www.nctimes.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1080
Note: Gives LTE priority to North San Diego County and Southwest Riverside County residents
Author: Gig Conaughton, Staff Writer
Cited: San Diego County Board of Supervisors http://www.sdcounty.ca.gov/general/bos.html