Wafting in: Medical marijuana makes progress in New York

“I think that what Cuomo was doing was saying, ‘OK, I’m opening the door a crack, now it’s up to [state lawmakers] to see how far you want to take it,’” Cahill said.

Unsanctioned approval

While the medical establishment and New York politicians have been slow to officially embrace medical marijuana, a thriving underground of patients, marijuana growers, weed-friendly patient advocates and healthcare providers haven’t waited around for the law. Back in 2009, local marijuana grower and activist Joe Barton lamented the bust of his Hurley pot farm by publicly declaring that cops were depriving cancer patients of his high-quality product.

One Hudson Valley healthcare worker who often deals with the terminally ill said that marijuana use by the very sick was an everyday, if unsanctioned, occurrence in her workplace.

“We’re not allowed to condone or push people towards [medical] marijuana,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous because of the topic’s sensitivity. “But we’ve had patients who straight-up smoked. You’d smell the marijuana down the hall and just pretend you didn’t smell it.”

The employee said she’d seen firsthand the efficacy of marijuana in relieving pain, especially among those whose lingering ailments had left them largely resistant even to high doses of traditional pain medications like morphine. The marijuana, she said, most often comes into the facility in the form of baked goods or other “edibles.” Other times, patients employ vaporizers that deliver the THC without the smoke.

Oftentimes she said elderly patients, who may be unfamiliar with or disapproving of marijuana, try it after conversations with their children or grandchildren. The employee said that she’d seen patients’ appetites and mood improve dramatically with marijuana use. She estimated that about three-quarters of her colleagues, including doctors, believed that marijuana had a role in medicine. That number, she noted, included older, more conservative healthcare workers who generally disapprove of recreational drug use.

“Once you see it work, it changes how you think about it,” she said. “I have co-workers who think it should be legal for medical use who would never, ever want their children or grandchildren smoking it for recreational use.”

Opponents of medical marijuana see these attitudes as a smokescreen for full legalization. They point to the examples of states like California, where a broadly constructed medical pot law made it a relatively simple thing for virtually anyone to obtain a prescription (often from a physician employed by a marijuana dispensary). In Washington State and Colorado, medical marijuana laws opened the door to voter referenda that made the two states the first in the nation to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

Many legalization advocates don’t shy from the medical marijuana as stalking-horse-for-legalization argument. National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws Capital Region (NORML) executive director Kevin Jones regard “medical marijuana” as a meaningless phrase akin to “medical tomatoes.”

“Calling it medical doesn’t change the plant,” Jones said. “But once we get patients taken care of, we can get past the toxicity theory and the addiction theories, which are false, and move on to legalization.”

Jones said that while 30 to 40 percent of New Yorkers favor outright legalization of marijuana and 80 percent favor its medical use. New York politicians don’t hear often enough from people who want to change the laws, Jones said. He believed a tipping point would occur when people realized that 70 years of prohibition and a four-decade-old War on Drugs had done little to prevent those who want to smoke marijuana from doing so while costing taxpayers billions.

“I smoke every day, because I can get [marijuana] every day,” Jones said. “It’s not the smokers who are getting screwed. It’s the taxpayers.”