I’ve had problems with my back. Two separate incidents resulting in compression fractures through seven vertebrae, with T7 being the worst off. Right near the middle.
Painful shitty stuff and painful shitty recovery and no doubt about it. Doing an hour-long physical therapy/slow torture routine 2-3 times a day. Wearing an accursed clamshell neck/back brace nearly everywhere. A weight limit of 10 pounds. Seemingly unending visits to a few different doctors, and their subsequent orders: A similar string of x-rays, CT scans, bone density tests, etc. Good times. Though of course it’s all relative. No surgery necessary so that was something. Same with the apparent fact that (knocking on wood) my spinal cord got away unscathed.
But for a solid month it was a 7+ on the old 1-10 pain scale, at least when I was off my meds. For all that time I was taking two Norco 10’s every 4-6 hours.
If you know what that means then you know that was a pretty good amount of dope.
It worked, mostly. Far better than the 5’s we tried at first, which didn’t cut anything. Those 10’s got on top of it and I was finally able to sleep.
That’s the catch.
The Man helps you through the hard times. He makes you feel better when you’re feeling as physically shitty as life can ever feel. He helped me to not need the damned bedpan.
But he will be paid for his services, one way or the other.
After a while I cut down to one 10 every 4-6 hours, as my pain started to abate, and there he was. I felt more or less like hungover dogcrap for a couple days after that change. Similar results with every step downward on the weaning ladder, and then of course when my bottle finally ran out. There he was in the back of my head, tapping his watch and frowning.
The word was that if I hadn’t weaned, if I’d tried to just go with that same dose until the end and then cut myself off, then that Man would've done more than frown. He would’ve tapped on my brain stem with a jackhammer. My withdrawal would’ve felt like the worst sickness I’ve ever felt, and it would’ve taken weeks.
So, that seems an easy solution, right? Just keep with the same heavy dosing for the rest of my life, whether from the pharmacy or somewhere else, and I won’t have those problems.
Except yeah no.
So what should a body in a lot of pain do?
For my part, I smoked and ate some good pot and used both tincture and CBD oil, as part of my recovery and weaning process.
And it helped.
A lot.
I was able to mostly ignore that Man. Oh he was still there, and I still felt that strung-out/hungover payment, but it was not nearly as intense.
Neither was the pain in my back.
Of course this solution is not for everyone. Some people don’t like or want the buzz that comes with direct consumption. Others (still) live where they can’t have any cannabis product whatsoever without risking a criminal record. I get all of that.
To the first point, there’s a lot more to that help than the buzz. CBD oil is only one example of effective derivative treatments that have no psychoactive effects. Others could likely be developed. And that ties into the second point. Pot is still schedule 1. Meaning, along with it being banned still in most states, it is banned outright by the United States federal government. Meaning just researching the cannabis plant is technically a federal crime, with their official statement being that it has “no medical benefit.”
And I’m here enjoying considerable relief, among millions of others, and saying What in the holy hell are you talking about?
It’s long past time to legalize cannabis nationwide, or, failing that, to downgrade it to schedule 2, where doctors can research and prescribe it and patients can use it without, you know, going to jail. It’s embarrassing and tragic that we have to keep writing and saying and yelling these things, while a virtual epidemic of opioid overdoses continues to kill more and more and more people, and while the United States incarcerates more people than China.
And future historians are going to shake their heads in frowning disbelief when they read about them.