It is the one thing that alleviates Carly Barton’s crippling pain, but cannabis in the UK is not legal, so she can not buy it without looking over her shoulder. So she is growing her own — and has advised the police.
Carly Barton says ‘I was breathing and trying to get to the next batch of painkillers.
Carly Barton winces when she talks about the pain, “A ridiculous amount of all-over pain — it just feels like you are burning from the inside out, such as my bones have been replaced with red hot pokers.”
Following a stroke at the age of 24, Barton developed the neurological illness fibromyalgia, which meant she was in continuous pain. Doctors gave her strong opiate pain relief, to a stage where she was drinking morphine every two hours, as well as wearing a fentanyl patch. She says she was “completely off my head, and screaming down the house in pain”.
She spent six decades pretty much in bed, couldn’t eat, could not think, couldn’t rest. Before this, she was teaching art at college, sculpting, welding, running around. Now she “wasn’t actually a person, I was only sort of breathing in and out, trying to get to a different type of painkillers, really.”
She was worried about attempting cannabis for pain relief. Feeling depressed, she was worried about how it would affect her psychological health.
But it got to a point where she would try anything. “Like bloody crystal healing – do you know when you get to that point? That’s the last straw.”
Instead of crystals, she smoked a joint, sitting on her front doorstep, and for the first time in six years she felt no pain. She says: “It was kind of like I’d lost my handbag or something – you know that feeling when you think you’ve lost your phone, something’s missing but you’re not sure what? It was like that. I wasn’t expecting it, thought it might help me sleep, or just be another one of those things that don’t work. I lay completely still because I didn’t want to move, I didn’t want to ruin it.”
The first evening of cannabis was the last one of morphine. She also weaned herself gradually off her other prescription medication. “It was just like Trainspotting, but more dull.”
She uses cannabis each day, about every two hours, with a vape pen. So, is she stoned, all day long? “I was a good deal more off my face . I have taken a significant amount this afternoon, to get out of bed, but I don’t seem stoned.”
She followed advice from men and women in the USA and Canada about establishing tolerance slowly, and about that breeds of cannabis to use: those reduced in THC, the psychoactive constituent of cannabis, but high in cannabidiol, or CBD, which has undergone preliminary clinical research, including studies on its impact on anxiety, cognition, movement disorders and pain.
Related: Medical Cannabis Is A Big Help To Minnesota Cancer Patients
At the moment, her cannabis stems from dealers, but it is not always possible to get exactly what she desires. So Barton has begun to develop her own, until cannabis in the UK becomes legalized. In her garage, she has a silver, boxy tent using a mild and an extractor fan, six little plants of varieties she’s found beneficial are between a week and two weeks into a journey which will last a few months until they are chosen. She purchased the seeds lawfully (they can be, for ornamental use), but what else she’s doing is illegal in the UK.
Last November, it became legal in the UK for physicians to prescribe cannabis-based medicine. This came following the high-profile instances of young epilepsy sufferers Alfie Dingley and Billy Caldwell, whose symptoms appeared to be helped by cannabis oil. But the reality is that, under hazy guidelines and with a lack of clinical testing, it’s still very difficult for people like Barton to obtain an NHS prescription.
She made a decision to go private, with a view to converting to the NHS after a month or 2, though it could be demonstrated to be functioning. She obtained a personal prescription from a pain expert, Dr. David McDowell, in Manchester. But there were permits and licenses, in order to import her medicinal cannabis from Holland. In total, a month’s worth of cannabis cost Barton about $1,500; there was no way she could afford to continue. On the street, the same amount of cannabis would have cost a fraction of that. But the prescription felt great. “I did not need to look over my shoulder, it felt like I had been a legitimate patient.”
Next, after a two-hour consultation with another pain expert, Dr. Rubina Ahmad, in Haywards Heath hospital, Barton got her NHS cannabis prescription, the first ever in this country. Fantastic news, but this wasn’t the ending of it. It had to get past two meetings at the hospital board, which it just about did. Then it needed to be rubber-stamped by somebody from the local authority. It went to Barton’s local clinical Enforcement team, who rejected it unanimously, on the grounds that cannabis is an untested medication.
Barton would like to see the clinical trials for cannabis rethought. “They take three years per condition. Cannabis can treat over 300 conditions, so that’s over 900 years of trials,” she says. “We have been in this situation before, attempting to squeeze medicine that’s been utilized for centuries into a box developed for brand new drugs. Rather than sitting around saying that this is not the way we do things, we must think how we can accomplish this.”
Whether you agree or not as to cannabis being considered a medicine, it is clearly ridiculous that something can become legitimate only if you pay a lot of money privately for it. “The wealthy are patients at the moment, everybody else remains criminal,” says Barton, who could manage to become a patient just for a month, prior to becoming a criminal again. She does not enjoy being one: the association with traders, organized crime, county lines, stabbings, in addition to the danger that one night that the police might come and kick the door down. She retains capsules of the cannabis oil she gets by her bed, to take with her if they really do come and take her away.
When she obtained her home-growing kit two weeks after her NHS prescription was blocked, she went into her regional police station to inform them exactly what she was doing. “I gave them a signed piece of paper disclosing precisely the location, what weights and strains I was prescribed, committing to develop just those strains, and whatever I grow above and beyond that I will personally come and hand for amnesty.”
What was their response? She laughs. “They literally did not know what to do. She’d reassure me that they weren’t going to come and kick the door down, though she could not promise that they wouldn’t.”
In response, Barton is putting up Carly’s Amnesty. It is a scheme where people like her who develop and use cannabis for medicinal purposes, have diagnoses and can’t afford personal prescriptions, would announce and register to their regional government exactly what, where and how much they’re growing, and agree to hand in anything over their needs, in return for immunity from arrest and prosecution.
If that seems more like Utopia than Sussex, she’s a meeting with the area’s police and crime commissioner later in the week, to discuss how it may work. She would like to run a pilot in the region, “then we’re going to invite other forces to join, and we’ll take over the UK slowly, in bite-sized chunks. I want this pilot taken seriously. It’s the very least that can be done – to tell people they aren’t going to kick your door down in the middle of the night, or have you worried about your family and social services involvement, because you’re consuming a plant to keep yourself well.”
Barton certainly doesn’t want to go back to how she had been. Nothing is cured, she understands that, and she can — and does — go into spasm. She shows me on her laptop a video of her, seemingly locking up, in an unnatural place, her shoulder twisted. All these dystonic storms utilized to take place roughly twice a week, and still do. The difference is the way they affect her life today. “That would have been an undercover occupation. A&E, anti-spasmodic shots, gas and air for a couple of hours before the injections kicked , probably admitted, a couple of days of recovery, then physio. Now, I can bring that down with cannabis. Two and a half minutes on the vaporiser and I can just crack on, do a bit of cleaning.”
If you are in LA and looking to purchase marijuana flower, CBD, edibles, or concentrates for delivery, register with Kushfly here.
The post Cannabis Over Pain Killers – One Woman’s Fight For Medical Cannabis In The UK appeared first on Kushfly.
from Kushfly https://kushfly.com/blog/cannabis-over-pain-killers-one-womans-fight-for-medical-cannabis-in-the-uk/
No comments:
Post a Comment