Most people Brigitte Biesel's age use their mini scales to weigh letters, but the 80-year-old bought hers to measure weed. "Recently, I saw one similar to mine on Bares für Rares [the German equivalent of _Antiques Roadshow_]," she tells me excitedly. As she's chatting, she's also trying to concentrate on grinding the cannabis buds onto her delicate silver scale.

Biesel loves to bake. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she made vanilla rolls, cinnamon stars, and other treats for her extended family and friends. But her baking today isn't about anyone else. I’m here to help her prepare her "medication," as she likes to call it—cookies spiked with cannabis from a nearby pharmacy.

Today is baking day at Biesel's terraced house in Köpenick, Germany, a picturesque district in Berlin. "I think it's safe to say that I’m the first person to bake this specific variety of cookies here," she says, laughing.

Her story is similar to the thousands of Germans who have found that cannabis works where conventional medicine has failed them. In March 2017, it became legal to obtain medicinal weed in Germany with a prescription, but relatively few clinics will prescribe it, and many health insurance companies don't want to cover the costs. By the end of last year, more than 13,000 people had submitted insurance claims to the three largest health insurance companies in the country. The German government had estimated that only 700 people would apply. "They have no clue," Biesel says.

Biesel isn't trying to get stoned and blank out the world. "That's not really my thing," she says. On the contrary—thanks to cannabis—she feels more alive. It makes her chronic pain more bearable, it helps her get out of bed in the morning, and it allows her to comfortably sit down in her garden under the rhododendrons, which she especially loves when they bloom red, white, and purple in spring and summer.

For the past 60 years, Biesel has struggled with chronic pain. At 19, she was diagnosed with scoliosis—a condition where your spine twists and curves out of place. If you stand behind her, you can clearly see that her spine is not straight, but rather shaped like an "S."

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Still, Biesel was determined to live a full and active life, despite her condition, and spent her 20s skiing, cycling, and swimming, while working as a costume tailor for the revues at the Friedrichstadt-Palast theater in Berlin. But, in her 30s, she woke up one morning barely able to feel the entire left half of her body. "I couldn't move my left hand—it just wouldn't work," she remembers.

In an East Berlin clinic, she was strapped onto a bed and pushed into an operating room. Bright lights, 20 students, and two professors stared down at her like she was the sole survivor of some UFO crash landing, she tells me now. Nobody could explain her paralysis. At the time, hospitals in East Germany didn't have CT scanners, so the alternative was to push a hollow needle into her spinal cord in order to collect spinal fluid. The pain was so unbearable that she fainted.