Even on prescription drugs, Irvina Booker, who has multiple sclerosis, was in so much pain that she couldn’t let her grandson jump into her lap.

She suffered intense headaches, vomiting and vertigo. It got to the point where she couldn’t walk. Desperate, she tried marijuana. The effect, she said, was “miraculous.”

It didn’t get her high. It made her feel normal. Today, it helps her handle the basics, such as going to the supermarket for ingredients to make her Easter pies.

Yet thanks to endless delays in opening New Jersey’s legal medicinal pot centers, the 60-year-old church volunteer and former PTA president from Englewood is forced to buy marijuana off the street, “as if I’m a criminal.”

As are countless other chronically ill patients. For two years, they’ve been told to wait. Now the first lawsuit has been filed, accusing the administration of deliberate foot-dragging. Let that be the final warning: If the centers don’t open soon, it could trigger an onslaught of challenges.

Some of the blame belongs to specific municipalities, which put up zoning laws to bar medicinal marijuana centers. They fanned irrational fears that the centers will lure criminals. But Gov. Chris Christie was the one who set that tone. He’s never liked the medical marijuana law, passed during the Corzine era.

So while Christie swore he’d cut New Jersey’s red tape, he’s left this program mired in bureaucracy. The head of Montclair’s center has threatened to quit, saying he invested $170,000 and the state still won’t give him a final permit.

To be sure, the Obama administration hasn’t helped. Recently, the feds cracked down on the marijuana business in California, which — like New Jersey — allows it by statute, even though it violates federal law. Local leaders were perplexed. Instead of raiding an established medicinal marijuana trade school and dispensary run by a paraplegic, they said, why not go after a genuine threat, such as illegal gun dealers?

To patients like Booker, all the fear-mongering over medical marijuana defies common sense.

“It’s about my quality of life,” she said. “If you’re not worried about liquor stores, or pharmacies giving out OxyContin, why this?”

— The Star-Ledger,

April 6