An unlikely plea in support of medical marijuana

(PNI) "No medical authority would say it's helping you. They all say it's harming you."

--State Rep. John Kavanagh, on medical marijuana

It starts the minute he wakes up and puts his feet on the floor. The nausea quickly builds from the base of his stomach to the back of his throat, and he tries to think mind over matter, but matter generally wins. And this is just the beginning of the day.

The really hard time, he would tell you, comes later in the afternoon, when he must force down the pills he needs to stay alive and hope they stay down. Food? The thought of it makes him gag, and this goes on day after week after year. His parents wonder whether he can survive it. So far, in well over a decade, Bennett Black has found only one thing that eases the nausea enough so that he can eat, so that he can live.

Marijuana.

Now, there's a move afoot to repeal the medical-marijuana law that Arizona voters have approved three times. Black's father is hoping the Legislature will take a pass on Kavanagh's bill to put repeal on the 2014 ballot.

"I can't imagine people saying, 'I'm going to take away a sick person's lifeline, their ability to have a quality of life and to criminalize that which is keeping him alive,'" the father told me. "If there's a problem, the problem doesn't come from keeping it away from people that need it."

Lest you think these are the words of some aging hippie, think again.

Black's father is former U.S. Attorney Mel McDonald, a Ronald Reagan appointee who led the war on drugs in Arizona in the 1980s and sat on the 15-member advisory commission of attorneys general that helped set national drug policy.

He's a Mormon, a former Maricopa County prosecutor who also served as a Superior Court judge and has been appointed to various boards and commissions by six of the past seven Arizona governors.

And he's a fierce supporter of medical marijuana because he's seen the relief it offers his son.

I've been skeptical about the whole medical-marijuana movement, sold as a godsend to cancer and glaucoma patients but used mostly by people with "chronic pain." The picture of a young man holding his skateboard and his white bag of pot in December, when Arizona's first dispensary opened, wasn't exactly a public-relations coup for the medical-marijuana industry.

Then, I met Bennett Black and his parents, Mel and Cindy McDonald.

In 1997, Black was riding his Go-Ped when he was hit by a car going 45mph. The 14-year-old suffered a serious brain injury that left him with a severe form of epilepsy.

He's seen some of the best neurologists in the country. He's had a golf-ball-size piece of his brain removed. He's had a vagus nerve stimulator, a device that sends out electrical charges every 30seconds, wired to his brain.

And still, the epilepsy controls his life, racking his body with life-threatening grand-mal seizures that can last up to 75minutes.

He takes five anti-seizure medications, which leave his stomach one roiling pit of "uuuugh." Every day, he is sick. All the time, sick. By 1999, his weight had dropped from 180pounds to 119, as he would go days without food.

His mother talked of spending hour upon exhausting hour in the dead of night, trying to coax seizure medication into his empty stomach only to find the pills minutes later in a bucket of vomit.

A neighbor, suffering the effects of a broken neck, suggested to Cindy that her son try marijuana. At first, Cindy said she resisted, but eventually, she became desperate. It was, she said, like a miracle. A few puffs, and Black could a least gag down a few bites of food, enough to keep him alive.

And so came Cindy the criminal, the mother who sneaked around and broke the law, obtaining marijuana so her son could live, knowing that if she were caught it would make headlines: "Wife of former U.S. attorney snared in drug bust."

But knowing, too, that she had no choice.

Mel McDonald also faced a dilemma. He knew his son needed the illegal drug. But he knew also that he could lose his license to practice what he had always stood for and respected -- the law.

For a decade, the McDonalds lived with what he calls "the iron curtain" in their house. Cindy would obtain the marijuana, storing it in a safe only she had access to and giving it to her son when he needed it, which was pretty much every day -- though never when Mel was around.

And Mel? It was his job to look the other way and to live with that.

"It's almost like the story of 'Les Miserables.' Jean Valjean, breaking in to steal bread," he said, recounting a decade of his wife's clandestine activity. "Here's a mother who has found one way to keep her son eating food -- the only thing that works is marijuana -- to keep him alive. To have to go out there and create that barrier in our home, because I can't be a part of it, I can't be with you. I don't want to know what you're doing. I've literally got to keep a barrier in my own home to satisfy the requirements of the law and the Bar."

Voters first approved legalizing marijuana for medical use in 1996, but the Legislature repealed the law. Voters again approved it in 1998, but it never took effect because federal officials threatened to prosecute any doctor who prescribed the drug.

Then in 2010, voters narrowly approved it a third time, this time with a requirement that only a doctor "recommend" the drug, and Cindy sobbed with relief and gratitude.

For nearly two years, the state dragged its feet before the first dispensaries finally were allowed to open in December. Now, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is asking the state Supreme Court to toss out the law, contending that it's pre-empted by federal law.

Meanwhile, Kavanagh is working to put a repeal on the 2014 ballot, noting that 90percent of medical-marijuana users are seeking relief from "chronic pain," not cancer or glaucoma. He also cites a recent federal appellate court ruling that upheld a Drug Enforcement Administration decision to keep marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug -- one deemed to have no legitimate medical uses.

Bennett Black would beg to differ. He is among nearly 34,000 Arizonans who have state permission to use marijuana.

We met at noon on Thursday, along with his parents and his service dog, Aggie, who is trained to call for help when a seizure occurs. Black hadn't eaten for 22hours when we met.

At most, he said he has one meal a day and only then because the marijuana temporarily eases the nausea, giving him a window of opportunity to eat.

"All you have to do is see someone in my situation and see how much it helps, and they would completely feel differently," Black told me. "They would go from being against it to for it in the blink of an eye."

Cindy said the program has given dignity to people like her son, who can now obtain the drug legally to ease his nausea and stimulate his appetite.

"It saved his life," she told me. "I will go to my grave knowing he would have been dead."

Mel McDonald said a repeal would have the effect of turning his wife into a criminal.

Mothers will do what they must, after all. Who among us wouldn't?

If people are abusing the law, Mel said, we should go after the abusers, not the patients whose lives are often transformed because they can get legal access to relief.

"There are tens of thousands of people that marijuana genuinely helps," he said. "We've been to the best doctors in the world for Bennett, from chiefs of staff on down. Nobody gave us a medication to take away the nausea and enable him to eat. It isn't out there except marijuana. If there was a magic pill somebody could give us that would cure the nausea and let him eat, we would take the pill, but marijuana is the only thing that works. …

"One of the tough things is for me not to pick up the phone and call Tom Horne or Bill Montgomery, both of whom are friends of mine and who I know well, and just say, 'For hell sakes, there's people that really need this. If there's a problem, tighten the laws to stop the abuse, but don't take the medicine away from the patient.'"

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8635.

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