John Berfelo had always been what he calls "a recreational smoker." But after falling 8.5 metres onto concrete, he credits marijuana with not just getting him high, but saving his life.

In 2005, the then-33-year-old glazier was working on a scissor-lift when he tripped on a box of construction materials and went over the railing. He woke up in the hospital.

"My life was changed forever," Berfelo said.

His broke his neck in four places; he shattered his left elbow. He fractured his skull. He broke teeth and he shattered an ankle. He herniated three discs. He broke his hip.

Berfelo was in the hospital for three weeks. A live-in nurse and Meals on Wheels helped him when he returned home and started recovery. He was on 32 pills a day, including muscle relaxants, antidepressants and sleeping pills.

"I was on so many pills I carried around a little box of prescription drugs," he said.

He was "chasing pain," Berfelo said. "I was a mess, up and down, crying my eyes out. I did pain charts and logs for over four years."

The pain fluctuated with the amount of drugs he was taking. At the time, he was also eating pot brownies from the B.C. Compassion Club Society.

The brownies were made with pot tested by Paul Hornby, a B.C.-based medical cannabis researcher and biochemist with a doctorate in human pathology. Berfelo found that those particular brownies worked better at fighting the pain than the prescribed painkillers, and their effects lasted longer.

He started slowing down on the pills in 2007 and has been pharmaceutical-free since 2008. That year, he even went through major back surgery without prescription pills, using only amino acids, cana-caps (standardized doses of THC and can-nabinoids in a capsule) and Hornby-tested tinctures.

The use of marijuana as an analgesic is gaining traction in North America.

In 2009, the American Medical Association adopted a report drafted by its Council on Science and Public Health, which affirmed the potential therapeutic benefits of marijuana, and called for further research.

Dr. Lester Grinspoon, associate emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a long-time advocate of medical marijuana. The 84-year-old published his first book on the medical benefits of pot, Marihuana Reconsidered, in 1971.

He said the pain-reducing benefits of pot are beyond dispute.

"Cannabis is great therapy," Grin-spoon said. "If you have chronic severe pain, like osteoarthritis or Ankylosing spondylitis, you can often get away with just using cannabis. If you have more severe pain, and your doctor tells you to use something like OxyContin, that's fine. But cannabis helps you reduce the dose. Many people start out using opiates, then they get into trouble. Then they concentrate on just using cannabis. Many of them can do it very successfully. There's no question about its usefulness."

Berfelo is still in constant pain. "The pain doesn't go away," he said. But the pot helps him deal with that and with muscle spasms, and has helped get him kick expensive pharmaceuticals.

When he was on painkillers, it cost $1,488 a month for Berfelo to lead a somewhat normal life.

Today, he sees his doctor only once a year, to renew his Marihuana Medical Access Regulations (MMAR) licence. This allows him to carry and use cannabis legally for his condition, at a cost of $500 a month.

Now on a permanent pension, Ber-felo also works at a hydroponics store as a legal medical cannabis educator and has started support groups for injured workers.

"It saved my life, that's how I look at it," Berfelo said.

"I'm not chasing pain any more, and I'm not all over the place. I'm not forgetting as much. I can have a life. I'm not a zombie."

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