Dying to Get High
Marijuana as Medicine
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
An inside look at how patients living with terminal illness created one of the country’s first medical marijuana collectives
Marijuana as medicine has been a politically charged topic in this country for more than three decades. Despite overwhelming public support and growing scientific evidence of its therapeutic effects (relief of the nausea caused by chemotherapy for cancer and AIDS, control over seizures or spasticity caused by epilepsy or MS, and relief from chronic and acute pain, to name a few), the drug remains illegal under federal law.
In Dying to Get High, noted sociologist Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb investigate one community of seriously-ill patients fighting the federal government for the right to use physician-recommended marijuana. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) is a unique patient-caregiver cooperative providing marijuana free of charge to mostly terminally ill members. For a brief period in 2004, it even operated the only legal non-governmental medical marijuana garden in the country, protected by the federal courts against the DEA.
Using as their stage this fascinating profile of one remarkable organization, Chapkis and Webb tackle the broader, complex history of medical marijuana in America. Through compelling interviews with patients, public officials, law enforcement officers and physicians, Chapkis and Webb ask what distinguishes a legitimate patient from an illegitimate pothead, good drugs from bad, medicinal effects from just getting high. Dying to Get High combines abstract argument and the messier terrain of how people actually live, suffer and die, and offers a moving account of what is at stake in ongoing debates over the legalization of medical marijuana.
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Sociologist Chapkis (Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor) and educator Webb chronicle the experiences of caregivers, patients and local officials in the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a nonprofit formed in the wake of California's "Compassionate Use Act of 1996" dedicated to education, research and providing cannabis to patients suffering from "chronic and life-threatening illnesses." Focusing on cannabis's benefits to the seriously ill, the authors investigate many aspects of this complicated issue, including marijuana cooperatives versus big pharma, the power of making one's own health care decisions, and the implications of alternative medicine's growing mainstream cachet. Chapkis and Webb rely on "anecdotal patient reports, not clinical trials," noting that the DEA and National Institute on Drug Abuse have for decades successfully instituted a policy of blocking "even carefully designed, FDA-approved research on the medical value of marijuana." While the authors mention arguments against medical marijuana ("'crude botanicals' are not real medicine; marijuana is reduced to and synonymous with smoking...; and 'feeling better' isn't always therapeutic"), patient testimony is largely positive and discussion of adverse effects limited. Still, this volume presents a great deal of information and perspective, and should be of value to the chronically ill and their caregivers, as well as those involved in public policy.