I have personally been waging a lifelong battle with Crohn's disease, a battle in which medical marijuana has proven to be a great ally. Crohn's disease causes inflammation affecting the entire gastrointestinal tract. During flare-ups, the symptoms can be paralyzing; over the past ten years my life has been brought to a stop by sharp, debilitating stomach pain, constant diarrhea (at its worst I spent entire days on the toilet screaming in pain), blood in the stool and severe weight loss. Medicine has made little progress in the search for a cure and doesn't even fully understand the cause of the illness (it is believed to be an auto-immune disease, so the body's own defenses may be to blame). The most popular way to control Crohn's is with Prednisone, a multi-purpose steroid drug that, along with reducing inflammation, can cause psychosis, stunted growth, high blood pressure, weak bones and glaucoma.

The manufacturer of Prednisone recommends it be used in short spurts to minimize side effects, but during my adolescence I was kept on high doses of the drug for prolonged periods of time. Prednisone couldn't control my illness, and even worse it went to work on my body and mind, stunting my growth, causing mood shifts and water retention, and putting me at risk for osteoporosis. I tried all the treatments available, even attempting an "elemental diet:" breakfast, lunch and dinner served through a tube that ran up my nose and down to my stomach. This failed too, and I had to be home-schooled through high school, spending my days lying in bed clutching my stomach in agony, hoping the constant diarrhea would stop.

A writing career led me to California, where I discovered a medical marijuana regimen of smoking before and after meals made the symptoms of my Crohn's disease disappear. Under California's Proposition 215, I had the legal right to use a medicine that proved far more effective than anything my doctors had tried.

The alternative is Marinol, a legal prescription medicine that contains a synthetic version of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active ingredient in natural marijuana. Marinol has several disadvantages: 1) It takes much longer to work, especially after meals when I need relief the most; 2) It is difficult to have the right amount. I either end up being too stoned to function or not medicated enough; and 3) THC is not the only active compound in marijuana, and research shows the anti-inflammatory effect of marijuana is likely a result not of THC, but of cannabidiol, a separate chemical not contained in Marinol.

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