In July of 1990 I was driving home from work and as I came around a corner doing 55 MPH I came into a herd of deer. I tried to miss them but one of them fell down and my right front tire went up on the deer's hip like a ramp. My car flipped over and went down an embankment. It landed on the roof smashing the driver's compartment down to the level of the top of the seat. I didn't have a seatbelt on so I was able to dive into the passenger's floorboard but even that didn't save me.

I woke up in the hospital a couple of days later with a broken vertebra. Medically it was called "an unstable fracture of the second vertebra" or C-2 fracture. Somehow it didn't kill me, but it did paralyze my left side for a couple of weeks. When the feeling came back all of the nerves reacted spastically. If I reached for something I couldn't control where my hand was going. If I sneezed my hand would fly uncontrollably.

Several times I bloodied my nose with my left hand just sneezing. I finally learned to grab my left arm when I sneezed. I couldn't walk without a cane because I couldn't trust my left leg to go where I wanted it to. It was an extremely difficult time in my life. About two months after the accident I came home from the hospital. Some of my friends had come over to visit and as it happened, I sneezed. My arm came up and hit me in the face and bloodied my nose once again. I was embarrassed to say the least.

One of my friends rolled a joint and something happened... The muscles in my neck relaxed and when I reached for my coffee my arm went where it was supposed to. As long as I moved very slowly, I could move correctly.

Within a week I was using my hand to shuffle a deck of cards. I can't explain how dramatic the difference was. I went from not being able to eat with a fork (previously too spastic to grab and hold a fork) to shuffling a deck of cards and dealing them in just one week. Within three weeks I could walk without a cane. Once again I could trust my legs to go where I wanted them. Marijuana is the only drug that any doctor has found, in eight years of trying different drugs, that works.

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