Welcome to Painopolis, the podcast for people with chronic pain. We bring you stories about people who confronted the worst hell imaginable, surmounted it, and are now ready to tell the rest of us how they did it. You’ve never heard stories like these. Stories straight from the trenches, brought to you by seasoned journalists who’ve made chronic pain their full-time beat. Prepare to be riveted. Painopolis. Relentlessly in search of what works, one defiant story at a time. Visit us at painopolis.com.
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Uncle Sam Is His Dealer: Medical Marijuana
Meet the chronic-pain patient who talked the U.S. government into giving him free, legal medical marijuana for the last 34 years.
You’ve probably heard about our guest today, maybe not by name but certainly by way of urban legend. The story goes like this: In Mississippi, the U.S. government has been growing marijuana for decades and giving the crop for free to a small, select group of Americans suffering from chronic pain and other medical conditions.
Well, the story’s not just an urban legend. And today, we talk to one of those recipients, Irvin Rosenfeld. He’s a 63-year-old Florida stockbroker who’s received free, government-approved weed for more than three decades. And he’s permitted to smoke it anywhere in the U.S. that tobacco smoking is allowed.
We chat with Rosenfeld about how he persuaded the feds to stop bogarting the pot; what the rest of us can learn from his decades-long reliance on medical cannabis; and what happened the day he lit up one of his legal joints at Disneyworld.
Today, Rosenfeld talks about:
• How he went from being the Nancy “Just Say No” Reagan of his high school to discovering that marijuana drastically reduced his severe chronic pain
• Why marijuana surpasses prescription painkillers at controlling his pain and allowing him to live a full, active life that includes sailing and playing softball
• How he uses marijuana on a daily basis to rein in his severe chronic pain
• How he pulled off the nearly impossible feat of persuading the U.S. government to provide him with a legal, lifetime supply of medical marijuana
• What the same amount of pot would have cost him if he’d bought in on the streets instead of getting it free from the federal government
• Why this successful stockbroker’s clients are happy to trust their investments with a guy who smokes 10 joints a day
• The Kafkaesque craziness that can happen when he smokes marijuana in public and can’t convince local police that he’s toking legally
Go to this episode’s show notes at https://painopolis.com/legal-medical-marijuana-for-chronic-pain/ for more information about Rosenfeld. We’ve also included links to an array of published studies investigating the medicinal uses of marijuana for chronic pain and other ailments.