Without cannabis my wife would be dead and I would be in constant muscle spasm. She cannot eat food unless she smokes and her pain level without the pot is horrible. Each meal for her begins with preparations which involve inhaling enough smoke that her stomach will cooperate and let her food stay down. It has been this way for around seven years now. Before that I watched as she slowly wasted, and hoped that she would not die.

One day around three years before we fled the USA, we were down to almost no cannabis. We were very worried because my wife was pregnant and there was no way that she could sustain a pregnancy if she could not eat. We had been getting by an a couple of very spindly plants gown under fluorescent lights in our basement. Why use bad lighting? Because my wife and I had been involved in a Cannabis Buyers Club...one that had gone under because sick people are easily taken advantage of by criminals….and we knew that the police watched for people with high power bills. We knew that if we got caught, and she or I went to jail, she would die from lack of medical care.

One day, I phoned the local hydroponics store to see if they had "superthrive" which is a fertilizer often used on cannabis, but also used on many other plants. I went down later that day to pick up a small bottle in the hopes of keeping my wife alive. Her weight was bad, and her color was pasty gray. She looked like and end stage cancer patient waiting to die...and in her uterus was a developing life, a potential person, perhaps the only child we would ever have a chance for. We had very little cannabis. We were boring and square and the club was our only contact with the world of cannabis.

A few weeks later there was a knock at our door. Two police officers were there, claiming that they had received an anonymous tip that we were growing pot. I had not slept more than a couple of hours a night in months, and they talked their way into the house. They saw our pitiful little grow operation. They saw my bone thin pregnant wife with her gray green pasty complexion shuffle unsteadily into the lounge for a few minutes and then collapse.

They took our tiny plants, our few grams of pot, which gave her the ability to eat, and they told us not to grow anymore, that we should keep our amounts under an ounce, and that they would try and bury the case and not come after us it but that they could make no guarantees that other people in the police would not come after us, and they left with my wife’s medication in a garbage bag. Later that month we got a call from our landlords, who asked if it was because of my wifes illness. They told us we could not grow anymore, and we didn’t grow anymore. There was too much risk, even at $400 to $500 an ounce ($1000 a month) to keep my wife alive.

Later that week we got into our car and drove south to a meeting of hemp activists 6 hours away. We threw ourselves on their mercy and showed them our CBC identification cards and told them our story. They kept my wife alive by finding us something we could buy, at $360 a ounce.

Later on the DEA raided the second CBC in our city. They took all the patient an doctor records and the local cops arrested everybody associated with the operation. They put our friend Sandy into jail for two weeks without her legal medications…that was two weeks of agony for her, two weeks of illegal torture. That was when we knew that we were right, that we had to leave the country. We knew that the feds would never let anyone stay alive using cannabis. It was their weakest argument, and a political tool that they had invested too much in to back down over.

So, now we live in Australia where the laws are not great, but the air is clean enough for us to breath and the country is too big to patrol efficiently. It has been almost 4 years and I still jump every time I hear a car go by the house.

If you have a way to leave the USA, go while you still can. You cannot stop what it going to happen. Leave while you can.