Edward “Lefty” Grimes uses cannabis to manage his pain.
Grimes has neuropathy, a form of nerve damage, from a back injury he sustained decades ago. After multiple spine and disc fusions he said he was constant pain.
“Sometimes it’s burning, sometimes it’s stabbing — sometimes it’s electrical, sometimes it’s dull, but it never gets better,” said Grimes, 57, who lives in Bayonne. “It just gets different or worse.”
Without cannabis, Grimes needs a wheelchair to get around for more than a couple of steps. He signed up for New Jersey’s medical marijuana program shortly after it launched more than a decade ago. With cannabis he can stand and walk for short distances.
“Cannabis got me off all those drugs,” he said. “It got me off OxyContin. It got me off Lyrica. It got me off Valium.”
Grimes and other medical cannabis patients in New Jersey were promised they would be top priority when the state opened the door for recreational sales in 2022. But as a billion-dollar weed business blossomed across the Garden State, these patients say they’ve been left behind.
The price of cannabis in New Jersey is among the highest in the nation. Consistent discounts offered to medical cannabis patients before the adult-use market opened are scarce now, patients say. While it was never easy to get specific strains that could ease pain, patients say it’s even tougher now as cannabis companies chase what’s most profitable to sell.
Many patients say in the face of this, they should be allowed to grow their own weed. But New Jersey continues to ban the policy also known as “home grow” — even though most states that have legalized cannabis allow it. Those caught growing their own risk arrest and possible fines and prison under New Jersey law. Patients say they feel betrayed.
“An important goal of legalization is to end the racial and income disparities in the way marijuana laws were enforced and prosecuted,” said state Sen. Vin Gopal, D-Monmouth, who co-sponsored home grow legislation (S1393) for medical patients. “Leaving residents to face a possible prison sentence for growing a limited quantity at their homes, while it’s legal to buy, sell, possess, smoke and to grow marijuana commercially, creates a new disparity.”
The object of medical patients’ ire is state Senate President Nick Scutari, D-Union, a primary architect of the cannabis legislation who for several years has refused to put home grow legislation up for a vote in the upper house. But he’s not alone: State Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, D-Middlesex, who controls what bills are considered in the lower house, says he does not support home grow.
Activists have tried. They have lobbied lawmakers and waged protests, and as frustration built, they moved to using a giant inflatable rat outside the Statehouse aimed at the Senate president, dubbed “Sen. Ratari.”
H/T: www.nj.com
