Can You Toke Away The Pain?

More and More People Are Claiming That Weed Comes With a Host of Health Benefits

- Gretchen Voss

She would never call herself a stoner. Sitting in her modest house, Lannette Johnson, 44, says she’s really just a nerd – even though she has used marijuana nearly every single night for more than four years.

Before that, Lannette routinely swallowed a cocktail of pharmaceuticals for intense fibromyalgia-induced muscle and joint aches that left her in agony during the day and wide awake at night. But none of the pills worked and the relentless pain forced her to quit her job; she spent most of 2006 in bed.

When someone suggested she try cannabis – aka pot, weed, dagga – Lannette laughed out loud. “I was staunchly against it,” she says, a proud product of the Just Say No era. She’d never so much as puffed on a cigarette. But in 2007, when a friend with fibromyalgia died after overdosing on pain meds, Lannette reconsidered. Her doctor agreed she should try medical marijuana, but a sceptical Lannette spent another year researching it – and then had to watch a YouTube video just to figure out how to smoke the stuff.

Now she takes her medicine – just a toke or two of a sweet-tasting variety her dispensary named Golden Goat – right before bed, always in her room and never around her family. It costs around R460 out-of-pocket for a two-week supply, far less than she was paying for prescriptions. And unlike when she was on those meds, she never feels nauseated. Her once-constant aches have decreased dramatically. She gets solid shut-eye and has begun working on her first book. “Marijuana has totally changed my life,” she says. “It has saved my life.”