Confessions of an Uncaged Soul

My Interview on Drug Truth Radio

2011-02-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

Irvin Rosenfeld, supplied with 300 joints by the federal government every 25 days & Chris Cain, a quadraplegic deemed "a threat to society" for using the same meds.

29:00 minutes (13.28 MB)

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My Story Broadcasted on Texas Public Radio

2010-11-21T19:17:00.000-08:00

Laura Burke, the author of the story about me, "A Threat to Society" in the Texas Observer was interviewed by Texas Pubic Radio.

Listen here: http://tpr.org/programs/thesource.html

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http://audio.tpr.org/source101118.mp3

A Threat To Society

2010-11-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

In a small East Texas town, one man fights for his right to medical marijuana-and suffers the consequences.

By Laura Burke of the Texas Observer. Printed in the November 12th issue.

Off of a dead-end street in the lush woodlands of East Texas, Chris Cain rides his motorized wheelchair to his trailer’s front door and pushes it open with his wrist. With his barking Chihuahua trailing behind, he spins and leads me toward his office space, excusing the place’s appearance. “It’s been through two hurricanes and two police raids. It’s had it,” he drawls. In his living room, worn couches face a big-screen television.

Cain has been paralyzed for 25 years. When he was 16, he dove into a shallow creek on a school canoe trip and injured his spinal cord. He was rushed by helicopter to a hospital, but he hasn’t walked since. The accident left him doubly determined to succeed, he says. He graduated valedictorian of his high school class and earned a computer science engineering degree. With his limited hand movement and adaptive equipment, he is competitive in that field.

But the side effects of his injury threaten to derail his career track. Cain suffers from violent, painful muscle spasms that have grown worse. His mom, Esta, 68, has spent years rising five or six times a night to care for him, often sitting on his legs so he wouldn’t throw himself off of his bed. “He is very strong,” she says. “I feel like one of those rodeo guys having to hold his legs down.”

Cain tried prescription drugs for his spasms, but found the medication had debilitating side effects such as rapid heart rate, shortened breathing and his sense that the drugs made him a “drooling idiot.” Cain developed a tolerance to pain medicine and muscle relaxers, so he needed more and more to stop the spasms—all the while becoming more sedated and less functional. “When you have muscles contracting all the time, you can’t think, you can’t work,” he says. “You’re just focused on this pain. If you take muscle relaxers or pain killers, you’re drugged out. Then you say, OK, as long as [my body is] sedated, I don’t care if I’m drugged out. But then after a while you need more drugs to stop the muscle spasms. Then you’re totally messed up. And you just say, I can’t do this anymore.”

He saw his future on these drugs: dependence on his family, difficulty working and thinking, and an IV tube pumping muscle relaxers into his back. Then he discovered that smoking marijuana relieved his symptoms without the side effects. If all he wanted to do was get high, Cain says, he had legal access to a cornucopia of narcotics. The point of smoking marijuana was that he felt less out of it than he did on prescription drugs. Plus, he says, it worked better. His mother attests to its effectiveness. “When he smokes his medicine, I can sleep at night. His legs lay relaxed,” she says.

Cain knew forgoing prescription drugs in favor of marijuana in Texas was risky. But he didn’t realize how far local authorities would take their zero-tolerance drug policies. As he saw it, he was just a disabled guy.

Scientific evidence has begun to support what patients like Cain and their families have been saying for years. According to an article published in the journal Nature in 2005, cannabinoids in marijuana can be effective in treating spasticity. A cannabis-based drug called Sativex has received approval in the U.K. for treatment of spasms in multiple sclerosis patients. Five European countries, Canada, 14 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical cannabis. Texas has not.

Cain’s condition would be covered by medical marijuana laws in any of the 14 states. But he lives in Hardin County, where drug laws are enforced rigidly. Texas counties can’t make their own drug laws, but they do enforce them in radically different ways. “It is so individualized,” says Jerry Epstein, co-founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. He says some parts of the state take a “compassionate” stance, in the language of advocates, toward medical marijuana users. In Amarillo in 2008, Tim Stevens, a man with AIDS, won a case for using marijuana based on “necessity.” Necessity defenses are difficult, as the defense must prove that less harm was done by breaking the law than by complying with it. A jury in Amarillo acquitted Stevens in 11 minutes. But it’s often the personal attitudes of elected officials that determine who will be arrested, prosecuted and convicted, Stevens says. In conservative counties like Hardin, sheriffs are elected on tough-on-crime platforms.

Founded as a lumber town and a juncture of several railroad lines, Hardin’s county seat, Kountze (population 2,115), lies in a tangle of pine and cypress forest. It is not much more than a cluster of gas stations, a Dairy Queen and a county courthouse. The town calls itself “The Big Light in the Big Thicket.” But Kountze has a dark side, too, with a methamphetamine problem and 21 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. Others who live here work in the nearby “Golden Triangle,” the industrial strip along the Gulf of Mexico bordering Louisiana.

Cain’s problems with the Hardin County sheriff’s department began in 1999, he says. The police came by his house and said they wanted to talk to him, he remembers. They had heard that people had been smoking marijuana at his place. “I let them come in my house and search,” he says. “They uncovered a pipe and gave me a paraphernalia charge, and that was that. From then, it’s been nonstop.”

At 9:03 a.m. on July 18, 2003, deputies from Hardin and from the Jefferson County drug task force raided Cain’s home and music studio. Aside from an incident report, other information about the raid has been destroyed. After agents broke down Cain’s door, a woman who was arrested with Cain but asked not to be identified in this article says she kept asking for a search warrant. Officers declined to show it to her. She recalls one of the deputies yelling, “Shut up. If you ask again, I’ll staple it to your fucking forehead.”

Cain had just built his studio. “I guess, to them, it looked like I’d moved in a crystal meth lab, because they were, like, asking where the crystal meth was. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I gave them the misdemeanor amount of weed I had,” he says. According to the police report, the raid turned up just under 2 ounces of marijuana, including “marijuana stems” and “partially burned marijuana cigars (blunts)” on Cain’s property. They confiscated a kitchen scale and $2,125 in cash, which Cain says was money to pay a contractor who had built a handicap ramp at his house. At the time, Chris was learning to brew beer and says he used the scale to weigh ingredients. Cain’s lawyer proved the money was legal, and the police returned it.

Officers also seized thousands of dollars worth of Cain’s computer equipment. “I watched them literally chuck everything into the back of a truck,” he says. The affidavit states that while Coy Collins, a Hardin County deputy, was executing a marijuana search warrant, he observed “numerous devices affiant knows are used in the fraudulent creation and programming of satellite receiver cards ... in order to fraudulently obtain satellite service.”

Cain calls the accusation “bullshit.” He was using the equipment, he says, as part of his work researching the use of smart cards for event-ticketing, so he had several card readers around. He was never charged with any crime related to the seizure, but it was a year before his lawyer obtained an order for the sheriff’s office to return the property, which was Cain’s livelihood. Most of the equipment and hard drives were damaged, Cain says. “I’ve spent every year since that 2003 raid trying to build my company back to where it was,” he says.

After the raid, Cain was arrested and booked into a holding cell at the county jail. The cell was not handicapped-accessible, and he had no one to help him relieve his bladder or bowels, he says, though he asked for help. Around 5 p.m., after being held for seven hours, a jail nurse arrived to evaluate his needs. He told her he needed help relieving himself, that he couldn’t eat without adaptive equipment and that he needed sedatives to calm his spasms. The nurse told him he could take care of himself. Late that night, he was released. He spent days recovering from an extended bladder and bleeding, he says.

The raid enabled Hardin County to prove just how tough it could be on recreational users. Investigator Ernest Sharp reminded citizens in the Silsbee Bee, “If you are caught with illegal drugs, no matter the amount, you will go to jail.”

Cain’s marijuana case never made it to court. A “big wig came to town,” Cain says. Greg Gladden, who formerly presided over the ACLU of Texas, dashed in from Houston and told a county judge if the county prosecuted Cain, Gladden would establish that officers hadn’t had probable cause to execute the warrant. The county decided to drop the charges. “The information was ‘stale’ at the time it was presented to the judge,” Gladden says. “There is no information in the four corners of the affidavit rising to the level of probable cause to [indicate] there was dope on the premises at that time.”

Still upset, Cain wanted to file a civil suit against the county for the loss of property and income, but his lawyer discouraged him. Gladden was satisfied the criminal charges had been dropped, and he was not optimistic they could win the civil suit. “Those are hard cases,” he says.

Seven years later, Cain still feels the social fallout from the raid. When he became paralyzed, all of Kountze stood behind him, he says. “They support you. They say, ‘This is a supersmart kid,’” He says. When people heard he was using marijuana, and his name appeared in a drug bust article in the local newspaper, his reputation sank. “They see a guy that, ‘Oh, he graduated good, went to college, but he must have given up because of his injury,’” he says. “They don’t see me as someone that’s educated, that’s using marijuana so that I can live a normal life, have a business. I’ve been very successful, but to this small town I’m just a drug user.”

Hardin County Sheriff Ed Cain (no relation) doesn’t understand what the big deal is. “Why are you interested in a misdemeanor case?” he asks. The sheriff knows that Chris Cain says he uses the drug for medical purposes, but has implied this is an excuse to get stoned. In May 2009, the sheriff told the Beaumont Enterprise, “I just don’t think marijuana has any role whatsoever except to make you high.”

The sheriff says, “It is our belief that they are selling marijuana out of that residence, or out of that area.” According to the public record, though, officers have never found more than a misdemeanor amount of marijuana on him, despite the fact that Cain says police have searched his car, home or person more than a dozen times.

Even if Chris isn’t selling, Sheriff Cain says the county operates under a “zero tolerance” policy. “I don’t know how to describe it any better: zero,” he says. “Hardin County residents want zero drugs. That’s what I have, zero drug tolerance.” Asked about his pursuit of Chris Cain, he says, “We do hit hard, very hard. I won’t apologize for that. I’ve arrested friends. I’ve arrested supporters. If you check around, that’s what you’ll find.”

The Legislature could pass a medical marijuana law and make Cain’s problems go away. So far, however, every effort to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes has withered and died. In 2001, former state Rep. Terry Keel, an Austin Republican, introduced a medical marijuana bill. Similar legislation has been introduced every two years by state Rep. Elliott Naishtat, an Austin Democrat. The proposal received a hearing in 2005, but has never reached a vote.

This session, lobbying groups are drafting two bills. Stephen Betzen, director of the Texas Coalition for Compassionate Care, a Dallas-based medical marijuana advocacy group, says, “We are drafting a bill that we think can pass. We’ve talked to sheriffs, community leaders, citizens,” he says. The bill would allow Texas doctors to recommend marijuana to patients. Law enforcement would still be able to arrest someone for possession, but that person could use an “affirmative defense,” citing their doctor’s recommendation, and have the charges dropped. Patients and designated providers could grow their own.

Medcan University, another medical marijuana lobbying group, is drafting a different bill, and is in the process of presenting it to legislators. Both groups say it is too early to say which legislators may introduce a bill. Medcan’s version would tax medical marijuana, taking advantage of the state’s huge estimated budget shortfall for the next biennium. “There’s a $25 billion budget deficit,” says Dante Picazo, president of Medcan. “It’s a horrible burden for our legislators.” The bill calls for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to regulate marijuana and disburse cannabis to eligible patients at holistic “wellness centers” throughout the state. Like in California, counties would determine the number of centers. Medcan estimates the program would create 200,000 jobs, and by putting a 10-percent sales tax on the herb, could generate $952 million in revenue in the first year.

Taxation would mean acknowledging an illegal trade to the federal government. But Picazo doesn’t think a proposed sales tax on marijuana will scare away legislators from backing the bill. He points out that cities have begun taxing the substance with lucrative results and with no backlash from the federal government. During its first six months of taxation, Denver generated $1.2 million in sales tax from its dispensaries.

In most of the country, voters appear more apt than legislators to approve medical marijuana programs. Nine states have legalized medical marijuana through ballot initiatives or statewide referenda. In Texas, neither ballot initiatives nor statewide referenda exist. Betzen says, “Getting a bill passed through the Legislature is the only way in Texas.” And in the current political climate, marijuana reform faces an uphill climb in the Texas Legislature.

In March 2009, six years after the raid, Chris Cain was at a park in Kountze having a picnic with family and friends. Driving by, police saw him in a group of about 30 people and asked him if they could search the backpack on his wheelchair and his van. They didn’t search anyone else. Cain says he has learned that if he resists a search like this, officers will say they smell marijuana, which gives them probable cause to search him. He admitted to having a misdemeanor amount of marijuana. They didn’t arrest him. Instead, they told him, “Today is your lucky day,” he remembers.

In May, Cain went to Austin to speak at a rally sponsored by the Texas Cannabis Crusade and other medical marijuana advocacy groups. Soon after that, his luck again ran out: He received a possession charge in the mail from his “lucky day” at the park. Cain decided not to hire a lawyer and instead pay a fine and take six months of probation. “I thought, hey, maybe they just want me to quit fighting. They want me to quit testifying, going to the news,” Cain says. “I was going to find some alternative to marijuana so I could test clean and they could see that I wasn’t using it, so they would leave me alone.”

On probation, though, the police did not need a warrant to search him. “They pursued me more relentlessly than they had before,” he says. He had stopped medicating himself with marijuana. Because he had no effective sedative, constant shearing and sliding in his wheelchair from all-day muscle spasms injured Cain’s legs and buttocks. A pressure sore developed, and he was bedridden for five months. “I wasn’t able to get in my wheelchair,” he says. “I wasn’t able to get on my computer. My consulting work came to a halt, and medical bills soared.”

His mother cared for him. “You would think I was under house arrest,” she says. “I couldn’t leave the house. I didn’t go to church.” His father Eldon, 70, ran errands and did the chores. At that point, Cain couldn’t begin using marijuana again; he was being drug-tested regularly under the terms of his probation.

While Cain was bedridden at his parents’ place, the police came to his office, the building he and his friends also use as a music studio, and conducted a narcotics search. “I had told all the people that had access to my computer and studios that marijuana cannot be around me, because I was on probation,” Cain says. “But it looks like someone didn’t obey the rules.”

Standing at the foot of Cain’s bed, deputies told him they had found a pinch of marijuana in his office, he remembers. The officers wanted to arrest him, but he couldn’t be cuffed, and he was under a doctor’s care. “They said, ‘Until you heal, we won’t take you in. When you get back in your chair, turn yourself in,’” Cain recalls. The officers returned several times to see if he had healed. “I felt like a murder suspect, a person of interest,” he says. Once Cain could sit in his wheelchair, he rolled into the police station to turn himself in. Cain’s trial has been set for Jan. 11.

Cain has thought about leaving Kountze. “If I were in Austin or Houston, they wouldn’t care about me,” he says. He’s thought about moving to another state, but says he can’t afford to leave Kountze, where his parents look after him.

In Kountze, Cain says he lives in a state of fear. But he continues to attend rallies, testify before legislative committees, and share his story with reporters. “It’s crazy when you’re sitting there hurting,” he says, “and you’ve got this little herb, this plant, and you smoke it and your [muscles are] finally relaxed. It’s kind of barbaric that you can’t stop your pain.”

From Internet Maverick to Accused Drug Dealer: A Wild Life

2010-11-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

There can be a fine line between becoming an Internet billionaire and coming close. And while I still chase my dreams, I look back at my past ventures and realize how some things are just beyond a man's control.

If you get to see the movie about Facebook, Social Network, you'll see how crazy your world can get when you have a massive popular technology. Here's what's not in the movie. In 2005, the co-founder of Napster Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake in the movie) had many phone calls and emails with me about the file-sharing technology behind my company's Warez.com and Warez P2P software. It was the 3rd largest peer-to-peer network in the world, and it was decentralized and anonymous unlike Napster. Parker was president of the new Facebook at the time, and I showed him how our network would be perfect for Facebook users to share big files without big server costs and eliminate Facebook having liability on shared content due to our network being decentralized unlike Napster. We formed a company called iP2P to prepare our technology for licensing and get away from the "Warez" name. Sean Parker was very interested to use our iP2P technology, but he wanted to make sure the Supreme Court ruling (Morpheus/Grokster) regarding peer-to-peer networks went in our favor. The court ruled in favor of the record industry, and Parker changed his strategy to use a P2P network inside Facebook, because he didn't want to go through the Napster thing again. After the court ruling, the record industry (RIAA) sent cease and desist letters to the top 7 P2P networks and starting filing $100 million lawsuits. We sent our big lawyers in London to negotiate with the RIAA in Washington DC. I had them approach the RIAA about using our iP2P network of millions of users to sell music legitimately. They were open to my strategy and agreed not to sue us, since we were entirely built organically and no big investors were involved with us. They loved our network, but wanted us to work with 2 other companies to create the end product. The goal by all parties was to create a successful alternative to iTunes to grab some market and leverage. Mashboxx would be the name of the service, our iP2P would be the network, and Snocap would provide the technology to apply the digital rights management technology (making the purchased MP3s unshareable), because at the time only WMA files and Apple AAC files were allowed to be sold on the Internet. Sean Parker became interested again, because Snocap was his friend Shawn Fanning's company. Shawn was the co-founder of Napster. Parker had just been fired from Facebook as president, but retained some shares and was monitoring our progress. However, Wayne Russo of Mashboxx couldn't get the service launched, and our MP3 retail opportunity died. We continued to focus on advancing our iP2P technology, and we are preparing it for applications in the 4G mobile wireless world.

Crazy huh? Well then look at my list of endeavors.

In 1994, a friend and I had an environmental company called BioSource that used innovative enzymes to clean drinking water and clean up oil spills. We were way ahead of our time. We landed a $10 million contract with the government of Mexico to clean their water plants. Just before we started, the Peso crashed hard and funding of the project was halted. A few weeks later, we landed a $20 million contract with the government of Nigeria to clean their oil fields because OPEC was threatening sanctions on them. Just before the product was to be shipped, the government was overthrown by a military coup. Our company never recovered.

In 2005, our innovative peer-to-peer technology was the best in the world. It was forced to shut down after the Morpheus/Grokster Supreme Court ruling.

in 2006, my voice-over-IP software for China, iPhox, was introduced to that country. It was like Skype and allowed Chinese citizens to communicate with the world uncensored and for free. There was so much excitement, that iPhox was selected to be the 2006 title sponsor of the China Super League, their NFL of soccer. A couple of months later, the government blocked and banned the software.

I've worked hard and done some exciting things, and I have exciting things in the works. Soon I will be very successful. The moral of my story is to NEVER give up. Never stop believing in yourself.

On top of being a quadriplegic, I've survived the crashing of a country's currency, a military coup, a supreme court ruling, and censorship by a communist nation...but my biggest battle through all this has been a local sheriff and his deputies who have spread across town that Chris Cain is a drug dealer. They have spent 12 years pushing the narrative that a once brilliant mind gave up after becoming paralyzed, and since he sits in his home in the middle of the woods without a 9-to-5 job, his only option was to become a "a weed and crystal meth ringleader." That quote was from the former task force leader Hicks who told me what was written in my files.

Chris Cain's van pulled over once again for no reason.

2010-11-21T17:42:00.000-08:00

Written September 22nd, 2010

It's becoming almost surreal. My nerves are about shot, and every time I go somewhere, I have an overwhelming anxiety that they are coming after me. I can't take it anymore.

Yesterday, I decided to go to the Woodlands to a concert. It was my first time to really go somewhere for extended hours now that I'm finally able to sit in my chair for a full day after my last injury.

On the way home, I was pulled over a short time after re-entering Hardin County. It was around 12:30 AM on a small highway in a rural area about 20 min from my home. Somehow they knew where I would be. A state trooper came to the window and said our license tag wasn't displayed properly. A Hardin County sheriff deputy pulled in behind the trooper almost immediately. It was definitely a planned pull over.

It all made sense when the state trooper identified himself. It was the same guy that has pulled me over and harassed me numerous times. In 2009, a week after I was searched in the park, the same officer pulled over a friend leaving my house and told her that he was pissed that they didn't put me in jail the week before and that she needed to stay away from Chris Cain, because "he is a sorry, drug dealing piece of shit." He then let her go and told her he was going to my house to give me a piece of his mind. Later that night around midnight, he pounded on my front door and demanding to talk to Chris Cain. I was already asleep, but a caretaker at my office walked him back off the porch and said without a warrant, he needs to leave the property. He left yelling that he was "gonna get me."

2 months ago, he switched from Hardin County Sheriff deputy to state trooper. Earlier this year, he moved about 2 miles down my road. My relative lives next door to him, and she said he told her that I was a drug dealer and that he was gonna get me. Over the last few years, many people all over the county have told me that he tells them I'm a drug dealer and that they need to stay away from me.

Last night, he claimed he smelled weed through the window and used that as probable cause to search my van. I had smoked the synthetic incense earlier for my muscle spasms, but I don't keep weed on me anymore for this very reason. They kept saying "we know there is a lot of weed hidden in this van."

My driver did have a bit of his own marijuana in his pocket that I did not know about, and they took him to jail. On the trip to jail, the officer kept trying to get him to say that he bought the weed from me. He kept telling him that he would let him go if he would say the weed was mine. My friend said they were doing everything they could to pin something on me, so they could come take me to jail.

I'm at the point where all of my friends and family are scared to even drive me town to get something to eat. They are scared to even come to my house.

I'm physically and mentally drained. I live in constant fear and anxiety, and the people I love are scared to be around me, because they witness firsthand how I'm constantly targeted.

I almost don't care about the criminal case anymore. I would do jail time if someone said it would make them stop making the destruction of my life their number one priority.

It's hard enough surviving as a quadriplegic. I can't take this witch hunt anymore.

Surving Texas

2010-11-21T17:21:00.000-08:00

Since my accident, which left me a quadriplegic during my teenage years, I have tried every remedy in the book to treat my symptoms safely. After 12 years of trying to justify my use of cannabis as a medicine in a small Texas county and living in fear of being arrested every day, I gave up in late 2009. I decided to quit consuming marijuana to stop my debilitating muscle spasms due to my spinal cord injury.

In early 2009, I was at the park having a family and friends picnic. The authorities driving by saw me and asked, me only, if I had anything on me. They asked if they could search the backpack on my wheelchair and van, and I went ahead and told them I had a misdemeanor amount on me. It was one of the 14 times that my van had been pulled over, and the 9th time that it had been searched in the last decade. I wasn't arrested on the spot, but I was sent a possession charge through the mail a few months later. It was my first case that resulted from being pulled over 14 times. My only other charge was in 2003 when my house was raided by the county drug task force, and I gave them the misdemeanor amount of cannabis that I had on me. Seven cars and a helicopter were used during that visit. That case was later dropped due to not having sufficient evidence in acquiring a search warrant. However, my computers and data drives were held for a year which was detrimental to my Internet consulting business. I lost many clients and opportunities that I never got back.

So, on this arrest, I gave up. I didn't hire a lawyer and decided to take a fine and 6 months probation. I will explain why. After 12 years of being pursued and accused of being a drug dealer, after testifying numerous times in front of legislature committee in support of a bill to change the laws, after over 30 instances of friends, clients, and family being pulled over and harassed coming to and leaving from my house, and after my reputation was severely damaged in my small town, I decided that it was not worth the trouble of using marijuana as a medicine anymore. Even though I had tried every pharmaceutical drug, which didn't work or either caused dangerous side effects or the inability to do work, I decided to quit the only logical, alternative that I had found to work while allowing me to function physically and mentally....marijuana.

I figured if the county succeeded in convicting me of a misdemeanor charge, and after testing clean for 6 months of probation, they would have deemed themselves victorious and successful from stopping me from using marijuana. I thought it would finally stop their relentless pursuit, and I would have peace. It would also force me to search and find another alternative that was as safe as marijuana and stopped my painful muscle spasms. However, I would soon discover, that quitting marijuana would lead me to more unforeseen health problems, and by being on probation, it gave the county a way to come after me even more. In fact, quitting the use of marijuana, was the worst thing I could have done.

I once again tried every legal remedy I read about on the Internet that could possibly sedate my painful leg and abdominal muscle spasms. Everything from valerian root to kava kava root to herbal teas would not work, and I refused to go back to trying heavy narcotics and turn myself into a drooling vegetable. Each day, my muscle spasms got worse than the day before. I couldn't work or concentrate on anything due to constant jerking of my legs and abdominal muscles. I started taking shots of vodka as a last resort sedative. It worked at first, but then my tolerance level grew. It look more alcohol to stop my spasms, therefore causing me to be drunk and unable to function, much like being on narcotics.

The constant shearing and sliding in my wheelchair from the all day muscle spasms caused major damage to my skin, and before I realized it, I had rubbed a very bad pressure sore on my leg. I could no longer sit in my chair. It caused me to be bedridden 24/7 until it healed completely. My worst nightmare came true, and I was forced to be in the bed for 5 straight months. It had to be worse than spending time in jail. I could go nowhere, and I couldn't work on my computer flat on my back, so my consulting work came to a halt and medical bills soared. Being isolated in a tiny room for 5 months can be quite a mental and spiritual challenge. To make things worse, my muscle spasms were at their peak. My mother would have to wake up 6 times during the night for months just to hold my legs until they calmed down, so that I didn't fly off the bed. Living as a quadriplegic is a daily survival itself...adding challenges that could have been avoided can be quite heartbreaking. A life being confined to a wheelchair is hard for most to imagine. Now imagine being in a position where all you hope for is to be back in your wheelchair again. That was where I was.

Around the third month of this difficult time, two sheriff deputies came to my bedside to tell me that they had a warrant for my arrest. I was told that they had searched my other property where my office and multimedia studios are located and found a pinch of marijuana on the desk of my main computer. I was told that they were allowed to search all my properties without a warrant because of the terms of my probation. While I wasn't there, they did a full drug task force raid of my offices as a "probation visit", however my probation officer was not informed about it. I had told all the people that had access to my computer and studios, that marijuana cannot be around me, because I was on probation. However, while you are not around, it's virtually impossible to make everyone you know obey the rules.
The deputies stood at the end of my bed with my mom crying from fear of me going to jail and weeks of exhaustion. She was in pure shock. The deputies told me that they wouldn't take me to jail until I was healed, and stated that I needed to turn myself in when I could get back in my wheelchair. It was at this time that I realized that their main goal was to put me in jail using any probation violations they could think of. I hired a local lawyer to speak to the county attorney to see if my probation had been revoked, but no one had information for him. I knew that if my probation was revoked, they may not give me a bond, and I would have to spend time in jail until a court hearing and risk further injury without proper care. Issuing a bond for deferred adjudicated probation of a misdemeanor is usually done, but the county attorney has the option to refuse one. But as of then, my probation had not been revoked.

About a month after my arrest visit from the sheriff deputies and 4 months into my injury, the doctor allowed me to start sitting in my chair for 90 minutes a day. It would be the start of a gradual sitting tolerance rehabilitation program that takes 3 months before one can sit on a wheelchair cushion all day. It was time for my final probation visit, and since everyone I called said that my probation had not been revoked, I decided to spend my second day up in my chair going to the courthouse and ending my probation. I was hoping that they would test me for marijuana, so that I could prove that I've done everything under my control to not violate my probation, which included many sleepless nights with non-stop muscle spasticity. To control my spasms for the probation visit, so that I didn't reinjure myself, I had been trying a synthetic marijuana that I heard about in the news called JWH-018 that mimicked the effects of cannabis. It was being sold in local convenient stores legally as herbal incense with brands like "K2" and "Serenity Now." I tried it and it actually worked amazingly well. A couple of puffs controlled my muscle spasms for hours. However, for me, it has unwanted side effects such as heavy anxiety and sometimes irregular breathing. I'm not sure if that's from the synthetic or the herbs mixed with it. But it is currently a legal backup to medical marijuana, and until my court case is over, I'm having to risk the short and possible long term effects of the synthetic to avoid re-injuring myself and being bedridden again. The synthetic will become illegal in most states soon, because unlike a safe, natural herb like marijuana, it doesn't have an intoxication ceiling, and smoking or ingesting too much can cause increased heart rate and panic attacks. It concerns me, because I don't want to put something in my body that could hurt me in the long run. My health is my priority. I didn't choose to use marijuana as a medicine because I wanted to get high. There's prescribed drugs that will do that for you legally if that's your goal. I chose marijuana as a medicine, because it had the least side effects and I didn't need to increase my dose over time. Because tolerance levels are maintained and it's not physically addictive, the same amount works each day to control my spasms and there are no withdrawal symptoms. It just works, and for me it has become a medical necessity for survival.

I arrived for my last probation visit. My fines were all paid. When my probation officer saw me, he told me that a deputy was with him to take me to jail, because my probation had been revoked the day before due to my new charge. I left with the deputy and entered the jail part of the courthouse. A jail nurse was there and started interviewing me about my daily and long term nursing needs, and I realized that I was about to spend time in jail. I told her and the deputy that I wasn't healed completely and that I was still under doctor's care. I told them that I had already passed my allowed sitting time, and that if I didn't get back in bed immediately, I would injure myself worse. They spent some time deliberating, then told me that I can go home until I heal. I was told that as soon as the doctor releases me, I needed to turn myself in.

When I came home that, I found out that sitting up too long did cause me to relapse, and I would have to spend another month in bed without getting up at all. Just 5 days after my courthouse visit, two sheriff deputies came to my bedside again to see if I was able to go back to jail and get booked in. With all the attention, I started to feel I was being treated like I was a murder suspect. Fortunately, my nurse was there at the time and assured them that I was still under doctor's care and had to stay in bed to heal.

After 5 months of being injured, the doctor allowed me start my sitting time again that would be gradually increased weekly until I could eventually sit all day. On the second day in my chair, I was outside my house when the deputies showed up for the third time. Because I was out of bed, they said that I needed to come to be booked in as soon as possible. I told them that I was waiting until I could sit more than two hours, and until I was assured that a bond for my revoked probation would be issued. They told me that I had to come in within the next few days to be arrested and booked, no matter what.

I was literally a fugitive who was about to go to jail. My lawyer was trying to get me a bond set, but the county attorney, who I had went to high school with, refused to give me one. I didn't know what else to do. It was psychologically overwhelming to know that I complied with my probation, and it not only led to an injury and 5 months in bed, but now would send me to jail for weeks waiting to see a judge. The thought of the improper care that I would receive in jail was frightening, cruel, and unusual punishment. My lawyer could not even believe how I was being targeted and given more attention than real criminals with much bigger charges. He kept calling the county attorney, explaining that it was common for bonds to be issued on revoked deferred adjudicated, misdemeanor probation, and that putting me in jail would cost big taxpayer money for proper care. The county attorney finally agreed, and the judge issued me a bond. I was finally able to turn myself in and bail out without having to spend weeks in jail. It felt great to longer have an arrest warrant, but I still have to deal with the case when it comes up soon. I'm going to need good lawyers, and the costs will continue to grow.

It's amazing how you can be viewed over time by different groups in a small town due to character defamation and rumors. Everyone in the town once supported me and I was a source of inspiration as I went on to graduate Valedictorian followed by a bachelor's degree in computer engineering. I was even a town celebrity when I got married on "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" in the 90's. But after you are constantly pursued by the local law enforcement, you are judged differently. Those who don't know me well think a once promising, young man has turned to drugs and thrown his life away. A small group of people even deem what I do as immoral, because it is illegal. The people that do know me see me as an intelligent, successful Internet businessman, who continues to do exciting projects. They know I will give my time and the shirt off my back to help anyone in need. My friends and family are witnesses to why I need to use marijuana as a medicine, and they accept it, because they know I'm making the best intelligent choice I can to stop my pain. They know that marijuana is not destroying my brain, but it does make me a criminal, which affects them by associating with me. Sadly, if laws do not change, I'll have to move out of my county soon and leave all of my friends and family, just to protect them.

It's a scary America, when a patient's rights are dramatically different from state to state. When someone in Texas can go to jail for a long time for using the same medicine as someone in California, it is a travesty. When rights that are left to be delegated by the states, such as medical marijuana laws, cause a severe violation to the notion of "equal American", this must become a patient's civil right issue. From severe punishment in Texas to being allowed to grow your own medicine in California, it's proof that we are not equal as Americans. Such a civil right inconsistency for patients must be addressed, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court.

Research: Cannabis Eases Muscle Spasms

2010-11-21T17:17:00.000-08:00

Must See Video of a Patient in Need

2010-11-21T16:57:00.000-08:00

Watching Greg Cooper deal with his painful muscle spasms will touch you.

Montel Williams Uses and Fights for Medical Cannabis

2010-06-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

TV talk show host advocates medical cannabis for pain.

Montel Speaks at a New Jersey Rally

Emmy award-winning talk show host Montel Williams shocked daytime TV viewers when he used his syndicated and highly popular program, The Montel Williams Show, to promote the benefits of medical marijuana.

The special episode came shortly after Williams, who suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), was detained and fined $100 at Detroit's Metro Airport. Baggage screeners had discovered a small amount of marijuana and some paraphernalia in his carry-on bag. Though he was released and allowed to continue his flight home to New York, Williams could have received up to a year in state prison under Michigan law, which makes no exception for medical use.

Instead of keeping silent about his legal slip-up and his preference for med-pot medicine, Williams decided to educate his viewing public about cannabis use in treating the pain of MS as well as the depression and sleeping disorders the disease causes.

Williams explained that his doctor-prescribed pot is the only thing that will relieve his pain, and that more socially-acceptable, legal drugs such as Oxycontin and Percoset are useless and potentially dangerous.

"There are doctors who have researched this and understand that for the disease that I have, as well as for cancer and AIDS, medical marijuana works," Williams said.

Montel's publicist added that Williams "has prescriptions for many different medications for MS, some of which manage his pain, which is constant. One of the medications he has been prescribed to alleviate his chronic pain is medical marijuana."

On his show, Montel adamantly destroyed myths about medical marijuana users being lazy and unproductive by saying, "The difference between me being a taxpaying citizen of this country and being at home and drawing off of your money is consuming medicinal marijuana in the evening to be able to work the next day."

Montel Williams says he hopes his declaration on his show will "inspire others to take a stand."

Montel Discusses Medical Marijuana on Larry King Live

Medicinal Use of Marijuana Info

2010-06-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

The medicinal properties of cannabis, or marijuana, are widely misunderstood. This is in large part to decades of misinformation and propaganda against the hemp plant itself. More and more research is showing that many substances, in addition to THC in cannabis is beneficial in the treatment of many illnesses. Please take the time to learn about the benefits of medical marijuana. Some day it may just be you or your loved one that would benefit from the many healing properties found in cannabis when other medicines and heavy narcotics will just not work.

Just some of the illnesses treated by Medical Marijuana:
Cancer, Parkinsons, Huntington's Disease, Alzheimers, Multiple Sclerosis, AIDs, chronic pain, glaucoma, hepatitis C, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV, epilepsy, Crohn's disease, anorexia, nail patella, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease), chronic nervous system disorders, cachexia or wasting syndrome, chronic or intractable pain, severe nausea, seizures, severe or persistent muscle spasms, diabetes mellitus, dystonia, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorders, gliomas, hypertension, incontinence, MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus), osteoporosis, pruritus, sleep apnea, Tourette's syndrome, migraine headaches, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, menstrual cramps and excessive bleeding, diarrhea, tuberculosis, elephantiasis, asthma, hemorrhoids, anemia, rabies, insomnia. (source: PUFMM.org)

Sites for reference:

Texas Coalition for Compassionate Care
http://www.texascompassion.com/
Marijuana Policy Project
http://www.mpp.org/
The American Medical Marijuana Association
http://americanmarijuana.org/
NORML
http://norml.org/
Americans for Safe Access
http://www.safeaccessnow.org/
The American Alliance for Medical Cannabis
http://www.letfreedomgrow.com/

The Texas Monthly article where I was mentioned.

2010-05-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

July 2005

Weed All About It

Yes, I think we should legalize marijuana—and maybe all drugs. But the big news is that some prominent conservative Republicans agree with me.

by Gary Cartwright

WHAT IS IT ABOUT MARIJUANA that makes politicians hallucinate? The faintest whiff of “the weed of madness” (as government propaganda used to call it) causes them to see distorted images of things that aren’t there and never were: law and order, justice, reelection. But they don’t see the obvious. The war on drugs was lost years ago, and pretending otherwise only makes the problem worse.

Consider the two marijuana-related bills that were introduced in the Texas Legislature during the 2005 session—each eminently practical, neither with serious downsides, and both essentially dead on arrival. The first, written by Democratic state representative Harold Dutton, of Houston, would have reduced the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana. It was approved by the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence but never reached the floor for debate or a vote. In Texas, 97 percent of all marijuana arrests are for simple possession—an ounce or less—at a cost to taxpayers of $480 million a year. (Full disclosure: In 1968 I was arrested for possession of about two ounces of pot, which at the time could have meant life in prison; the charges were dropped after my lawyer got the search warrant thrown out.) In America, we spend nearly $8 billion trying to enforce the laws prohibiting the use and possession of marijuana. All we get for our money is a huge increase in organized crime, an endless string of drug-related murders, and the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world.

The second bill, which was written by several House members, including Republican Terry Keel and Democrat Elliot Naishtat, both of Austin, would have facilitated the use of medical marijuana, or “medi-pot.” It never got out of committee, even though there is ample evidence that smoking pot eases pain and reduces nausea associated with cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and other illnesses; it may also have a role in combating heart disease and strokes. The medi-pot bill was simple and straightforward—so elementary, in fact, that it was probably unworkable. It didn’t legalize marijuana, but it did allow doctors to discuss it as an option with their patients and provided an affirmative defense for patients who are busted for following doctor’s orders. But it didn’t address, for example, how and where patients could obtain this still-illegal substance.

A number of witnesses in wheelchairs appeared before the committee in April, admitting that they regularly violated drug laws and explaining that marijuana in its natural form was the only drug that relieved their suffering. Chris Cain, a 36-year-old quadriplegic who has smoked pot for twelve years to control pain and spasms, described how his home near Beaumont was raided by a team of Hardin County sheriff’s deputies with the assistance of two helicopters; they seized a small amount of marijuana and the computer equipment he uses to run his Internet business, then threw him in jail without regard to his need for medical attention. “I’m just asking for a fair trial,” Cain told committee members. “I’m now a university graduate and a successful businessman. Marijuana has not damaged my brain, but it has made me a criminal.”

Polls show that 75 percent of Texans support medical marijuana, and they’re not the only ones. As of February, ten states had adopted laws permitting the use of medi-pot (although in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that medi-pot users can be federally prosecuted), and thirty had recognized its therapeutic potential. Still, the response to it here is mixed at best. One member of the committee, Democratic state representative Juan Escobar, of Kingsville, spent his career fighting drugs as a border patrolman and, later, as the head of an anti-drug task force. Nevertheless, Escobar is so convinced that medical marijuana makes sense that he supported it. Keel, a former county sheriff, told his fellow lawmakers: “We have, for some reason in our pharmacology, isolated that particular herb as not of medical value when, in fact, it is.” Yet Democratic state representative Aaron Peña, of Edinburg, whose vote the bill’s sponsors had counted on, couldn’t bring himself to back it. He acknowledges that the drug war is lost. “All we’re doing is loading up our prisons and burdening our taxpayers,” he told me. “We need a paradigm shift toward treatment and education, and we need it fast.” Ever since his sixteen-year-old son died four years ago of a drug overdose, however, he has dedicated himself to keeping kids off the stuff. “If I voted for it,” he said, “how could I keep telling them that drugs are harmful?”

Though marijuana has been used medicinally for hundreds of years and was prescribed by doctors in the U.S. until the thirties, the government decided years ago that weed is a menace. In 1933 the feds launched their famous “reefer madness” campaign under Harry Anslinger, the zealous federal narcotics commissioner who supplied bogus information to the media that marijuana was responsible for insanity and violence. A federal law enacted in 1937 put marijuana in the same category as cocaine and opium. In 1970 Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, grouping marijuana with heroin as a narcotic with no medical use. In 1988 the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief law judge declared that “marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man” and ruled that it be made available to doctors, but the agency ignored him.

Over time, law enforcement officials have repeatedly misled the public and the media about the so-called scourge of drugs. General Barry McCaffrey, Bill Clinton’s drug czar, should have known better when he told the Washington Post in April 2000 that “illegal drugs will cost the United States 500,000 deaths…over the next decade.” A twenty-year study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that from 1979 through 1998, illegal drugs were the cause of just over 44,000 deaths, compared with the 380,000 poor souls whose deaths could be tied to alcohol. Meanwhile, George W. Bush’s drug czar, John Walters, has used his office to lobby against medical marijuana programs in various states. With increasing frequency, federal narcotics enforcers have conducted raids on growing operations. Even accepting the fact that the war on drugs has been waged for political rather than scientific ends, with arrest and imprisonment preferable to treatment and education, how could policy makers ignore something as benign as medi-pot? A cynic might suggest that their motive is to appease the far right, which has a pathological fear that some terminally ill wretch might smoke a little boo and break out in giggles.

Finding ourselves in such a monstrous hole, you’d hope someone would suggest we stop digging—and someone has. Several someones, in fact: a few of the smartest people in America, many of them conservative Republicans. Among those who have championed the legalization of marijuana are William F. Buckley, Nobel prize—winning economist Milton Friedman, former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz, and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson. In his keynote address at the Fifth International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, in 1991, Friedman said that the country should admit that drug prohibition is a policy disaster, just as we once conceded as much for the prohibition of alcohol. The war on drugs and the harm it does, he has written, are “manifestations of a much broader problem: the substitution of political mechanisms for market mechanisms . . . ” It has failed, he contends, because it’s a “socialist enterprise” that is inefficient, expensive, and very advantageous to a small group of people—in this case, the drug enforcement agencies for whom the war is a raison d’être and the drug lords whose cartels are a byproduct of U.S. policy.

Another conservative Republican who thinks prohibition is a dumb idea is the “right-wing-nutcase” I wrote about a few months back, my pal Dr. Robert McFarlane (“The Thrill of the Hunt,” March 2005). The Harvard-educated cardiologist has written dozens of letters and e-mails to politicians and friends arguing that drugs should be treated as a public health problem rather than a criminal matter. In an essay published in the Palestine Herald- Press in March, Doc wrote: “By legalizing drugs, the profitability in their sale would evaporate, which would, in one stroke, eliminate everywhere the incentive to grow poppies and thus end the narco-wars in Afghanistan and Colombia…[and] would drastically lower the crime rate here and empty out our prisons.” In recent months Doc has forwarded me news items about drug-related murders and reports of conversations with fellow wingnuts. After his piece ran in the Herald-Press, one conservative judge told him, “Heresy is just the truth spoken prematurely.” A top Republican strategist confessed to Doc that his plan had merit but thought drug laws ought to stay on the books “because people are weak.”

That nanny instinct, so at odds with traditional Republican dogma, is one of the arguments made by a conservative couple from Houston, Bob and Ann Lee, who for years have waged a campaign to legalize marijuana. “Current drug policies violate Republican philosophy of personal responsibility,” the Lees wrote in a widely distributed pamphlet that rebuts many of the arguments advanced by drug warriors. They come to the subject with a heavy heart: Their son Richard is in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down since a work accident damaged his spinal column in 1990. Legal drugs had serious side effects, so Richard turned to pot, at which point his parents discovered that most of what the government had told them about it wasn’t true.

Exposing government lies is the easy part—and making drugs illegal doesn’t keep them out of the hands of kids. Schoolchildren can’t buy hard liquor, but hard drugs are as available as candy on the black market. Would legalization increase drug use? Maybe. But the use of tobacco, probably the most lethal drug today, has dramatically decreased because of intense anti-smoking campaigns. Some people will use drugs no matter what the consequences, but as Friedman and others point out, the user primarily harms himself. When he harms others, we do something about it, just as we arrest those who drink and drive. We arrest them not for the act of drinking but for the act of driving drunk.

Ending the war on drugs will take time, but politicians need to show some backbone. They should do what’s best for America and ignore the fringe types who won’t be happy until they’re again allowed to burn witches. In the words of philosopher Robert Nozick, they should legalize “capitalist acts between consenting adults” and trust the free market they’re always raving about.

Copyright © 1973-2010 Emmis Publishing LP dba Texas Monthly. All rights reserved.

Newspaper Articles

2010-05-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Here are the links to past articles that mention my story. They will give you a quick background on my arrests, and our attempt to change the laws in Texas regarding allowing a medical marijuana patient to defend himself in court.

Beaumont Enterprise
http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/local/paralyzed_kountze_man_pushes_for_medical_marijuana_bill_05-10-2009.html

Dallas Morning News
http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/legislature/stories/040605dntexmedmarijuana.563c1.html

San Antonio Current
http://www.sacurrent.com/special/story.asp?id=60095

Houston Chronicle / Associated Press
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/05/legislature/3045870.html

Hello World

2010-05-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of a series of blogs to give everyone an insight into my life which has been nothing short of interesting. I'm hoping after reading about my experiences, everyone will understand the paths I've endured and the choices I have made.

I'm currently writing a book on my adventurous life entitled "Confessions of an Uncaged Soul", a story of survival from a small town to the World Wide Web.

This blog site will focus on a serious part of my life: the decision to use marijuana as a medicine and the consequences for making that choice.