Cancer patients praise medical marijuana, hope lawmakers listen

By Troy Carter 

In response to a diagnosis of stage 3 breast cancer last month, Katie Mazurek has launched an ambitious counter-attack that includes running, writing and chemotherapy.

The chemo treatment Wednesday fatigued her Thursday, when the 33-year-old Bozeman attorney and mother of two articulated a message to the Montana Legislature and courts: I’m in the fight of my life; get out of my way.

Mazurek, seated before a somber gathering of patients and family at the Cancer Support Community in Bozeman, said in the absence of medicinal marijuana, she and other cancer patients in Montana face a choice they shouldn’t have to, pain or vomiting.

“I’m not a bad person. I’m a sick person,” she said. “It pains me to be persecuted for being a sick person.”

Nor is Mazurek a horticulturalist. To the contrary, she kills house plants, and can’t be expected to grow her own marijuana, she said. So the Montana Supreme Court’s decision last month allowing a law that radically reduces access to medical marijuana by limiting a provider to just three patients, she said, is the same as being told to bite on a leather strap.

“I suffer from quite a bit of nausea and pain as a result of bone marrow and white blood cell medication,” Mazurek said. “Half the time I’m in or near my bedroom, the other half I’m kind of a shadow of the vigor and energy I used to enjoy in my life.”

In 2011, Montana lawmakers drafted dozens of measures aimed at medical marijuana use approved by voters in 2004. Among them was Billings Republican Sen. Jeff Essmann’s SB 423, which placed restrictions, marijuana advocates say, that will drive patients and their providers underground.

When former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer signed the bill, Montana had 30,000 registered patients using marijuana prescribed to them by a doctor. When the law was temporarily blocked by the state Supreme Court the next summer, the number of patients had dropped to 8,000.

The current patient count is 13,000, but on Feb. 25, a majority of the court allowed most of the law to go back into effect. The Montana Cannabis Industry Association has asked for a re-hearing and for the state to adopt a transition plan extending until the end of the 2017 legislative session, citing the state health department’s stated need for a transition period. The Montana Attorney General objected to the motion for re-hearing on March 15 but indicated a 49-day delay in implementation would be consistent with the original bill. The court has yet to answer.

Three years ago, Jayde Wilmes wasn’t concerned with lawmakers or judges. She was about to have a baby. But during her pregnancy Wilmes was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that can compromise the body’s ability to fight infection.

Six months of chemotherapy didn’t work — not completely, the cancer relapsed — and Wilmes needed more in preparation for a stem cell transplant, which she described as killing her own body.

She couldn’t eat or sleep and was in pain.

“A lot of the time the only way I could be with my family, and be with my child was after I had used medical marijuana and I felt like I could be there for them, and I could get my energy and I could eat something and just be present,” the Bozeman woman said. “Whereas when you’re taking handfuls, literally handfuls of prescription pills, you feel like a zombie in your own body and there’s nothing else you can do.”

Mazurek and Wilmes spoke, seated at a table, flanked by two other local cancer patients who also use marijuana. Patti Samson’s breast cancer has spread to her bones and liver. The relief that marijuana provides is so important to her that, “If the state rules that it’s going to be illegal across the board, I would move,” she said.

Dorothy Solyst, 73, has been surviving breast cancer for 19 years. She also suffers from radiation burn treatment received in the 1950s. Marijuana provides her pain relief.

“People have to know the good parts and not just all the bad stories because it definitely, definitely, definitely has helped people, and I’m one of them,” Solyst said. “I’m not sure why we’re going in reverse ... why we’re cutting it off when there’s so many hundreds of people, thousands of people in this state that could benefit.”