SEATTLE -- Betty Hiatt's morning wake-up call comes with the purr and persistent kneading of the cat atop her bedspread.
Reaching for a cane, the frail grandmother pads with uncertain steps to the tiny alcove kitchen in her two-room flat.
She is, at 81, a medical train wreck and a miracle, surviving cancer, Crohn's disease and the onset of Parkinson's. Each morning Hiatt takes more than a dozen pills. But first she turns to a translucent orange prescription bottle stuffed with a drug not found on her pharmacist's shelf -- marijuana.
Peering through owlish glasses, Hiatt fires up a cannabis cigarette with a wood-stem match. She inhales. The little apartment -- a cozy place of knickknacks and needlepoint -- takes on the odor of a rock concert.
"It's like any other medicine for me," Hiatt says, blowing out a cumulus of unmistakable fragrance. "But I don't know that I'd be alive without it."
With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to soon rule on whether medical marijuana laws in California and nine other states are subject to federal prohibitions, elderly patients such as Hiatt are emerging as a potentially potent force in the roiling debate over health, personal choice and states' rights.
http://www.detnews.com/2005/health/0505/08/A07-174610.htm
Reaching for a cane, the frail grandmother pads with uncertain steps to the tiny alcove kitchen in her two-room flat.
She is, at 81, a medical train wreck and a miracle, surviving cancer, Crohn's disease and the onset of Parkinson's. Each morning Hiatt takes more than a dozen pills. But first she turns to a translucent orange prescription bottle stuffed with a drug not found on her pharmacist's shelf -- marijuana.
Peering through owlish glasses, Hiatt fires up a cannabis cigarette with a wood-stem match. She inhales. The little apartment -- a cozy place of knickknacks and needlepoint -- takes on the odor of a rock concert.
"It's like any other medicine for me," Hiatt says, blowing out a cumulus of unmistakable fragrance. "But I don't know that I'd be alive without it."
With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to soon rule on whether medical marijuana laws in California and nine other states are subject to federal prohibitions, elderly patients such as Hiatt are emerging as a potentially potent force in the roiling debate over health, personal choice and states' rights.
http://www.detnews.com/2005/health/0505/08/A07-174610.htm