Of the many words I’ve used to describe myself, from cannabis journalist to Great Value Sacha Baron Cohen, I never thought the term “refugee” would apply to any situation I would ever find myself in.
Surely, the term applied to my great-grandmother. Cecilia Rauch, a young woman in her early 20’s living in Berlin until the mid-1930s, when the Third Reich rose to power and began displaying their violent ultimate objectives; exterminate every Jew like my great-grandmother from Mother Europa. Barely escaping the growing pogroms and publicly condoned violence against Jews with her mother, they first landed in Galveston, before their short-term visas ran out. Strangely yet much to the country’s credit on allowing in people who were clearly refugees, the two spent some time in Mexico, before venturing back into America from there to H-Town itself.
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Yes, we have a scanned copy of Mexican immigration papers saying that my very German/Romanian great-grandmother was a resident of Mexico. It’s quite a story to say the least.
Tragically, her brother didn’t survive the Holocaust. While it’s not known what his exact movements were, the research my mother has done indicates that my great uncle Ernst Rauch was killed in the Majdenak extermination camp.
Yet, her brother’s memory stayed with her everywhere she went. When she met a friendly tailor in the neighborhood immigrant from Transylvania, employed at the textile shop owned by the father of Houston journalism legend Marvin Zindler, I believe things changed for her. I believe she finally felt that sense of peace and that tranquility she had been searching for, ever since leaving Germany under the tragic circumstances that she did.
When we discuss modern-day refugee situations, whether the Syrian refugee situation or the Rohingya, I always hold sympathy for these crises and truly believe that this flawed yet immigration-rich country should be the ultimate refuge for those seeking persecution. I’m the great-grandson of only one of the many generations of Jewish refugees due to the Shoah, and as such, I believe in treating refugees with the utmost humanity and making them fully naturalized citizens of our country.
However, I never intended for that experiential term to be relevant to the life and death medical health history of Cecilia’s great-grandson. Or the medical health stories or countless other Americans who’ve found relief in a plant whose possession is punishable by a criminal record for that matter.
While surely not escaping a genocide or any sort of facist violence, a “medical refugee” is one who’s found objective medical success from cannabis yet must move to another state, one with safe and either recreationally or medically legal access to this beneficial plant. Depending on where the patient originally lives, this voyage could potentially span the country.
Early on in my childhood, my teachers and professionals my parents took me to, noticed an extreme presence of mental hyperactivity, meaning I would have racing and uncontrollable thoughts along with a lack of focus and constant anxiety. It’s hard to describe the initial condition I still occasionally struggle with. It’s a combination of anxiety so visceral that it’s sunk into my essence, a depression that’s manifested in a “darkness” of seeing the worst situations always occurring and a mind that is unable to slow down to the manageable speed of most others. I frequently have trouble being optimistic in the slightest in several aspects of my life. I shake frequently, my balance is horrid and I project my darkness onto people more than The Man in Black on Lost.
My anxiety surrounding driving and unstable motion is especially petrifying to the point where I have Final Destination-like visions of death and feel my life is in danger. Any mockery or sarcasm towards my very unique condition isn’t appreciated whatsoever. During my aneurism-level stressful time of being an intern at Disney World, I’ve had the pleasant experience of calling a 75-year-old ride attendant at Animal Kingdom a term I’d rather not repeat in front of my mother, because this bored retiree insulted me for having fear of roller coasters and jump scares.
In adulthood, this transformed into a crippling perma-panic and near inability to view aspects of my life optimistically and an almost Final Destination-like sense of everything going wrong and failing. At one point, my therapist said that I had the worst anxiety he’s seen in 25 years.
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After avoiding any psychiatric medication for several years due to my concerns about how those pills would worsen my slowly deteriorating mental state into my final months at UNT and into my early-mid twenties, I decided on giving those “medications” a chance.
Ultimately, this would prove to be one of the most dangerous decisions of my life, as my already worsening mental state only became more chaotic, unraveled and detached from reality. The Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and three other medications whose’ names aren’t remembered, transformed into a deranged mess of screams, cries and drinking a combination of Captain Morgan and ZQuil to the point where I felt nothing.
The unemployment and constant rejection from jobs I had been facing during most of 2017 certainly exacerbated my condition, but those devilish synthetic pharmaceuticals were the prime suspect in my descent into madness, Abilify the famous “antipsychotic” in particular. And the laughably bad “help” I had received from those glorified drug dealers that call themselves “psychiatrists” made me feel more unhinged, especially when I was referred to as a “marijuana addict”.
After three panic attacks within 20 minutes, while driving in horrible traffic on I-635, I quit all three medications cold turkey. At that moment, when I believed that useless drugs wouldn’t have withdrawals, is when the darkness swallowed me whole.
Following weeks of psychotic behavior that went from me talking with my forever caring parents about getting committed to something that resembled a suicide attempt to finally receiving a job offer at my old painfully boring desk job in Las Colinas in October of 2017, the pills were out of my system and I truly noticed how effective cannabis was in lessening my mental illness issues.
Unlike that ineffective poison, cannabis put the brakes on my psychosis, the crippling fear, my constant irritation and darkness mixed with anger. My relationship with my parents, once tumultuous due to my declining mental state, repaired itself with how level-headed I became with cannabis, a natural plant grown just like tomatoes.
Yet due to Texas’ stubbornness and desire to keep all things a little old school including their drug policies, cannabis in any form was heavily prohibited. As such, I was committing a Class B misdemeanor at the lightest every time I needed to medicate, which was quite frequently given the fact that I had to drive through downtown Dallas every day.
I hated the anger I felt towards lawmakers in Texas for making me commit illegal acts to obtain my medicine. I hated the constant anxiety my mother faced that her son would catch a charge just for buying his clearly effective medicine. I hated the stagnant nature of my mid-20’s life of hopelessness. I hated the fact that even discussing cannabis reform in 2018 seemed illogical among Texas politics.
After receiving a speeding ticket in nowhere else more hilarious for a Jew to get a speeding ticket but in the school zone of a Catholic middle school, I decided to take the leap of faith. I was and still am quite single, childfree and saved enough finances to start anew for a few years. Where else better for someone in my excitement and nightlife-loving cannabis refugee to move to than Sin City, home of so many looking for a fresh start.
Despite a first few struggling months, I soon landed a decent entry-level flower packaging job in a mid-size cannabis brand here in Vegas, which resulted in almost a full year of experience in both packaging and distribution. Yes, I would deliver dozens of pounds of legal cannabis products at a time to different dispensaries, all operating totally compliant with the very strict regulations of the Silver State.
Most importantly, I no longer faced potential criminal persecution and prosecution for my medical choice. I couldn’t explain in simpler terms why this medicine was far more effective than any pharmaceutical. It’s a beautiful plant, one whose medical value must be researched and understood while never being stigmatized.
It’s utterly ridiculous that otherwise law-abiding and tax-paying Americans must relocate themselves and sometimes their entire families to another state they may not have any connections to simply for safe access to their medicine. It’s cruel and inhumane, with a moral and some would argue legal equivalency to withholding medicine.
How a supposedly so “pro-family” politician, whatever the fuck that means, could withhold the legal right for medicinal cannabis from a child suffering is beyond me and the definition of hypocritical. Please, for the sake of the veterans, children, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts and everyone across all political spectrum that uses medical cannabis, please continue to support medical reform and access so the term “medical refugee” becomes a term of the past.