When Debbi S.Talshir was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis 14 years ago, her furture looked grim. She knew that, before long, her condition would confine her to a wheelchair and cut into her busy, community-activist lifestyle. Meanwhile, the treatments her doctors recommended did little to alleviate her symptoms.

Then she started smoking pot.

It's been smooth sailing ever since. "It gives me energy, it helps to eat, it helps to sleep, it helps me to function and it's like oil for my brain," says Talshir, 39, a resident of Bourne, Mass. "Am I going to take all the bullshit chemicals the doctors prescriber? I know that this stuff really works."

Spread the Word

Now, Talshir is trying to spread the good word about the cost-effective miracle drug that she says changed her life.

And she is not alone in that effort. A steadily growing number of Americans, including many members of the medical community, are jumping on the medicinal cannabis bandwagon, as activist groups across the country--including the newly-formed Cambridge Coalition for Medicinal Cannabis (CCMC)--fight the powers that be to legalize conditionally one of the number one targets of Bush's Wart On Druges.

For Talshir, marijuana relieves the spasticity associated with MS. For others, marijuana provides the only effective relief from the almost unberable nausea caused by chemotherapy. And for those with AIDS, it is one of the few known effective appetite enhancers.

But because, as activists put it, the feds cringe at anything that combines the words "legalize" and "marijuana," despite a wealth of personal testimonies and dozens of conclusive studies, the movement is running into closed doors at every turn.

"What (the government) is trying to say is that in order to win the war on drugs we have to paint all drugs as all bad," says Rick E. Doblin, co-author of an important Kennedy School of Government study released in May that revealed that many cancer specialists had recommended at least once that a patient break the law and smoke marijuana to counteract the effects of chemotherapy.

"The government was saying it was a fringe group of doctors (advocating the medicinal use of marijuana)." Doblin says. "We found there's definitely more to it. (The government) rides roughshod over people's real interests, real health needs, for bureaucratic reasons."

Numbers to Prove It

Doblin's study, based on surveys of 1035 members of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, showed that 44 percent of the doctors had, on at least one occasion, urged a patient to smoke marijuana, and that 48 percent would do so if the drug were legal.

"We were quite surprised, because doctors are heavily regulated by the government," Doblin says of the results.

The study is the most recent in a small line of which have shown that marijuana is widely accepted by members of the medical community as an antidote to chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma and AIDS, among other disorders.

According to Doblin, the mounting evidence has the government running scared. With the increase in demand and visibility that the new studies presaged, the federal department of Health and Human Services announced that it would phase out a program that provided free marijuana to the very ill, fearing that publicity about the program would project a soft-on-drugs image. Because of the enormous amount of red tape involved, the program served only 12 individuals nationwide, but it was one of the few cracks in the government's otherwise united front in the war against drugs.