He had not eaten in over a month and all he wanted was to go home. But doctors decided he was so ill he wouldn’t even survive the car ride home.
That’s when a nurse came to George McMahon’s bedside and told him another terminally ill patient down the hall wanted to trade his marijuana joints for McMahon’s cigarettes.
McMahon, thinking he had nothing to lose, decided to accept the stranger’s offer and went ahead with the trade. McMahon then smoked the marijuana, and within 15 minutes he was sitting up in his bed for the first time in almost three months, virtually pain-free.
“I was pretty much strapped in the bed. The (doctors) couldn’t stop the pain,” McMahon said. “Once I had smoked marijuana, within 15 minutes the pain subsided. The hunger pains came back. I mean, I actually got hungry.”
He was released from the hospital shortly afterwards and that is when McMahon applied, and two years later accepted, to participate in a government sponsored marijuana research program.
That was in 1990. Now McMahon is just one of the original six patients still alive. They are the last six people in the United States who continue to receive government marijuana.
McMahon, who was diagnosed with Nail Patella Syndrome, had 19 major surgeries, took 17 prescribed drugs each day, and had been declared clinically dead twice before beginning the drug in 1990. Since McMahon began smoking marijuana regularly to treat pain, nausea and spasms, he has not had any surgeries and has been taken off all of the prescription drugs he once took.
Now McMahon travels around the country delivering speeches on medical marijuana and attending conventions with the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA). McMahon receives his marijuana through the NIDA.
He said the application process was tedious, and the government was not timely in granting the initial approval to terminally ill patients.
“When I started applying, the doctors were telling me I had five hours to live, and that I was in an advanced state of being terminally ill. It took the government two years to approve the application. It was very hard to get approved,” McMahon said.
He believes the government knowingly waited extended periods of time before granting patients the right to use marijuana. Between the time he was released from the hospital and when the approval from the government came two years later, McMahon continued to smoke marijuana illegally.
“They would rather have had me die during that two-year wait, I’m sure,” McMahon said. “But, thank God for my doctor and his nurse. They fought, they battled — and eventually, because of them, I got the medical marijuana.”
Every four months, McMahon picks up his allotment of marijuana and then reapplies, McMahon said. But the reapplication process is not as strenuous as applying for initial approval.
Bob Randle was the first to be supplied with medical marijuana from the federal government in 1976, according to McMahon. But they stopped issuing it in the early ‘90s because there were too many applicants.
However, they let current participants, like McMahon, continue to receive the marijuana.
“I would like to see patients who are in the same shape as I am and patients who are being forced to do what I did, be able to turn to an alternative and to stop the progression of their illness,” McMahon said.
McMahon is allowed to smoke the marijuana whenever he feels the need. That even includes smoking indoors.
However, smoking what is otherwise an illegal drug in public has caused McMahon some problems in the past.
He was assaulted in Virginia by an undercover police officer while attending a NIDA convention. McMahon was outside of the building in which the convention was being held when a police officer, dressed in street clothes, began slapping his hands to knock the joint out of his hand.
All of McMahon’s fingers had been broken before the incident occurred, due to his brittle bones, and the slapping of his hand caused him excruciating pain.
The incident caused the Virginia Supreme Court to rule, at 2:30 a.m. the following day, that McMahon was allowed to smoke marijuana whenever and wherever he felt the urge.
