Now, every day Julie spends around four or five hours working on leaving town, to move to Berkeley or Oakland. It’s hard to find an accessible, affordable apartment. She was going to go with a friend but that person got ill. She’s exploring hiring a personal assistant. She’s on a waiting list for six or eight apartments.
“I’m not completely clear on my exit strategy. No one has responded to me. Is anyone interested that I’m giving my body to cannabinoid science?”
When I ask about cannabinoid, Julie is happy to explain: “Cannabinoid science is not marijuana. It’s a common mistake. Anyone who uses the word marijuana, they are living under Prohibition to demonize this plant. I use the words cannabis and cannabinoid medicine. I am studying the science. This is what the plant is called; there are cannabinoids; we have a cannabinoid system in our bodies, even if you do not imbibe in the cannabis system. I’ve written a book, it took me five years to research: The Cannabis Papers: a citizen’s guide to cannabinoids. It’s on Amazon and on lulu.com. It’s a signaling system, it regulates all the other systems of your body. We are deficient in this system.”
From 2004 until 2011, when Julie worked to advocate legislation allowing medical marijuana in Illinois—today seventeen states have these laws but Illinois still isn’t one of them—she would drive the several hours to Springfield about once a month. Then, in July 2010, she was invited to speak at the Science and Compassionate Care Seminar at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Also invited were Dr. William L. Courtney and his wife Kristen Peskuski, who had managed to control lupus and many other ailments by juicing cannabinoids. Kristen talked about how cannabinoids can best be absorbed into the body by juicing, putting maybe ten or fifteen fresh palm-sized leaves in a blender with some apples or some carrots, and drinking the mixture like a smoothie, daily. “The focus is always on smoking the biggest, grandest bud; there’s gotta be a paradigm shift, because the juicing is what cures you.”
And juicing was best accomplished in California.
Julie’s tiny, old-fashioned Chicago kitchen doubles as her war room and she keeps manila folders full of clippings in piles. She hands me a printout of a multicolored pie chart showing the amount of CBD (cannabidiol)—one of the compounds in the cannabis plant—and the amount of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which she says is less able to heal disease. On the chart, dozens of arrows point outward, each representing its own compound with its own healing properties.
Julie started taking cannabis in 2004, when she had already been ill for nearly twenty years. She was so ill she was thinking of suicide. A lot of things contributed toward her decision to try using cannabis as a treatment for MS: she had smoked in college, and while researching online she read about a woman with glaucoma who used it. At the same time, she began talking to Illinois NORML (National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws).
Soon Julie began baking one-inch cube brownies and eating them three times a day. It helped with her symptoms and she thought, This is fantastic. She could speed around the living room doing twenty to thirty laps, exponentially increasing her energy level.
Each pan of brownies contained about half an ounce (roughly fourteen grams) of marijuana. According to Illinois law, possessing ten to thirty grams of pot is a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. Julie tried not to think about that. But cannabis helped so much that her most immediate response was gratitude. The sensation wasn’t like smoking where the effect goes to the brain. She was on an even keel all day long and it kept her numbness and tingling at bay so she could function well. Gradually, she weaned herself off pharmaceuticals and now she only takes Tylenol with codeine.
Julie began with a brownie mix, mostly Duncan Hines Double Fudge. She moved on to Ghirardelli brownie mix. She refined the recipe, sautéing what she genteelly calls “the plant material” in olive oil to release the benefits in it and to evenly distribute it. In other words, so she wouldn’t choke on a clump. She included many “add-ins,” such as walnuts and hemp seeds. More recently, though, she switched to what the NORML website calls Ginger Snap Surprise, which she buys already made, because she is too tired to bake.
Julie “takes” cannabis in a tincture of glycerine from an old brown glass bottle with an eyedropper, which goes right into her bloodstream. The tincture can also be made with flavored alcohol or with Everclear. There is also cannabis honey, the heat of which, stirred into tea, helps protect the compounds.
She likes dark chocolate and there is a box of chocolate almonds on the kitchen table. She takes her hemp juice, hemp oil. Sometimes she stops the cookies and brownies, like you would any medication. She is concerned about titration—in other words, how much medicine is good for her body.
Even back when she was “taking” brownies, Julie was sure that the changes she was going through were too profound to keep to herself. She began to speak about cannabis publicly and testified before the Illinois Senate, which, at that time, was in the first year of hearing a bill to legalize medical marijuana. Right away she wondered whether she should use her real name: She thought, Wow, do I say I’m Julie F. or Julie Anonymous? I’m talking about all my stuff and something that’s illegal. I can’t imagine sitting in a jail cell.
Then Julie read an article in the Washington Post about Jonathan Magbie, a paraplegic arrested for marijuana possession, who wound up in a cell where he couldn’t communicate with the guards.
“They found him dead, soaked in his own urine,” Julie says. “Are you kidding me? This is what we’re coming to? Someone who doesn’t have fully functioning limbs can’t take something that helps him? It’s just insanity. Well, I have use of my limbs, I have use of my voice. I am Julie Falco and it makes me feel better.”
Julie began to visit every legislator in Springfield, making trips once or twice a month to tell her story, which back then not a lot of people were doing. Still, in the ensuing six years, as state after state passed laws legalizing marijuana for medical use, Illinois did not. The Marijuana Policy Project would set up a hotel room and transportation, and she would pretty much have to pack it up, spend a few days down there, bring her wheelchair, going through every office in the capital. It was taxing—she would get tremors just from the noise and the crowd, her nerves were so sensitive she couldn’t process it all. It got easier over time. She’d bring a little container of brownies or ginger snap cannabis cookies. She would pull them out and say, “This is my medicine.”
Over the years, as Julie’s condition deteriorated, advocacy work became physically harder. Getting out of the house took its toll. She did as much as she could, but newer patients were more physically able and could take up the charge.
But year after year, the law would get passed in the Senate and stymied in the House. They were about two votes short. She would hear the same objections every year and the same anxieties about what would happen if the bill did pass: “Look at California,” people would say to her, referring to the chaos that ensued there as dispensaries got shut down by the feds, since federal law doesn’t recognize the state laws.
But according to Julie, the problem with Illinois is that it doesn’t have a referendum. The states that have gotten it passed have had a referendum; the people could vote it in. And yet it’s a hard issue to get people to rally around.
“How do you get chronically ill people to storm the Capitol about cannabis?” she asks, laughing. “It’s not like the teachers’ union.”
Last December, Julie was falling a lot. She had what she calls a “mini exacerbation,” a relapse of some of her symptoms, and had to go into a nursing home and the hospital. She returned home at the end of March.
What Julie knows about California is that in the dispensaries, there is a much greater level of sophistication about which brand of pot treats which ailment. With all those crazy brands—Lemon Skunk, White Diesel, Maui, Alien Dawg, Girl Scout Cookies, White Widow, Purple Urkle, Northern Lights—which in Illinois are hard to grow, it’s easier to cure yourself. Plus, people are just throwing leaves away because everyone’s focusing on the buds.