Medical marijuana working group's Ed Bruder works for patients, and wants to hear from them
The Department of Revenue's 25-member medical marijuana working group stirred controversy due to a plan to hold its first meeting behind closed doors -- a situation rectified when MMJ advocates complained. But after the group's initial sitdown last week, the Cannabis Therapy Institute vowed to fight proposed regs, as well as the MMJ law, which it deems unconstitutional. Group member Ed Bruder understands CTI's frustration, but he wants to work with the state to help patients. Here's why.
Ed Bruder.
"I was never a recreational marijuana user," says Bruder, a former dispensary owner and current caregiver living in Lyons, where he serves as a town trustee. "I came to medical marijuana in 2002, after a couple of years of very aggressive pain management with a pretty well-known guy in the Boulder area, who spent $105,000 of my insurance company's money on sometimes barbaric methods of trying to get me some relief."
The roots of Bruder's pain go back to August 1999, when "a sixteen-year-old kid in Boulder who'd had his license for two days took a left hand turn from a right-hand bike lane. I was in a sports car, and the impact drove my elbow into my ribs and ripped out my shoulder on the top," resulting in a torn rotator cuff and severe nerve damage along his ribs.
What followed, Bruder says, was "a failed surgery on my shoulder, and there was nothing they could do for my ribs." Over the next several years, he received hundreds of pain-med injections and took "every opiate under the sun, none of which helped the pain. They only made me sicker."
Eventually, Bruder's insurance money ran out. At that point, "the doctor pulled me aside and said that the kind of pain I had, nerve pain, isn't generally treated by opiates -- and I should try marijuana as a last resort."
Instead of responding to this recommendation by tracking down a dealer and buying some brick weed, Bruder began doing research, and eventually moved to California, where he met and began working with Dr. Claudia Jensen, a doctor well-known across the country by members of the medical marijuana community. With guidance from Jensen, he found a dispensary whose staffers had a strong understanding about the medical uses of cannabis, and the strains that would best treat his condition.
Dr. Claudia Jensen.
A full five months after his arrival in the Golden State, he finally took his first puff -- something he didn't do lightly, given that he suffers from asthma. What happened?
"It saved my life," he says simply. "It eliminated a lot of the pain and suffering I'd endured for years. By the beginning of 2003, I'd stopped taking all other medicine other than marijuana that I used twice a day in a vaporizer, and I started experimenting with other delivery methods, like edibles and tinctures."
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