Peter's Story: Opioids vs. medical cannabis for chronic pain — A paradigm shift

Can you tell us about your history with chronic pain, and what treatments you’ve tried in the past?

A number of years ago, I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, which is a nerve disease that causes severe pain in my face. It’s hard to say for sure how I ended up with this condition, but I suspect it might be related to some benign skin cancers I got on my face when I lived in Texas years ago. To remove one of the spots, they operated just under my nose, right along a large nerve. I think that might be what triggered it, but I can never be sure. 

It was a difficult condition to diagnose. At first, the doctors just thought I had a bad case of sinusitis, but the pain became absolutely unbearable. I was in unbelievable agony—like the worst toothache you can imagine multiplied by 10. Finally, they realized that it was trigeminal neuralgia, and I was sent to a specialist.

My specialist told me that there were two treatments to consider. The first was to go down the pharmaceutical route. He offered a number of different drugs, including some that are normally used for epilepsy. I said to the doctor, “Unless I'm very much mistaken, a lot of these medicines will make me incredibly drowsy, right?” He said, “Yes, they will.” 

The second treatment he mentioned, surprisingly, was tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), but he said he wasn’t allowed to prescribe it, so I left with a prescription for the opioid OxyContin. It did make the pain more manageable, but obviously there is a serious downside to taking opioids.

And, how did you discover that medical cannabis was actually legally available in the UK?

I was talking to the husband of a friend of mine who I’d gone to visit in the hospital, and he was the first person to tell me about medical cannabis. I was shocked when he told me that it is, in fact, legal and quite easily accessible. He said, “You’ll never believe this, but it comes in the post!”  That really piqued my interest. After that conversation, I thought, “My god, things really have changed.”

I was a young man in the 1960s, so I’m no stranger to “street” cannabis, but that kind of cannabis has always had two serious difficulties: one, you never know what kind of product you're getting. And two, there’s the problem of actually finding and buying it—there is a darkness attached to all that. 

I started to do the research online about medical cannabis. Only days later, I was reading the newspaper, and Releaf was featured in an article. I made the call and got in touch the same day.

Since that first call, I’ve found the team at Releaf to be incredibly helpful. Everyone made the pathway to my beginning treatment very easy. Before I knew it, I found myself actually sitting down and having a consultation about medical cannabis with Releaf’s Oncologist, Dr. Sue Clenton. I told her my history, about the opioids I’d been prescribed, the fact that I'd used cannabis before, and also about the difficulty I’d had getting my diagnosis. Dr. Clenton turned around and said, “I do wish they'd stop thinking it's a sinus problem.” That’s how I knew she understood my condition and knew exactly what I was going through.

Moments later, I was prescribed medical cannabis. There was a huge sense of relief, like a weight being lifted off my shoulders. Suddenly, I had hope—a real, potential solution to my problem. 

You say you’ve used “street” cannabis recreationally in the past. Is there any difference between those experiences and the treatment you receive at Releaf?

Yes. There is a big difference. 

As I said, I experienced the 1960s first-hand. I was also a filmmaker for many years, and I made films about musicians. When I lived in Texas, I made a film about a great champion of the fight to legalise medical cannabis in America, Willie Nelson, and I even stayed on his compound with him for a time. So, I guess you can say I’m rather familiar with cannabis. 

Of course, the quality of medical cannabis is much better—the strains Releaf provides are very pure—but the psychological effect of having a legal prescription is also very interesting. When you have a prescription, there is a psychological aspect to that which enables you to relate to the medicine differently than “street” cannabis. It's a paradigm shift. I always saw cannabis as a recreational thing, but this doesn’t feel like that at all. 

How does treating your pain with medical cannabis compare to the opioids you were prescribed previously?

There is a wonderful story about this: a grandfather turns around to his grandson and says, “You have a good wolf in you and a bad wolf in you.” And the boy says, “Well, how do I deal with that Grandfather?” And the grandfather says, “You be careful which one you feed.” 

Medical cannabis works on so many different levels, that's the interesting thing about it. Neurological pain is somewhat different from a chronic backache, for example, because the way the pain is received by the brain is not the same. With medical cannabis, it’s kind of like the pain gets put into another place. It's still there, the treatment doesn't necessarily eliminate it completely, but the perception of the pain is changed.

Before, with my treatment with OxyContin, it was like I had a baseline, and then the pain would peak, and I’d medicate in an attempt to bring it back down to the baseline. With medical cannabis, it’s a different approach. I’m kind of attacking the whole condition, rather than just treating the pain, and that results in fewer and fewer times when my pain peaks. 

Pain is an extraordinary thing, and so is our relationship with it. It's very debilitating, and it can make people very lonely—people feel that they have been singled out to have pain. But pain is the human experience. Like the Buddha said, “All life is suffering.” 

You have to look at more than just the pain itself. For example, if today I wake up with pain, I have to embrace it—I have to try to understand it and learn all I can about it. I also have to stay active and try to eat well, which is a continual challenge, especially at my age. I use all the tools I have available, and medical cannabis is one of those tools. 

If I said it’s been life changing, that would not be an exaggeration. Medical cannabis can change people's lives. I just wish more people were aware that it’s out there and available.