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| Photo: MyMedicineTheBook.com |
| Irvin Rosenfeld holds up a tin of 300 federal joints. He receives one of these tins every 25 days. |
On a recent chilly morning, Fort Lauderdale, Florida stockbroker Irvin Rosenfeld interrupted his client calls for a quick joint in the company parking lot. Then he went back to work inside — and nobody said anything about the smell.
That joint — legal, for him — was one of more than 120,000 the federal government has given Irv at taxpayer expense for the past 29 years, reports Fred Tasker at the
Miami Herald. Rosenfeld, 58, is one of only four people who remain in a now-closed “compassionate” drug program that, at its peak in the 1980s, provided 13 patients across the United States with marijuana to help manage medical conditions.
Rosenfeld smokes 10 to 12 government joints a day to help relieve a rare, painful condition called multiple congenital cartilaginous exostosis, which causes tumors to grow from the ends of his bones.
Not only does marijuana ease Rosenfeld’s pain and make his joints more flexible — for decades now, the tumors of have stopped growing, which Irv attributes to the pot.
His new self-published book, My Medicine: How I Convinced The Federal Government To Provide My Marijuana And Helped Launch A National Movement, tells the story of his cannabis use, and argues that the federal government should be more active in studying pot’s medical uses.
