Pubdate: Mon, 02 Sep 2013
Source: Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
Copyright: 2013 Sun-Times Media, LLC
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/5QwXAJWY
Website: http://www.suntimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/81
Author: Maudlyne Ihejirika

SHE'S SMOKED OUT

Medical Marijuana Will Remain Out of Activist Michelle Digiacomo's 
Reach, Despite Her Life of Pain

Marijuana was illegal in Illinois, so she always knew the day might come.

Still, when police stormed her North Side apartment, Michelle 
DiGiacomo was unprepared.

"We had discussed this possibility in the past, one I had hoped would 
never come to be," says the 53-year-old who runs Direct Effect 
Charities, a Chicago nonprofit serving needy Chicago Public Schools kids.

For the past four years the widowed mother of two had used medical 
marijuana for relief from fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, spinal 
stenosis and rotator cuff disease.

On March 5 - five months before Gov. Pat Quinn would sign the state's 
medical marijuana bill into law - DiGiacomo pleaded guilty to Class 4 
felony possession. Under the Illinois Compassionate Use of Medical 
Cannabis Pilot Program Act, a felony disqualifies patients from 
accessing medical marijuana.

Advocates who used her story in the battle to get the bill passed say 
she's an example of the new law's deficiencies.

Medical marijuana entered DiGiacomo's life in August 2008.

Her 53-year-old husband, Paul Fitzgerald, had just been diagnosed 
with advanced esophageal cancer. Doctors gave him three months to 
live and prescribed morphine for the excruciating pain. But it didn't help.

A friend recommended a medical marijuana vaporizer. "It helped ease 
his pain, gave him as much presence of mind as possible," DiGiacomo 
says of her husband, who died Nov. 2, 2008.

Earlier that year, while on vacation, DiGiacomo was hit by a 
five-foot ocean wave that tore rotator cuffs on both shoulders.

"I began to have radiating pain throughout my body. I would see a 
rheumatologist who would prescribe medications that did not work and 
irritated my stomach greatly," she says. "I basically learned to live in pain."

According to Dr. Andrew Ruthberg, a Rush University Medical Center 
rheumatologist who has treated her for years, DiGiacomo has "several 
chronically painful conditions," and has "had difficulty tolerating 
many traditional medications, and I fully believe that [her] use of 
marijuana has been solely for the purpose of trying to moderate chronic pain."

Dr. Howard An, Rush University Medical Center's director of spine 
surgery, who has treated DiGiacomo, adds, "I know that [she has] 
tried numerous traditional medications without any relief." In 2009, 
DiGiacomo traveled to California, where medical marijuana was legal. 
"I did not want to get my medication on the street, so I made the 
hard decision to purchase it from a medical dispensary in California, 
and receive it in the mail. It was terrifying, a horrible way to live."

On Sept. 13, 2012, DiGiacomo received 670 grams of marijuana from 
California. Minutes later, police were at the door.

"I opened up to multiple guns pointed at me. A police officer 
screamed, ' Who's in here?' I told him, ' Myself and my 14-year-old 
daughter.' He asked where the guns were. I told him I had no guns. He 
asked where the drugs were. I told him where the small amount of 
medical marijuana I had in the house was, as well as what had just arrived."

Spencer Tweedy helped raise $3,000 toward DiGiacomo's legal fees. 
"Michelle DiGiacomo is not a criminal," says Tweedy, whose father, 
Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, and mother, Susan Miller Tweedy, are longtime 
supporters. "When [the police] impounded her car, it was filled with 
school supplies headed for impoverished students. The cost of 
defending herself against the law has crippled her more than her 
diseases ever have."

The Cook County state's attorney's office refused to reduce the 
charge or to grant her a 410 probation - which allows expungement for 
first-time drug offenders.

"The state's attorney refused to even look at the fact that her 
doctors verified she was taking this as part of a medical treatment 
for pain, and that she had a California medicinal marijuana license 
or . . . the fact that she'd never been convicted of any other crime, 
not even a misdemeanor, nothing," says her attorney, Michael Rediger. 
DiGiacomo received a year of probation and went public.

"Each patient who helped pass this law has a story, and each of them 
was simply looking for compassion in the eyes of the law," says Dan 
Linn, executive director of the Illinois chapter of the National 
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, allows patients with any of 33 
medical conditions 2.5 ounces every two weeks. But with her felony 
conviction, medical marijuana will remain illegal for DiGiacomo.

Watching Quinn sign the bill into law Aug. 1 with other patients was 
bittersweet.

"It was surreal," she says. "While relief has finally arrived for 
them, it still has not for me."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom