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." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom