Having had the misfortune of incurring multiple spinal injuries after being hit by a runaway school in 1994, it requires me to take pain killers, a muscle relaxant and tranquilizers. Before that, I really never took pills except an occasional one or two for headaches. Living in a conservative state like Louisiana, I can't get help from medical cannabis unless, of course, I venture out to buy it in the worst place in the world to score, New Orleans.

Moving to any of the states that have legal medical cannabis would require a trade-off of the help cannabis gives me vs. the pain caused by cold. (Most of the medical states are in cold weather climates.)

I've learned things from this experience I would like to share. First is that when I have access to cannabis it does a world of good. Without it, I usually have to take a painkiller, and as often as not a muscle relaxant shortly after rising in the morning. With it available, a small toke eases the morning pain episodes and stops the muscle spasms, and I don't have to take pills until hours later, sometimes not at all. If I have an ongoing supply of herb, that reduces my pill intake to about a third of what I require to be functional without it.

For years after the injury, which at times can put me on the floor the pain is so severe, I was given Xanax. I'd been using that for a decade and could regulate use to suit my needs; it was a helpful tool in dealing with stress related to the pain issue. But the Feds stepped in and stopped my orthopedist from prescribing me Xanax, and I was forced to try a drug that I was unable to regulate properly and left me feeling sluggish and depressed. It would seem the heat is off of Valium, so ultimatley that's replaced Xanax for me. When kind bud is available, I rarely pop pills in the daytime and less at night.

Now, I can't even get Soma, the muscle relaxant I've used since the injury. Again, my doctor admitted it was because of the Feds asserting control over the relationship between me and him.

Since I'm what is considered a senior citizen, it's a given that my pain problems will only (and have) worsen with time. Yet, despite that, for the 15 years this has been going on I've been required to pay for a visit to the orthopedist to have him write a three-month script. With th help of cannabis, I've been at times been able to extend that to less visits in a year, but nonetheless to get to the drug supplier I first have to pay what is basically a surcharge to the doctor to give me a document to go see the dealer (the pharmacist) who then charges me a small fortune for the required medication.

Let's put that in context. If in order to score some KB you had to go to go to one dealer and pay them for a note to see the second dealer and pay him all over again for your weed, what kind of counterculture would we be running here? Of course, with legalization the two-dealer system is not so bad because when cannabis is available legally the price would go down enough to make it worth having that imposed.

When I was living as an expatriate in Afghanistan in the days before the CIA came in and tosses us (the expats) and Zahir Shah out, not only could you score the best cannabis in the world just about anywhere, anytime, but if you needed pills of any sort, some tinture of opium,  a factory-sealed glass ampoule of cocaine or whatever the fuck else was being produced,  all you had to do was go to the druggist and buy what he you needed (if it was in stock). For example, when I got dysentery, local lore had it that tinture of opium was the best cure. So down to the pharmacy I went and picked up a bottle for next to nothing. (German coke, by the way, went for $3 a gram as I remember.)

Hell, when I was in Iran I learned that even there at the time of Shah Pahlavi - while he might kill and parade the dead bodies of Afghan opium smugglers through the streets strapped to the hoods of trucks like deer in the South - if you were a senior citizen, you were issued drugs for your needs. I learned that when my wife was in the hospital for a couple of months for hepatitis C for next to nothing BECAUSE IRAN HAD SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

But would our society even consider giving a carte blanche document to someone like myself to pick up what I need for my daily pain problems? No - instead they tell the doctor what he can or cannot sell me.

Our CIA, in league with the Soviets, brought down the stability that existed in Afghanistan in the '70s, kicked off by our tax dollars at work in 1972 while the counterculture was helping build the economy there. It was Nixon who put that country on the slippery slope that led to the WTC tragedy (he declared his War on Drugs and sent the CIA into Afghanistan). Later, acting as an agent for the US (CIA?), Osama bin Laden went there to sell arms. He was a modern educated guy, who upon being moved by the realization of the cause of the suffering in Afghanistan, transitioned into what he is now, and collected the names of foreign Muslim fighters into the database (thus Al Qaeda, The Base) on his computer. In 2002, G.W. Bush let his family friend bin Laden slip away at Bora Bora while he removed troops from Afghanistan to fight his bullshit, illegal war in Iraq.

The theocracy of the mullahs brought down an Iran, which while far from perfect, gave women the right to vote before the Swiss. (Iranian women's enfranchisement was approved in 1963 in a national referendum as part of the White Revolution. Women were granted the right to vote in the first Swiss cantons in 1959, but not at the federal level until 1971 and, after resistance, in the last canton Appenzell Innerrhoden in 1990.) And as I learned, Iran afforded free medical care to not only its own people, but even a satanic Amerikan like me.

Amerika: the government with the God complex, wanting to make over others in our own image.

Mez Merai spent a good portion of the '60s and '70s on the ganja trail in Asia. He's a longtime resident of New Orleans

Photo: Chicken St., Kabul, 1970

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