The first five patients in the US who received their cannabis medicine from the federal government were featured speakers at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws’ (NORML) annual conference held in Washington, DC in 1990. The prime movers of that conference were two members of its Board of Directors, Al Byrne and Mary Lynn Mathre, RN. A fellow member of the Board made a call to a friend at C-Span, the local civic orientated TV channel that is broadcast nationwide, suggesting this conference was worthy of its attention. They agreed and broadcast the entire conference live and repeated the entire program on several occasions. Forty thousand phone calls poured into the NORML offices that month. The patients had put a new face on marijuana. These were not the stoner hippies so often portrayed in the press, but men and women with gray hair, soft words and serious illnesses. They were everybody’s dad, grandmother or son and the US government provided them with their medicine. The callers were from all over the country, supportive, and wanted to know more about “medical marijuana.”

After working together informally for a few years, the five federal patients and health care professionals with expertise in clinical cannabis applications, formalized their work by incorporating as Patients Out of Time, co-founded by Mathre and Byrne, in the spring of 1995. The organization’s mission was and is to educate health care professionals and the public about therapeutic cannabis.

By the end of the nineties the awakening provided by C-Span had blossomed into a full-scale awareness that the US government policy on medical cannabis was at best, misguided. To us it seemed just plain mean, based on a relentless propaganda machine that just lied about the issue. The public seemed to agree. Over the decade polls about medical cannabis efficacy and medical necessity climbed from the low 40’s to the mid 70’s, even into the 80 percentile in some states.

In order for research to be considered of merit it must be replicated and peer reviewed. The results must be made public, scrutinized, and validated. To overcome any federal government dialog that indicated that such research did not exist we started a series of clinical cannabis conferences beginning in 2000.

The first such meeting was sponsored by the College of Nursing and the College of Medicine of the University of Iowa.
This sponsorship was critical to our work. It enabled the agenda to be accredited for professional education for MD’s, RN’s, SW’s, JD’s and other professionals. To be so honored the faculty and the presentations had to meet the highest of academic standards. All conferences in the series have received this accredited status. The entire conference was broadcast live to various locations including McGill University in Canada and to the health education network of the State of Oregon. The faculty was of the highest quality; the press response supportive and the studies were presented under the theme of Science Based Clinical Applications – this formed a benchmark of knowledge from which there has been no retreat.

Our second conference was sponsored by the Health Department of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Nurses Association and other groups. The faculty included a number of speakers from European countries and we involved the hemp community in the proceedings by discussing the positive impact on health that cannabis used as food, hemp, proffered for sick and well alike. The main focus of this forum was to discuss pain of all types, since over 70% of the Oregon patients reported pain relief as their primary purpose for the use of cannabis.

The Third National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics was held in May of 2004 in Charlottesville, VA.
It was co-sponsored by the Virginia Nurses Association, the Pain Management Center and the Medical, Law and Nursing Schools of the University of Virginia, known in the US for its conservative ways. The faculty included the world’s finest cannabis researchers, clinicians, patients and caregivers from the US, England, Israel, and Canada. At this venue cannabis use as medicine ranged from the therapeutic use by infants and children to use with Hospice patients.

Our Board of Directors includes four of the seven US federal cannabis patients left alive, Irv Rosenfeld, George McMahon, Corrine Millet and Barbara Douglass and a fifth patient, Elvy Musikka, is our national spokesperson (the other two patients wish to remain anonymous). In the spring of 2001 in Missoula, MT, four of the patients underwent an extensive three-day examination of every system in their body to determine the long term effects of cannabis. Known widely as The Missoula Chronic Use Study, the investigators concluded that after using cannabis therapeutically for a range of 11 to 27 years, with a dose of nine cured ounces per month for Barbara and others, and eleven cured ounces every 26 days for Irv, they were all in fine condition exempting their original illness and the wear and tear of age. We assume that the federal government never bothered to conduct such long-term studies because it did not want to scientifically validate the efficacy of cannabis. A thorough review of the study, Chronic Cannabis Use in the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program: An Examination of Benefits and Adverse Effects of Legal Clinical Cannabis was published in the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics and is available for review here: PDF File

Press and journalist contact: Al Byrne
ph (434) 263-4484 fax (434) 263-6753
Al@medicalcannabis.com