The Little Book of Cannabis by Amanda Siebert

Author:Amanda Siebert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2018-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

7

AN EFFECTIVE

SOURCE OF PAIN

MANAGEMENT

Case Study: Galen Pallas

EFFECTIVE PAIN MANAGEMENT is essential for Oakland, California, native Galen Pallas. As the founder and CEO of his own cannabis company, Kind Culture, he can’t afford to have his days interrupted constantly with chronic pain—pain that is often intensified by violent twitches. Pallas was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome as a preteen, and says while it’s often characterized by vocal and physical tics, he suffers from “twitches, not swears.” When I ask what causes his chronic pain, he tells me there isn’t one simple answer.

“It’s complex,” he says. “My body makes jerky movements in my head, neck, and shoulders that I cannot control.” These jerky movements cause intense headaches and, after years of the same repetitive motion, severe pain in the back, neck, and shoulders. Following his diagnosis, he says, he was put on so many different medications that he felt like a guinea pig. When he began smoking cannabis recreationally as a teenager, it did something for him that other drugs could not: not only did it reduce the number of headaches he experienced, it also limited the frequency and severity of his twitches.

The year he graduated from high school, the state of California legalized medical cannabis, and at age eighteen, Pallas was among the first one thousand Americans to receive a prescription. Though it served him well in college, he says he stopped using it once he began working and no longer enjoyed the feeling of being high.

When he began experiencing intense chronic pain several years later, his doctor’s first line of defense was opioids. He says they worked incredibly well for a few years, but when his pain eventually became so intense that his doctor could no longer increase his dose, surgery was the only remaining option.

Describing the brutal surgery, Pallas says it was like having his cervical spine cut in half and then put back together. Doctors instructed him not to move his neck for three months after the procedure, but his twitches made keeping still next to impossible. When the pain medication he was being given didn’t adequately manage the added discomfort brought on by his Tourette’s, Pallas reintroduced himself to cannabis and found a combination of cannabinoids that managed his pain without making him feel impaired.

“To be honest, I can’t stand the feeling of being high,” he admits. “It’s great recreationally, but imagine trying to run a company stoned. I know a lot of people who are capable of doing it, and God bless them, but I just don’t have that skill set.”

While a hemp-based CBD extract containing no THC worked to mask his physical pain, he says, “there [was] still the acute awareness that I constantly hurt.” After introducing a small amount of THC in a 10:1 CBD-to-THC edible, he noticed that he was able to keep his mind calm while experiencing intense pain. “If my [baseline pain] gets exacerbated by any number of things—if I overexert myself, if I don’t get a good night’s sleep, if I

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