Opinion | The Christian Case for Marijuana

"I grew up in an evangelical Christian minister’s home during America’s “Just Say No” era, which means I spent most of my life believing that marijuana was just one more sinful tool that the devil used to shred America’s moral fabric. But that was before I developed a mysterious and debilitating chronic pain disorder against which most traditional medicines proved worthless. Pain, like time, has a way of transforming us.
On a gray morning in December four years ago, I awoke in my cramped Brooklyn apartment and could not feel my hands. Over the following weeks, the numbness morphed into burning, tingling, stabbing pain that spread all over my body. The pain was soon accompanied by panic attacks, crippling depression and something bordering on suicidal thoughts.
Desperate for answers and relief, I plowed through health care professionals — six neurologists, three primary care physicians, two chiropractors, two physical therapists, an orthopedist, a cardiologist, a rheumatologist, a physiatrist and one especially earnest Hasidic Jewish healer. They offered me no answers, but instead gave me a cabinet full of nerve pills, painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs that clouded my mind and were accompanied by side effects that were often worse than the symptoms themselves.
In the depths of my despair, I visited a so-called green doctor in Venice Beach, Calif., and did something that the pious childhood version of me would have considered unthinkable: I asked for a medical marijuana prescription. That evening, I sampled a small dose and experienced what some might call a miracle. The excruciating pain receded and the cloud encircling my head lifted for the first time in months. I laid in bed and wept for more than an hour".