drug poll cuz the other thread wont work..

Me, I have had to deal with high-level pain (recurring kidney stones, surgery, etc.). Painkillers, I hate. They are all addictive, they all have crappy physical and psychological side effects—any of the codeinelike ones is guaranteed to really eff up my temper so I have to go away from any and all other people for a couple of days afterward, for example—but sometimes they are necessary. Then there are the times when they are completely inadequate. During my most recent kidney stone "adventure", on a couple of occasions taking a quadruple dose of oral painkillers was no use: they'd said to take one Demerol or one Percocet when the pain flared up; within 90 minutes I'd taken two Demerol and two Percocet and the only effect was that I forgot how to walk. Off to the hospital for I.V. morphine, which is highly effective but obviously not an everyday solution to chronic pain.

I have never found cannabis to be a particularly effective painkiller per se. I have, however, found that it can potentiate painkillers (i.e., make them more effective), probably due to its calming and dissociative effects. Also it helps maintain and/or stimulate appetite, which is one of the first things to go away when you are in serious pain—thus leading to dehydration and undernourishment, which in turn makes you feel all the worse, so there's something to be said for appetite stimulation. I've never grown pot—I leave that to the experts; it looks like a complicated and labour-intensive job to make them produce a worthwhile quantity and quality of product.

If your doctor's recommending cannabis, by all means give it a try. Keep in mind that smoking any plant material, even if you are filtering it thru water, is highly injurious to the lungs and can easily trigger very strong coughing fits, the muscular spasms of which can greatly aggravate body pain. Eating pot means not having to fill your lungs with crap, but it also means the entire day is shot to hell. Harm reduction by heating and vapourising rather than burning it is well worth the initial expense of the ]equipment for doing so.

Obviously, no driving.