Source: NOW Magazine (Toronto) Pubdate: November 20, 1997 Contact: Author: Enzo Di Matteo TERRY PARKER SAYS WEED CONTROLS HIS EPILEPSY BETTER THAN PRESCRIPTION DRUGS AND HE HAS EVIDENCE FOR THE JUDGE Terry Parker, the unlikely hero on whose slight shoulders this country's medical marijuana hopes squarely rest, answers the door in that everpresent psychedelic sunburst Tshirt, ponytail and the affectionate "Hey, bud" he often uses. His Parkdale digs high above the lake on the 22nd floor haven't changed much since my visit last July except that the cops haven't been through and left everything turned upside down. And the landlord still hasn't got around to fixing the front door they bashed in before hauling 73 plants out of Parker's place. He was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking and cultivation after someone spotted some of the green growing on the balcony. The circa70s photos of Parker here surrounded by pot plants, there in an afro and brown tuxedo at his younger brother's wedding "Those were my Jamaican days," he says are still the first things you see when you come in. The most striking portrait among them is of Parker Sr. standing at attention in full firefighter uniform. That was before his untimely death from a heart attack some years ago. He was 42, the same age Parker is now. Like his eldest son and namesake, he had his own demons to contend with. Only they came out of a bottle, while Parker's, who suffers from a serious form of epilepsy, have lived in some dark, haunted space in his mind ever since childhood. Next month, judge Patrick Sheppard is scheduled to hand down a decision that Parker hopes will end up allowing him and others who swear by pot's healing properties to grow the leaf as medicine. Parker discovered in his early teens that smoking pot helped ward off the bodycontorting seizures that, for him, made simple pleasures like riding a bike or driving a car every teen's dream impossibilities. Sheppard's decision was supposed to be delivered this past Tuesday (November 18), but he called Parker's lawyer, Aaron Harnett, a few hours after our interview Friday (November 14) to say he needed more time. By Harnett's account, the trial went very well, judging by, among other things, the perfect strangers who would show up during the two weeks of testimony to relate stories of relatives with cancer using pot to allay the effects of chemotherapy. The testimony of the arresting officers this goround was not what one might call impressive, either especially since the trafficking charge comes out of a "throwaway line" of Parker's, says Harnett, that he sometimes gives pot away to friends and others in medical need. Parker also has the benefit of a 1987 decision allowing him to possess pot for medicinal purposes going for him not to mention the strength of clinical trials in the U.S. pumping pot's therapeutic benefits. NEWS DAMPER But news of Sheppard's delay puts a damper on Parker's day. It's like that sometimes with Parker. The 1,050 milligrams of prescription dilantin and priandon he still takes daily to control his seizures cause depression and mood swings. They make the world Parker inhabits one of emotional extremes. When the tides of torment really start swirling inside his head, things seem overwhelming, even out of control. Back in 69 and 72, Parker had two separate bouts of brain surgery. Doctors told him and his mother it would make him better. Parker says it has only made his epilepsy worse. He has continued to search for answers about the entire mindboggling episode. It has become an obsession. For a period ending in 95, he picketed the Hospital for Sick Children, where the surgeries were performed, for 410 days. It was Parker's way of saying that all he wanted was some sort of explanation. Pot has been his only saving grace. "I don't know if I can take much more of this waiting anymore, or these doctors who play bogus experts," he says. *** Terrence Leslie Frederick Parker was four when he first began developing the symptoms of epilepsy. That was after being hit on the head with a swing. Things got worse when, at age six, he was hit by a car. The seizures became a daily disruption, even with the heavy doses of dilantin, mysoline and librium doctors prescribed to control them. It got to the point where his teachers and the Etobicoke board recommended he be institutionalized. Then, on the advice of his neurosurgeons, Parker underwent a right temporal lobectomy. He was 14. It was hoped the procedure, which involved removing brain matter, would improve his condition. The seizures, though, only got worse. He experienced what's called a grand mal, the most serious type of seizure, right in the recovery room. Shortly after the surgery, Parker became extremely depressed and suicidal and was hospitalized in various psychiatric institutions. His doctors performed a second temporal lobe cortical resection three years later, but to no avail. He still continued to experience debilitating seizures. It was around that time, during a stint at Lakeshore psychiatric hospital "It was like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," he says that an orderly there turned Parker on to pot. He began to notice that the more he smoked, the less frequent and intense his seizures became. His mother, Helen Cork, who now lives in Lakefield, noticed it, too. She says in her affidavit filed in court that she was "shocked" to find out about it because she considers herself a lawabiding citizen, but she nevertheless grew to understand Parker's need and has even risked arrest to purchase pot for him a few times. MOTHER'S SUPPORT "My only concern for my son is that he be as healthy and happy as possible," Cork says in her affidavit. "It is my sincere belief, not as a doctor but as a mother who has cared for him, that marijuana helps to treat his seizures." Parker reported the phenomenon to his then physician, Michael Rachlis, and on his instruction began keeping a diary, while continuing to take his prescription medication. During one threemonth period in 1980, Parker noted a total of 12 grand mal seizures all of them on days when he did not smoke pot. In another threemonth period in 81, when he was smoking pot with his prescription, he experienced no grand mals at all, though he did suffer some less serious petit mals. "When I feel a seizure coming on, I smoke a couple of joints, and boom," Parker says, "everything is under control." Pot, he says, also comes without the sideeffects of depression and loss of appetite associated with his prescription medication. When he doesn't smoke, however, Parker says he can experience anywhere from three to five grand mals and up to a dozen petit mals a week. Things can also become very scary. Once, during what's called a psychomotor seizure, which causes hallucinations, Parker mistook the end of a subway platform for the back of a truck and jumped off. Only the sound of an approaching train brought him to his senses, and he was able to scramble to safety. On a more recent occasion, Parker felt a seizure coming and tried to hop a bus on Weston Road to get to relative safety, when he was hit by an ambulance and had to be hospitalized. He figures he's ended up in the hospital more than 100 times because of injuries he's sustained during seizures. "When I'm treated only with prescription medicine, my life is very difficult to live and at times truly miserable," Parker tells the court at his most recent trial. "When I can consume marijuana daily, I'm able to enjoy my life, free from seizures, and carry on in a relatively normal way." Valerie Corall, an epileptic from Santa Cruz, California, who testified on Parker's behalf, started her own marijuana buyers' club a few years ago complete with charitable status and corporate donations to help sufferers of epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and AIDS/HIV. Her condition, like Parker's, was brought on by an accident in her case, when a plane buzzed the car she was riding in. The costs of buying pot for her club became so prohibitive that she started growing the stuff on her farm. State authorities wanted to shut Corall down and charged her with cultivation. She launched a constitutional challenge similar to Parker's, based on medical necessity. The charges, along with a second set laid later, were dropped. "At first they thought we were just trying to get high and put something over on the state," Corall testifies. "It took a long time to educate and many more conversations to obtain credibility and legitimize it." California is one of two U.S. states, the other being Arizona, where doctors can recommend marijuana be used for medical purposes. Thirtyfive other state legislatures have passed laws recognizing marijuana's use as medicine. Six states also recognize the medicalnecessity defence in cases where people have been charged. In Canada, meanwhile, pot charges continue to climb, to a total of 29,562 in 1996, the last year for which stats are available, from 28,330 in 95 and 27,662 in 94. Other medical marijuana experts at Parker's trial, including John Morgan, professor of pharmacology at the City of New York Medical School, testified that the prescription drugs like dilantin used by epileptics to control seizures cause a long list of possible sideeffects, including blood abnormalities and liver and brain damage. When Parker was charged with pot possession back in 87 the first time he used the medical necessity defence and won both Rachlis and Douglas Sider, another physician he was seeing, noted pot's beneficial effects on his seizures. Sider wrote in a letter submitted as evidence then that, "From a medical and qualityoflife point of view, it is medically necessary, in order to obtain optimal seizure control, that Parker regularly use marijuana in conjunction with his other medications." The arresting officer in that case offered to release Parker on his own recognizance at the scene if he signed a release agreeing not to smoke pot. Parker refused "To me, it's matter of life and death," he says and ended up spending a week in the Metro West detention centre that ended up being interrupted by a stay in hospital after he experienced another of his seizures. Parker won that case. But being allowed to possess pot, and growing it for medicinal purposes are two different things. TOO BROAD Parker's lawyer, Harnett, argued that the current laws against cultivation are too broad and an infringement of Parker's constitutional right to life and liberty because they don't allow people who need pot to grow it for medicinal purposes. More harmful drugs like heroin, percodan and amphetamines, for example, can be prescribed by a physician. And technically, so can marijuana, but there is no exception in current law. THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, is currently available in synthetic form as marinol and nabilone but doesn't, according to Morgan and other medical experts, contain the active ingredients shown to demonstrate the anticonvulsant properties of smoked pot. The Crown attorney, Kevin Wilson, argues, despite Morgan's testimony, that marinol and nabilone are viable alternatives. And he claims that a mechanism does exist whereby an application can be made to Health Canada for approval of new drugs, even pot, for medical use, the suggestion being that Parker hasn't exhausted all alternatives. SCIENTIFIC STUDY Harnett points out, though, that the cost of the scientific study necessary to get approval for any new drug is prohibitive between $100,000 and $200,000 for the average person. Wilson also argues that the criminalization of marijuana, in any event, is a matter not for the courts but for parliament, and should be dealt with there, if at all. In his final summation, Wilson goes on to suggest that Parker was not administering his prescription medicines properly and that that's why he feels the need to smoke pot to calm his seizures. It's at that point that Parker says he began to experience the "tingly feeling" he gets before a seizure. He ended up collapsing on the courtroom floor. The fire department and ambulance were called, but the timing of the seizure, Harnett says, had some in the courtroom wondering whether Parker was trying to pull a fast one. To Parker, it was more personal. "He kept calling me a phony," he says. *** Over a cup of coffee back at Parker's place, my mind floats back to all those times over the years that Parker's called during one of those fits of depression or maybe desperation to offer his own conspiracy theories about his illfated brain surgeries. I got tired of listening even hung up on him once or twice but I realize now that it was just his way of searching for some comfort, and maybe an explanation. "To this day," he says, "and for the complications I was suffering, nobody's ever told me jack shit. All I get is people ducking their heads." The caged budgie overlooking the balcony from atop the stereo cabinet begins fluttering up a fuss.