How I used Medical Marijuana to help eliminate gout

Last year I used Medical Marijuana as an integral part of a radical lifestyle-change program that has helped me eliminate my gout, cut my alcohol consumption by 95%, lose thirty pounds and eat more healthy, unprocessed foods.


Gout: formerly just a hereditary curse of overindulged European kings, it has now spread to the mainstream and is afflicting Joe six-packs from here to China in record numbers. I blame end-stage capitalism and its tempting cornucopia of high-fat, high-protein processed foods. As the world develops, more people hanker after things that are bad for them. More oil, more precious metals, more junk food, more junk media promoting the junk food. Gout. It's not just for Francophile brandy-swiggers like Ben Franklin anymore.

In Washington State, "intractable pain" is a legitimate, if somewhat broad, qualifier for Medical Marijuana status. Gout is not a condition that is generally recognized to get you in the pot doctor's office, although the agony this condition inflicts upon your big toe (and elsewhere) is beyond intractable. Luckily, I was already a Medical Marijuana patient for a different (and less painful) malady, and had a few grams in my safe for a rainy day.

My gout attack came as a surprise, having been misdiagnosed and ignored ten years earlier. The pain in my big toe was Cheneyesque: like a million nano-Hitlers stabbing me with poison needles. And then it spread to my ankle, which soon swelled plump with toxic fluid. It felt as if my body had been shredded with salty white-hot razors in preparation for the nematocysts of a deadly box jellyfish to be placed directly on the open wound, on a hot day at Guantanamo.

In laymen's terms, a lifetime of booze and red meat causes those with a genetic predisposition to gout to accumulate uric acid in their extremities, and when this acid crystalizes, a painful, arthritic inflammation can occur. And the only solution is to more or less quit drinking or more or less stop eating red meat and other nasties like snails and fish eggs.

Pain attacks the mind, and the corporate doctors had a quick cure for my suffering that, in my addled state, I readily accepted: the arthritis drug indomethacin chased with 400 mg pops of ibuprofen. And corporate America has yet another product for you to take once you recover: allopurinol. Every day for the rest of your life. Keeps the uric acid levels low, Big Pharma profits high, and allows you to continue indulging, which keeps Mickey D's in the black.

None of those drugs worked for me, so two days later I was back for some Colchicine. "Take two tablets now, then one every two hours until gout resolved or GI side effects occur." I overlooked the subtle warning on the label suggesting that colchicine strips your insides bare and will have you vomiting and diarrheal for two days (especially if you wash it down with lots of that cherry juice everyone suggests for gout).

The poison known as colchicine stripped the gout from my body, and almost everything else, too. I hadn't eaten in days. I was left with nausea - the plague of the sick and dying - the worst feeling in the world. So I broke out some newly acquired high-end indica/sativa blend and had a smoke.

After the first exhale I felt a profound sense of calm, followed by a complete disappearance of my nausea, and a subsequent mild euphoria. Very few doctors out there would recommend pot therapy for gout, and that's sad. Maybe because there's no money to be made from marijuana products by Big Pharma yet.

Pain and panic go together, but thanks to a couple tokes of marijuana I was in a new space, and was hungry and needed a beer. But I knew my beer days were over.

Gout sufferers should not drink beer, wine or liquor, but I've found that an occasional top-shelf vodka works okay. Keeps me from being too much of a dud at parties. My access to Medical Marijuana has allowed me, for the first time in my life, to kick the booze to the curb. No hangover, and cheaper, too: one could, theoretical, make $40 worth of pot last a week or more, even while smoking it several times a day. Try going out on the town on a Friday night to catch an alcohol buzz with only $40 in your pocket. By Saturday morning you're gonna be buying a classy 24oz can of fortified beer at the 7-11 with your remaining spare change and calling it a weekend.

Quitting beer was only half the battle. Cutting out rich, delicious foods was next. Gout sufferers must never eat organ meats (pate, liverwurst, blood sausage), wild game (skunk, raccoon, squirrel, deer, muskrat, etc.), shellfish (see below*) or caviar. All the indulgences enjoyed by legendary gout superstars Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo Da Vinci and John Milton are strictly forbidden.

*(Hot gout tip! Those with gout must avoid two of the eleven branches of the animal kingdom at all costs: Mollusks and Arthropods. Mollusk lovers can kiss their days of scarfing down oysters, mussels, clams and octopi goodbye, a quadruply painful punishment for residents of the Pacific Northwest, where these treats are large and plentiful. And Arthropods like crabs, shrimp, lobster ... swimming in melted butter with a slice of lemon on the side ... mmm. No more. Not five years from now. Not ever.)

Remember, the first mistake of the gout sufferer is to think he has been "cured," only to fall back into old bad eating and drinking habits.

Also avoid sulfites, MSG, refined sugar, chick peas, mushrooms, red meat (use in moderation), and eat more vegetables.

To sum up, if you have suffered from gout, follow these four rules and it will leave your body forever.

1. Cut your alcohol consumption by 90%. Warning: if you have a pressing medical or legal need to quit drinking entirely, the pot gout cure is not for you. Allow yourself the rare vodka and soda. If you have the urge for a drink, smoke pot instead. We'll save the "how to quit booze by switching to pot" story for another time.

2. Drink lots of water and other low-sugar beverages.

3. Avoid eating any Arthropods, Mollusks, Fish Eggs and Organ Meats.

4. Start smoking more marijuana. It will make you hungry for more unprocessed whole foods and fewer nuggets of deep-fried corporate crap. Brighter, crisper days, expansion of the conscious mind, and deeper sleeps await you.

by Ray Lee Marx - ray@wildworldnews.com

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This story originally published in Mary Jane Magazine #2, Fall 2010.