Homelessness, Disability, and Cannabis Allergy

Hemp Extract - Courtesy of Wikipedia - Public Domain

Disability affects most adults at one time or another.  We may be disabled for a few weeks or permanently.  However long it lasts, disability negatively impacts adults’ abilities to support themselves and their families, resulting in voluntary or involuntary homelessness or to housing insecurity.

Based on my first-hand study of homelessness for lo, these many months, I would say that disability is the most frequent reason for homelessness.  Granted, my sample size is small and restricted to one geographic location. 

I will say, though, that 100% of the homeless people with whom I have chatted have been disabled to one degree or another.  Some have become disabled because they began drug or alcohol habits that consumed their lives.  The vast majority, however, have become disabled through no direct fault of their own.  Further, most are trying to support themselves as best they can; they simply cannot earn enough to qualify for housing or to save up the $2000-ish that is needed to acquire even substandard housing in northern California.

In my own situation, I have several medical challenges, but the disability that contributed the most to my family’s homelessness is a deathly allergy to cannabis.  One person’s medicine is another person’s poison, and that is what cannabis is to me: poison.  I cannot even be near someone who smokes on a regular basis without becoming immediately ill.  The CBD oil that helps so many people?  Put a drop on my wrist and watch my skin turn red and swell.  I washed my hands with Dr. Bronner's soap and felt the burn, even though the amount of hemp oil must be miniscule.

I first found out that I was allergic to cannabis at the age of eleven when my older half-sister gave me a cannabis-laced brownie in the hope that I would fall asleep. I went into anaphylactic shock and, technically, was dead for a few minutes.  Were it not for the presence of a Marine who had been a Medic in Viet Nam and who had a kit with him, I would have remained dead.  The next year I had an ECG as part of routine health check, and it showed that I had had a heart attack.  

I went to public high school for a couple of months and was sick all the time.  Imagine!  My grandmother took me to her physician who took a complete history and who informed me that marijuana was to me as kryptonite was to Superman; I needed to stay away from it.  Period.  Homeschool, here I come!

As an adult, my cannabis allergy really wasn’t a problem until the 2010s.  Prior to that, I lived in middle class areas in southern California or in Mormon-dominated areas of the Rocky Mountains where if people were using cannabis, they used on the sly because even simple possession for personal use was prosecuted.  In the 2010s, the laws in California began to be liberalized to the point of decriminalization.  

In 2017, the voters approved cannabis for recreational use in California, and I knew that I would have to leave my beloved state.  Before that, in 2016, our local District Attorney stopped prosecuting cannabis cases, effectively legalizing cannabis growing in Sacramento County.  Also, in 2016, growing cannabis for commercial medicinal purposes became legal in the county where I worked, turning my work hours into misery as the entire town reeked of the skunky funk of cannabis.

I became a California renter in 2010, and I was always careful to let apartment managers know of my allergy and to make sure that cannabis was forbidden on the property.  Cannabis smoke residue is nearly impossible to clean, so landlords don't want it around.  In my penultimate rental, I was threatened with rape by a neighbor's boyfriend who was making "hash oil" in her bathroom.  The police turned the guy into a snitch, so he wasn't prosecuted.  In the last place I rented, the neighbors with whom we shared the long side of our apartment grew their own cannabis in the apartment, even though it was strictly forbidden. One of the youngsters and I were horribly ill the entire last months of our lease.  I could hardly wait to leave, but our exit from California proved to be over too soon.

I want to make it clear that I know that cannabis can be used successfully for the treatment of disease or the amelioration of symptoms.  I believe that smoking a bit of cannabis is the intoxicant equivalent of a glass of wine.  

Just don't use cannabis around me, 

please and thank you.

Next Up:  Lars, Death Threats, and Tennessee