An Open Letter to EVERY Lawmaker Who Has Never Felt Chronic Pain

On the evening of Saturday, February 28th, I cried.

Not from sadness. Not from despair, though there has been enough of that in my life. I cried from relief. I took my first dose of RSO (Rick Simpson Oil, a cannabis concentrate) in over a week. I had been managing my severe chronic spinal pain with nothing but two generic Aleve tablets, twice a day, because the medicine that actually works for me is nearly impossible to legally access in the state where I am a resident. As the RSO finally settled in, the pain that had been building for days began to lift, and I sat there and wept.

I am a 49-year-old man, six feet and five inches tall and about 265lbs, who spent over 3 decades being ground through the medical industrial complex and spit out the other side. I am a husband, a fulltime nomad, a cybersecurity professional, a tech veteran of nearly 30 years, and a chronic pain patient who found his life again, not in a prescription bottle, but in a plant.

This is my open letter to every politician, every lawmaker, every bureaucrat who has ever voted on drug policy without once considering what it feels like to live inside a body that is constantly at war with itself.

It Started When I Was 13

I fractured L2 and L4 in my spine at age 13. The doctors told me plainly: you will be fused by the time you're 30. I was a kid. I had no framework for what that meant, no way to understand that those words were a sentence. Not a prediction, but a preview of decades of pain that would shape every corner of my adult life.

By my early thirties, the chronic pain had become the central fact of my existence. My primary care physician started me on oxycodone (Percocet, 7.5mg/325mg, four times per day) around 2013. At the time, this felt like finally being heard. Like a solution. Like relief.

It was none of those things.

Eight Years in the Machine

Over the next eight-plus years, I underwent approximately 50 spinal procedures. Epidurals. Nerve blocks. Injections. Manipulations. Each one a temporary band-aid on a structural problem that no injection was going to fix. I had one spinal surgery (then t-boned just 2 weeks after surgery). And through all of it, the Percocet kept flowing.

Before my eventual spinal fusion, I was prescribed 19 medications per day plus a weekly injectable medication for diabetes. Nearly twenty... a pharmaceutical cocktail that my doctors had assembled piece by piece, each new prescription often written to manage a side effect of the last. This is the medical industrial complex at its most efficient and its most devastating: not healing a patient, but managing symptoms indefinitely while the underlying condition slowly destroys him.

What did eight-plus years of opioid dependency actually do to me? It wrecked my gastrointestinal system. It flattened my mood and warped my personality in ways that were deeply unfair to the people around me, especially my wife, Karen. It kept me functional enough to work and miserable enough to dread waking up. I was alive on paper. I was not living.

The medical establishment had me exactly where it wanted me: dependent, compliant, and returning for more.

How COVID Changed Everything

During the COVID-19 pandemic, like a lot of people, I had time to think. And what I thought about, obsessively, was whether there was another way. Whether I could stop poisoning myself with opioids and actually get better. I had heard about medical cannabis. I had also grown up as a D.A.R.E. kid, fully indoctrinated in the idea that cannabis was a dangerous gateway drug that destroyed lives.

But I was already watching opioids destroy mine.

I drove to Chicago. I walked into a dispensary. I explained my situation to a budtender (my chronic pain, my spinal damage, my opioid dependency) and they helped me select gummies, RSO, and vape cartridges. I drove home to Batesville, Indiana, took my first dose, and waited.

My wife Karen (who had watched me suffer for years and was terrified of trading one dependency for another) was adamantly opposed. We lived in Indiana, where THC was illegal and we're both rule followers. She gave me one month to prove that this was better. I didn't need a month. After one week, it was undeniable.

The fog that opioids had draped over my entire existence began to lift. The pain was still there. It always will be; my spine is permanently altered. But it was manageable in a way it had never been on Percocet. I could think clearly. I could be present. I could be a husband again. Even Karen was so convinced we started looking for ways to move so my newfound medicine could be legal for me.

The Transformation

On September 30, 2022, I underwent a L4/L5 spinal fusion at the Mayfield Clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio. The surgery I had been told was coming since age 13 had finally arrived.

The results have been, by any objective measure, extraordinary.

Since switching to medical cannabis and completing my spinal fusion, I have lost nearly 100 pounds. My health has improved across virtually every measurable dimension. The weekly diabetic injection I had been taking for years? Gone. The 20-medication daily cocktail? Down to 4 prescription maintenance medications, some supplements for my AuDHD, and two over-the-counter Aleve, plus cannabis, when I can access it.

The Legal Nightmare

Here is where I need you (politicians, lawmakers, and advocates) to pay close attention.

I am a resident of Texas. We chose Texas as our domicile specifically because I was raised in Richardson, TX and the Texas Compassionate Use Program, which offered legal medical cannabis access to patients with qualifying conditions. I am a fulltime nomad. Karen and I sold our home in Indiana in 2021, moved into an RV, hit the road full-time in December 2022, and now live and travel across this country in our Northwood Arctic Fox (#BigFoxTravels). We established our legal domicile in Texas on January 1, 2024, through the Escapees Mail Service program out of Livingston.

The Compassionate Use Program I chose Texas for? It no longer meaningfully exists for patients like me. The medicine simply isn't accessible.

From the time we determined THC was the correct medicine for me until we hit the road, I had been an Ohio resident specifically because Ohio's medical cannabis program offered me legal access to the medicine that was giving me my life back. When we became Texas residents, I obtained a Texas medical cannabis license, which costs money to obtain and must be renewed annually. Money I no longer have, because we filed for bankruptcy in 2025, a direct consequence of economic devastation wrought by DOGE cuts and the Trump administration's tariff policies that gutted our financial footing.

So here is where I stand today: a Texas resident and verified chronic pain patient who cannot legally access his medicine in his home state, who cannot afford to renew the license that would allow him limited access, managing his severe spinal pain with two Aleve tablets twice a day.

When Karen and I travel north (and we are headed north tomorrow, March 4, 2026) we make sure to stop through Michigan so I can purchase my medicine legally at a dispensary. Organic 1g 510 vape carts and 1g RSO darts.

I will be turning 50 years old on the 25th day of March. I have severe combined ADHD and moderate Asperger's. I have a fused spine, a bankruptcy behind me, and nothing left to lose. If the federal government wants to arrest a chronically ill, neurodivergent man for transporting a plant across state lines because his home state won't give him access to the medicine that saved his life, then come arrest me. I will be the most cooperative, but also the most vocal, most inconvenient patient you have ever processed. Because I am done pretending that these laws are anything other than a cruelty inflicted on sick people for political sport.

If that makes me a martyr for medical cannabis reform, I will wear that badge with honor and without hesitation.

This is not a hypothetical policy problem. This is my life. Tonight. Tomorrow. Every day I have to choose between suffering and breaking a law that should not exist.

Let's Talk About Plants

Let's have the conversation nobody in Washington wants to have.

You can walk into any gas station in America and buy a pack of cigarettes and a beer or other alcohol. Cigarettes are a dried and cured plant (tobacco) and they kill nearly 500,000 Americans every year. No prescription required. No licensing. No annual renewal fee. Just hand over your ID and your money. Beer is malted grain. Wine is fermented fruit. Whiskey, vodka, tequila: all of it derived from fermented or distilled plants. Alcohol kills roughly 95,000 Americans annually and is the third leading cause of preventable death in this country. But pour it in a glass, call it a cocktail, and it's practically a social obligation.

Now tell me, honestly and with a straight face... how cannabis is different???

Not theoretically. Not philosophically. How is it different?

It's a plant. I ingest it or inhale it. It manages my pain, supports my lung health, and helps my neurodivergent brain function in a world it was never designed for. And under federal law, it is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, defined as having “no accepted medical use,” while cigarettes and alcohol are available at every truck stop in America.

That classification is not science. It is politics, greed, and a century of racism dressed up as public health policy.

Here's what six years of DAILY cannabis has actually done to my body:

I have been severely asthmatic since the age of 12 or 13. My own parents didn't believe me until I was hospitalized during a breathing emergency. For years, I managed it with daily steroidal inhalers and rescue inhalers, the kind you keep everywhere, because an asthma attack is genuinely terrifying.

I still get asthma attacks. My last one was in upstate New York in October 2025. I still carry rescue inhalers everywhere, one in my bag and one in the truck, because when an attack comes, there is no negotiating with it, and I will never be caught unprepared.

But here is what I have learned from six years of daily cannabis: the less I vape, the more likely I am to have an attack. That correlation is undeniable in my own body. My lungs are healthier today than they have been at any point in my adult life, not despite daily cannabis use, but because of it. I no longer rely on daily steroidal inhalers or routine rescue doses to manage baseline asthma. Cannabis changed that equation.

I know how insane that sounds. I was a D.A.R.E. kid. It violates everything every doctor, teacher, and parent figure ever told me about smoking anything. But it is a fact of my life.

But here's what changed my mind: a boss I truly respected mentioned casually that he occasionally smoked cannabis. I knew this man. I knew what he had built, what he had accomplished, who he was. He was not a cautionary tale. He was a high-functioning, successful, respected professional. And that single conversation cracked open a door in my mind that I had kept bolted shut for decades.

The pharmaceutical drugs I had been taking (a dozen of them daily, carrying me at 365+ lbs) clearly weren't working. So I asked myself the only question that mattered:

Here is what cannabis costs in the real world, since nobody in Congress seems to know:

A 1g RSO dart at LUME dispensaries across Michigan costs $20. That single dart gives me 3 to 9 doses (ingested via starch capsule) depending on my pain level that day. A 1g 510 vape cartridge (premium, all-cannabis, no fillers) runs between $7 and $23 depending on deals and location. Yes, cannabis goes on sale now. Because when you treat a plant like a product in a regulated market, the market actually works.

Compare that to the cost of opioids. Compare that to what Epidiolex (the newly FDA-approved, pharmaceutical-grade, cannabis-derived prescription drug) costs patients per month.

The federal government officially classifies cannabis as having “no accepted medical use” while simultaneously approving a prescription drug derived from cannabis, manufactured by a pharmaceutical company, patented and priced accordingly. Let that sink in for a moment! The DEA and FDA cannot hold both of those positions simultaneously and call it science. That is not policy. That is corruption with paperwork.

I have been using cannabis daily for six years. Not recreationally. Not casually. As the primary tool that allows me to live, move, breathe, think, and be present in my own life.

When does the hypocrisy stop?

Every American living with a chronic condition that is made more tolerable by cannabis should be allowed to use the medicine that works for them, without persecution, without the threat of arrest, without a politician's ignorance or a pharmaceutical lobby's greed standing between them and relief.

We are not criminals. We are patients. And we are done pretending otherwise.

A Plant, a Gun, and a Constitutional Double Standard

On March 2, 2026 (literally as I am writing this) the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States v. Hemani. The case centers on 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), a provision of the 1968 Gun Control Act that makes it a federal felony for any “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” to possess a firearm. Under this law, a verified medical cannabis patient who legally owns a firearm is committing a crime punishable by up to 15 years in federal prison.

Let that number sink in. Fifteen years. For a plant.

The Trump administration's Justice Department stood before the Supreme Court and argued that cannabis users (even those who use it only a few times a week) should be categorically disarmed. Their rationale? Cannabis is a Schedule I controlled substance, therefore users are dangerous by definition, and dangerous people shouldn't have guns. But an alcoholic can own a gun? Make that make sense.

I'd like to introduce them to Kris Harrison.

A Collin County grand jury declined to indict Kris Harrison. He has faced no criminal consequences in the state of Texas. A UK coroner, however, ruled Lucy's death an unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter, noting that the gun could only have fired the way it did if it was pointed directly at her.

A drunk father. A Glock. A dead daughter. No charges.

But the federal government wants to make sure that I (a verified chronic pain patient who uses cannabis to manage a fused spine, reduce asthma attacks, and function with AuDHD) cannot legally own a firearm.

This is not a policy nuance. This is obscene.

Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the government's lawyers during oral arguments: “What do we do with the fact that marijuana is sort of illegal and sort of isn't, and that the federal government itself is conflicted on this?”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was even more direct: “What is the government's evidence that using marijuana a couple of times a week makes someone dangerous?”

The government had no good answer. Because there isn't one.

Here is what the historical record actually shows: the Founding Fathers consumed THC and drank. Hard. John Adams drank hard cider daily. James Madison drank whiskey. The entire founding generation consumed alcohol at rates that would raise eyebrows today, and not one of them was disarmed for it. Justice Gorsuch made this point explicitly during arguments, noting that by the government's logic, half the founding generation could have been stripped of their gun rights.

A man who drinks heavily and then handles a firearm (like Kris Harrison did in Prosper, Texas) faces no federal prohibition on gun ownership. But a medical cannabis patient who uses RSO to sleep, manages spinal pain with a vape cartridge, and hasn't been impaired in public in six years of daily use is, under federal law, a prohibited person.

I believe in the Second Amendment. I also believe in common sense. Those two things are not incompatible, unless you're the federal government.

I know this personally. Not abstractly. Not theoretically.

When I transitioned from Indiana residency to Ohio residency, I made a deliberate decision: I voluntarily surrendered my Indiana Concealed Carry Weapon permit when I became an Ohio resident in order to legally obtain my Ohio medical cannabis card. The law forced me to choose. I chose my medicine, because my medicine was giving me my life back, and a CCW was not.

No alcohol drinker in America has ever been asked to make that choice. No tobacco user. No one who takes legally prescribed opioids has been categorically prohibited from firearm ownership the way cannabis patients are.

I also made another decision, more recently and more personally: I sold my handguns. I owned a 9mm and other handguns that had sat unused for years. But more than that, I chose to remove them from my life because I had previously suffered from suicidal ideation. That is not easy to write. It is the truth. And while there were many contributing factors, my chronic pain played a huge part in my depression and my inability to see just how bad things had gotten.

My wife Karen recognized how serious things had become before I fully did. She had me admitted to Beckett Springs, an inpatient behavioral health facility in West Chester, Ohio. It was an ordeal to say the least, the kind of experience that strips you down to the studs and forces you to confront everything you have been avoiding. It was followed by months of outpatient work before I was released back to my life.

I am alive because Karen acted. I am standing here, writing this letter, because she refused to let me disappear quietly.

The decision to sell my guns after all of that wasn't coerced by law. It was my own, grounded in self-knowledge and hard-won clarity about what I need to keep myself safe and healthy. I own that decision. I stand by it completely.

Karen still owns her handguns, which she keeps for our protection as we travel full-time across this country and I carry a Byrna XL kinetic launcher (a non-lethal personal security device) for protection on the road. I am not defenseless. I am not anti-gun. I'm a big enough man to admit that my wife is better equipped to manage a firearm than I am... and a better shot, if I'm being totally honest! I am a man who made informed choices about what responsible ownership looks like for his specific life.

What I am against (and will always be against) is a government that strips constitutional rights from sick people based on the plant they use to manage their pain, while leaving fully loaded the hands of drunk men who shoot their daughters in Texas.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on United States v. Hemani by June 2026. If the court strikes down or narrows the categorical ban, it will be a victory for millions of cannabis patients across this country who have been quietly living as second-class citizens, unable to exercise a constitutional right that every bourbon drinker takes for granted.

I'll be watching. And I'll be writing about it.

Because this, too, is my life. And I am done being quiet about it.

The Hypocrisy That Makes Me Furious

I was raised to believe that cannabis was dangerous. The D.A.R.E. program told me so. My school told me so. The government told me so. It was all a lie.

Not a well-intentioned mistake. Not an outdated understanding. A politically convenient lie that served the interests of pharmaceutical companies, alcohol producers, tobacco corporations, and the politicians who take their money, while doing nothing to serve patients like me.

You can walk into any gas station in America and buy cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Two products derived from a plant. Products that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year through documented, well-understood mechanisms of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and addiction. You can walk into a bar and drink yourself to death on alcohol (another plant-derived substance) and society will call it a personal choice.

But the cannabis plant (which has helped me lose 100 pounds, come off opioids, eliminate a diabetes medication, reduce my asthma severity, and reclaim my quality of life... oh, and be a more pleasant human!) remains federally classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, defined as having “no currently accepted medical use.” A classification that is, at this point, not just wrong but actively dangerous to patients.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and politicians like him play games with patients' lives for political theater. While they posture and pontificate about “protecting” their constituents, actual patients (verified, licensed, trying to manage real conditions through legal channels) are left to suffer.

Cannabis is a plant. I am asking for my right to use a plant to manage my pain. I am not asking for permission to use opioids that destroyed my body over eight years. I am not asking to smoke cigarettes. I am not asking to drink alcohol. I am asking for access to a naturally occurring plant that has given me my life back.

What I Want You to Do

To every senator, every congressman, every state legislator, every local official who has ever cast a vote on drug policy:

I want you to understand what it costs to navigate the patchwork of cannabis laws across this country as a patient who genuinely needs this medicine. I want you to sit with the image of a man crying, not from pain, but from the relief of finally getting access to his medicine after days of suffering. I want you to think about the thousands of patients like me who don't have a Karen, who don't have a travel trailer, who don't have the ability to reach the states where their medicine is legal.

I want you to ask yourself what we are actually protecting when we keep cannabis illegal or barely accessible. Not public health: the opioids that nearly killed me were all perfectly legal. Not public safety: the data does not support that narrative. We are protecting industries and political donors. We are performing a moral theater that kills and diminishes actual people.

Here is what I am asking for:

• Federal descheduling or rescheduling of cannabis to reflect the actual scientific and clinical evidence of its medical value
• Interstate reciprocity for medical cannabis patients: if you hold a valid medical cannabis card, it should be recognized across state lines, the same way a driver's license is
• Cost protections for medical cannabis licenses: patients in financial hardship should not be priced out of legal access to their medicine
• Protection from prosecution for patients who travel between states to access medicine that is legal where they obtain it

And if you are a politician, a journalist, a media organization, or a cannabis advocacy group who wants to hear more: I am right here. My story did not end when I got better. It continues every day that I have to fight to access the medicine that made me better.

The Person Behind This Letter

I am Casey Michael Cannady. I will turn 50 years old this month (March 2026). I am a husband, a nomad, a cybersecurity professional, a tech veteran, and a chronic pain patient who spent over a decade being processed through the medical industrial complex (50 procedures, one surgery, a spinal fusion, 20 medications per day) and came out the other side because of my wife Karen's love, a plant, and my own refusal to accept that suffering was the only option.

I am also a late-in-life AuDHD patient (severe combined ADHD and moderate Asperger's). I was IQ tested at eight years old, flagged as highly intelligent, and then left undiagnosed and untreated for decades because my abusive father refused to pursue further evaluation. My younger brother got his ADD diagnosis. I didn't. I finally paid out of pocket for the travel that was required to get my ADHD diagnosis in December 2024, at 48 years old. That's right, I couldn't even find a doctor to diagnose me because I had aged out of the typical diagnosis timeline. My Asperger's diagnosis remains incomplete because I lost my healthcare. Another system, another gatekeeping, another thing I was not allowed to have. I will write more about that journey separately. It deserves its own letter. But I mention it here because it is part of who I am, part of why navigating these broken systems has been so relentlessly exhausting, and part of why I have absolutely nothing left to lose by telling the truth loudly.

I am alive today because Karen nursed me back to health. I am functional today because of medical cannabis. And I am writing this letter today because I am done being quiet about a system that is failing patients like me for reasons that have nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with politics and money.

If you want to talk, and I genuinely mean this, whether you are a senator, a reporter, a documentary filmmaker, or a cannabis company that wants to amplify patient stories, reach out to me directly. Find me on social media using the “Connect with Casey” section that follows.

I will answer. I have nothing to hide and everything to say.

I am almost 50 years old, and I have spent too many of those years silent while a broken system decided what medicine I was allowed to use. That ends now. The prohibition ends when enough of us refuse to comply with it. Consider this my refusal, signed, dated, and published for anyone who wants to find it.

Casey Michael Cannady is a fulltime nomadic traveler, cybersecurity professional, and chronic pain patient advocate. He and his wife Karen travel the United States full-time and document their journey at Nomad Black Book. You can find Casey at caseycannady.com and across social media.

Connect with Casey

Have a story, a question, or want Casey to write about a specific topic? DM me and tell me which story you want next.

Casey writes about chronic pain, medical cannabis, nomadic life, cybersecurity, and navigating the world as a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult. New posts drop on my professional website.