Every morning when Viridiana Edwards wakes up, she says her body feels like a roll of aluminum foil crumpled up into a tight ball.
So she starts each morning with a series of stretches, and by rubbing a homemade body oil on her neck — one made with olive oil, chamomile and arnica flowers, and cannabidiol derived from hemp.
Edwards, like others who have advocated for measures to expand medical marijuana legalization in Texas in recent years, says cannabis is the only thing she’s found that’s successfully treated her symptoms without the harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals.
In 2015, Texas lawmakers passed the Compassionate Use Act, which allowed people with intractable epilepsy to use medical cannabis with extremely low levels of Tetrahydrocannabinol , the ingredient that causes a high, with a doctor’s prescription.
This spring, the Texas House passed House Bill 1535 to raise the cap on THC level in medicinal products from 0.5% to 5%, and expand the eligible conditions to include chronic pain and PTSD for the first time.
Her parents told her they didn’t have the money to pay for college, so she viewed the military as her way out of her hometown.
There’s an alarm that goes off, and in an English voice, the lady says, ‘rocket attack, rocket attack,’ and at that point you just dropped to the floor,” she says.
When Edwards returned to the United States almost a year later, her cycle of PTSD symptoms — anxiety and chronic pain — began.
She also took Botox for migraines, which required her to receive 42 injections between her neck, shoulders, cranium, and forehead on three different occasions.
Then in 2015, Edwards tried medical cannabis for the first time, while on vacation in California.
Since then, she’s advocated for expanded access to legal medical marijuana back home in Texas, and studied its impact on veterans while at graduate school at the University of Texas at El Paso and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
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