Please allow me to introduce myself: my name is Allison Ranieri, and I am a medical cannabis patient and business owner in the state of Ohio. I am currently using medical cannabis to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) due to a traumatic event that happened to me in adulthood. However, my road to this diagnosis has also not been an easy one. Allow me to explain.
Before receiving my diagnosis of PTSD in 2018, I had been prescribed countless pharmaceutical antidepressants – with little to no effect on my often debilitating symptoms. Finally, my psychiatrist at the time reluctantly decided to prescribe an anti-anxiety medicine of the benzodiazepine class. While this medication helped take the edge off my anxiety, an adverse side was drowsiness, something I found extremely difficult to just “work through.”
I felt like I still had work to do. I knew that the anti-depressant I was taking was only a part of the puzzle. The anti-anxiety medicine was not working for me as effectively as I would’ve liked, and I still dealt with restless, agitated sleep (around that same time, I even began to get treated for restless legs syndrome, since my sleep was so disrupted by my body’s own inability to quiet down). Also around this same time, I began seeing a new counselor who used Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) techniques to address the trauma roots of my anxiety. Enter my PSTD diagnosis.
It took some tough, mindful work with this counselor, but eventually, in the fall of 2018, she ended our session with a diagnosis of PTSD. It was earth shattering. I felt like I could finally put a name to my own mental health journey (and oftentimes burden!), and I researched ways I could treat it. Clearly the pharmaceutical route was not fully working. I remember seeing signs around Cincinnati at that time for medical marijuana doctors, and my interest was piqued. Enter medical cannabis.
Several weeks later, armed with a recommendation letter stating my diagnosis, I showed up to my appointment to meet with a medical cannabis doctor. The whole process from beginning to end could not have been easier, and my complete apprehension at the experience dissipated when I met Dr. Thress and explained my symptoms – there was suddenly a level of understanding of everything I had been going through that I rarely felt with other doctors.
Fast forward to January of 2019, and I found myself making the almost four hour commute in the snow from my home in Cincinnati to Canton, Ohio to visit the closest dispensary to me – The Botanist – to purchase a product I knew very little about. To put it bluntly, cannabis flower was something I had smoked during college that had made me paranoid. Despite the feeling of warmth and understanding I felt months prior in Dr. Thress’s Cincinnati office, when I got to Canton, I felt overwhelmed and unsure of the gamble I had entered into in pursuit of a relatively symptom-free lifestyle. The closest dispensary was over three and a half hours away, and I was choosing a treatment option that was not even slightly covered by my insurance.
The drive to Canton was neither desirable nor practical for me, so before the first dispensary in the Cincinnati area, About Wellness, opened in May, I made a handful of trips to a dispensary in Columbus to access medical cannabis. There are now four dispensaries in the Cincinnati area that are practical for me to visit. It should go without saying that access to medicine is, of course, a very fundamental component of its effectiveness.
In the past year, I can safely say that I have learned to become more in tune with my body. The Restless Legs Syndrome that I had previously been diagnosed with by my trusted Primary Care Physician (PCP) has become, through my treatment with cannabis, a thing of the past. I can sleep more soundly through the night without waking up with the sudden physical urge to want to run laps around my house.
In addition to Restless Legs Syndrome, I also address my physical symptoms with cannabis for Plantar Fasciitis and untreated childhood scoliosis, as well as hip misalignments.
I feel confident that I have a team around me that is helping me make informd, educated, and positive decisions for my own care and wellbeing. Most recently, in fact, I have been delighted to add a Registered Nurse with over 30 years of experience in the hospital care system in Ohio to my team of supporters. However: It is not lost on me that I am the exception, not the norm in terms of Ohio patients having access to a supportive network of encouraging folks who reinforce their use of cannabis as a positive, powerful holistic tool.
It has also taken me about a year to finally feel generally comfortable knowing what all of the items on the dispensary menu are and how to use them. A lot of this research I have had to do myself, through hours on message boards and educational sites like Leafly, Weedmaps, and even Wikipedia. And yet, I still find extremely useful information missing from the program, from the dispensaries, and from the products themselves.
Terpenes, for instance, are organic compounds produced by many plants, including cannabis. Terpenes in nature are designed to protect plants. These naturally occurring compounds can have a range of effects from pain relief to anti-inflammatory properties, to aid in respiratory functions. However, there is little to no explanation of terpenes at the dispensaries I’ve visited, with some of them even restricting their employees from educating patients on terpenes altogether. I don’t see across-the-board packing requirements for terpene contents on Ohio packaging either. So for patients who are using larger doses of cannabis throughout the day to treat symptoms, the potential for incredibly augmented and more finely honed care is lost without terpene information.
Another incredibly powerful roadblock that I have found difficult to navigate in the Ohio system is the lack of information regarding safe and affordable ways to consume cannabis. We are told that arguably the easiest and one of the most effective ways to consume cannabis, combustion, is illegal in Ohio. Non-combustion options are limited and cost-prohibitive to patients. These two factors are highly alienating and ostracizing to the average Ohio consumer. Again, I feel quite blessed to have grown up in a generation that has empowered me with the skills to obtain this information. But I know it is not as readily available for all Ohioans.
Prices are a huge roadblock for myself and many other Ohio medical cannabis patients I have spoken to. As someone whose net income hovers around the $20,000 mark per year, it is grossly cost prohibitive for me to medicate the way my body tells me I need to with cannabis. A one-day supply of cannabis concentrates, ranging anywhere from .5-1 gram, can cost anywhere from 50 to 100 dollars. When I am medicating to live a symptom-free day, I consume a whole day’s supply of cannabis concentrates. At its most affordable, I would still pay at least 50 dollars a day out of my own pocket to fully treat my symptoms. I think it is enough to say that almost 1,500 dollars a month on cannabis is not an option for most people – including your average patient.
Overall? I feel that there have been some great strides of improvement in the Ohio medical marijuana program in the last year, and lest I forget to mention how grateful I am that this even exists as a treatment option. But I know it has a long way to go.
At the end of the day, the way I see it is this: Any program instituted by the state should always contain a simple mission, one most recently introduced to the world by the likes of Fred Rogers – appealing to the “least common denominator” in any room full of people. (For instance, as a business owner with roots in compassionate hemp care, my goal moving forward with anything I do is to make sure my own grandmother would’ve felt comfortable using my products and services). If we, as a society, always choose this as our mission, we will never leave anyone behind. As it stands, I’m afraid the Ohio medical cannabis control program leaves quite a few folks in the dust.
My work speaks for itself – I am Ohio’s cannabis illustrator – and I have branded myself as such because it is a combination of two pieces of value I know I can bring to the world. By serving clients and helping them solve problems in the Midwest since September of 2019, I have tapped into a unique cross-section of understanding as now both a patient as well as a potential force for positive change in the outcome of this program.
Something I’ve learned, with my year or so of knowledge with the Ohio medical cannabis control program, combined with almost a decade of customer service experience in an unrelated medical profession: trust is paramount. And as a patient, I can confidently say that trust is paramount to feeling seen, heard, and listened to in a medical setting.
Currently, I trust several things when I go to my local dispensaries: I trust that I will be sure to leave with mostly very dry flower product(s). I trust that I will be sure to leave feeling wholly uneducated (nine out of ten times) on the product(s) I just purchased. I trust that I will have my selection incredibly limited by price. I trust that from the time I walk in to the time I walk out of the doors of an Ohio dispensary, I will feel primarily seen by the everyone involved in that transaction as just another number jotted in the bank ledger.
I don’t know if I can stress this enough: it is incredibly hard to recover trust once you’ve lost it. Trust is earned through time and compassion, not bought with an overabundance of glossy, empty fliers in the waiting lobby of a dispensary. The Ohio medical cannabis program is in desperate need of nurses. As a patient, I am imploring you to consider training and implementing compassionate nursing staff to work both hands on with patients and at a higher level of operation to ensure the needs of the patients are always met first.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Allison Ranieri
Business Owner and Freelance Cannabis Illustrator
Cincinnati, Ohio
The Canna Artist 