Medical Cannabis: A Right for Chronic Patients — Romanian Parliament, March 2023

I suppose I should partly repeat what I said earlier, at the press conference.

My story really begins in 2008, when I was diagnosed with the first of the several incurable illnesses I was later diagnosed with: Crohn's disease, an incurable autoimmune illness.

After I received the Crohn's diagnosis, I immediately started the treatments prescribed by doctors in Romania. For four and a half years I tried different treatments, without success. On the contrary, besides barely helping me at all, they caused serious side effects that worsened my overall health. Crohn's disease shows up as a gastrointestinal illness, it affects the gastrointestinal system and causes inflammation along the whole digestive tract, bleeding, internal haemorrhages, and it blocks the absorption of nutrients. I was down to 42 kilograms at my worst, at 1.70 metres tall.

The pain I went through day and night, 24 hours a day, was almost impossible to bear. I felt sick all the time, I vomited maybe 20 to 30 times a day. I had to use the toilet between 50 and 100 times a day. I don't think you can even imagine what it means to have to use the toilet 100 times a day. And to go through dreadful, terrible pain every single time. It felt as if someone was driving a knife into my abdomen and cutting me open.

The illness did not affect only me. Because I could no longer hold down a job, I practically became a burden on my family, on my wife and on my child, born in 2007, my daughter. Becoming a burden, I inevitably slid into chronic depression. For many years I had suicidal thoughts, because I was trapped in a nightmare that seemed impossible to escape.

Later I was also diagnosed with fibromyalgia. The doctor told me that, unfortunately, sometimes the two are diagnosed together and it is a kind of complication of Crohn's disease. I don't know how true that is, but fibromyalgia made things even more complicated. I live with chronic pain in almost my whole body, because of the fibromyalgia.

But all of this took a turn for the better for the first time in 2014, when someone close to me suggested I try cannabis for the first time and handed me a cannabis cigarette.

At first I refused; I did not use drugs, but as luck would have it, I eventually gave in and accepted. I inhaled, took two puffs from that cigarette, and I was shocked, pleasantly surprised to notice that all the symptoms I had almost constantly disappeared, as if by a miracle, within 30 seconds.

At the time I knew nothing about medical cannabis, but I came home, went online and started reading websites from the West. And I learned for the first time that in the West cannabis is not considered only a high-risk drug with very dangerous effects on the body, but a medicinal plant with incredible properties. I felt those properties first-hand over the following years, when I decided, despite the law that criminalised possession of cannabis, and so its use, to treat myself. Because I could not use cannabis without possessing it.

So the law criminalised me, a patient who, out of desperation, only wanted to find a solution, a treatment to keep my symptoms under control. Treating myself illegally with cannabis in Romania was a second nightmare, because I was terrified of being caught while trying to obtain the cannabis, or even of being reported by a neighbour because of the smell. During that time I had to hide it from all my friends and from my parents. I did not want to put pressure on them for nothing. I don't know how my parents would have lived, knowing that every day I risked being arrested. In 2015, after I had ended up completely broke, because I was spending money both on conventional treatments and on cannabis, and because I was no longer able to hold a job, I was no longer eligible for subsidised or free treatments.

At that time I was paying between 1,500 and 2,000 lei for conventional treatments, and at the same time roughly the same amount on cannabis.

I left for England with the last money we had, 400 euros, which I gave on the first day, as rent, to the friend I stayed with.

Arriving in the UK with no money, I could no longer get cannabis. Within two weeks I was in hospital in a very serious state, with a very severe perianal abscess, a result and a complication of Crohn's disease.

I had surgery, after which I was left with a fistula, which made my life much harder over the following years.

After a month, my wife managed to join me in England. We had to leave our child with my parents for a year, until we managed to get back on our feet somewhat. My wife worked, at first, 80 hours, then 100, and got up to 120 hours, so that she could support us in the UK. Fortunately, in 2018, after campaigns for the legalisation of medical cannabis, the UK Government decided to give chronically ill patients a helping hand and legalise cannabis.

It became legal in November 2018, and I have been prescribed medical cannabis since September 2019.

The effects of cannabis on me have been truly miraculous. It saved my life and has now given me the chance to rebuild it. I managed to go back to studying, I graduate from university this year, I will once again be an active member of society, of British society, because here I was not allowed more. And I ask you to consider everything I have told you and to think of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of chronic patients in Romania who would benefit from the same miraculous effects of medical cannabis.

Thank you! Apart from medical cannabis, what other treatment do you have?

Since 2019, when I started medical cannabis treatment, I have been able to stop every other treatment for my medical conditions. And the conditions are: Crohn's disease, fibromyalgia, generalised anxiety disorder, and autism, Asperger syndrome.

I have a question for you. Do you have a prescription, to show us how it is prescribed and what one of the products you take on prescription looks like? And tell us about your experience at Otopeni customs two days ago?

On the prescription for cannabis it says here: cannabis, 21% THC, which is the psychoactive substance, illegal in Romania, for which patients can be prosecuted. It contains less than 1% CBD.

The cannabis oil I use contains 12.5% THC and 25% CBD.

This product is the prescribed cannabis.

As you can see, it is dried cannabis flower. It is not a pill, it is not an extract. It is a dried cannabis flower. This flower is taken not by smoking, but with a special device. This is the device.

The device heats the flower and does not burn it; there is no combustion. So the cannabis vapour I inhale contains none of the harmful substances usually produced by combustion in smokers of cigarettes. Those harmful substances are not present when you take the treatment with this device.

The illness has flare-up periods. It is a chronic illness and it has flare-ups. What were your flare-up periods? How far apart?

You mean?

Basically, Crohn's disease came on suddenly for me. I was perfectly healthy until I was 20.

At the time I was working in a very stressful environment, which I understood is a trigger for the illness. And I simply started having frequent bowel movements, diarrhoea, feeling unwell, nausea, vomiting, which was not at all normal for me. Shortly after, I started losing blood in my intestine, because of severe inflammation, confirmed by colonoscopies, and indeed, the doctors said the level of inflammation was very severe. Many of them told me they had rarely seen anything like it.

How often were the flare-ups, I asked you?

How often? How often were the flare-ups? Basically... Terminal ileitis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis have acute periods and quiet periods. That is Crohn's disease. How often were they in your case? Believe me, I am a surgeon and I treat this.

I know, I know. In my case, the periods of remission, when the illness was not active, were very, very few. I simply had those remission periods for a short time, a month or two, after the doctor changed my conventional treatment. For example, I took steroids, Medrol, prednisolone, or I was given sulfasalazine, immunosuppressants. For two or three months the symptoms eased, but then it seems that, I don't know, perhaps my body, my digestive system, which was failing, somehow adapted to those treatments, and the symptoms did not just come back, they came back more severely than before the change of treatment.

For how long were the treatments concurrent? Until 2019. Since when?

Since 2008. No, alongside cannabis. Since 2014... Five years, until 2019.

Five years, until 2019.

Yes, many years.

Thank you.

And, as Mr Ungureanu said, it came to the airport: when I landed, I went to the customs officer, handed over my passport and said I had something to declare. He asked me what. He invited me to the customs office, where I had to declare it, and told me about a good friend of his with stage 4 cancer who, a few years ago, had to leave Romania, go to the Netherlands and be treated with THC cannabis, and he recovered from cancer.

Apparently, from what the customs officer told me, this friend decided to sell his property in Romania and move to the Netherlands for good. As I did myself, in fact: I have no property to sell, but I had to move to the UK for good. And in every conversation I have with my family about a possible return to Romania, my number one obstacle is always the health system. What will I do without cannabis if I come back?

Thank you!