If you’re not a medical marijuana patient, here’s something you probably don’t know: Once a patient gets a prescription from their doctor, they’re basically on their own.
Unlike for other medicines, where the physician’s note matches a bottle on the pharmacist’s shelf, the cannabis script, for legal reasons, is more of a recommendation and is wide open to interpretation. It’s up to the patient to decide by themselves — or with the help of a budtender at a dispensary, who may be knowledgeable about cannabis in general but not about its medicinal properties — what kind of pot to buy, how to ingest it, at what concentration, and so on. It can be confusing, overwhelming, and even dangerous.
That was the experience of Santa Barbara photographer A. Arthur Fisher when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis five years ago. Fisher had smoked weed in college, so thought he knew what he was doing. But after six months of experimenting with flowers, edibles, and tinctures, he was no closer to finding what worked best for him and his disease.