Pro Bono Journalism

Charles Piona, who is also called CJ Clark, woke up at five on the morning after Thanksgiving in a house donated to the church — from a mattress on the floor. The windowless bedroom contained his homemade art installations made out of toy bears, ragged clothes, and plastic flowers dangling from the ceiling and walls. The single bulb lit up a dim spot on the wall where he had written ”Love takes me Downtowns. I just need some touch.”

He checked his schedule, hoping today someone would visit – he stopped going out three months ago after he realized walking is too much for his aching feet. The world outside, which he tried hard to fit into, can’t feel his pain.

Before that, Piona kneeled down on the mattress, thanked God “for another day to play.” He walked around in the house, lay down again, and slept until seven, when Annie Cedrone, the donator of the house, made eggs and cheese with toast. Then he downed his Conner Blend coffee, smoked a Camel non-filtered cigarette, set his breakfast aside until ten or eleven.

He fed his six-year-companion, a cat named Kitty, and updated his dating advice blog.

Then he downed his first pill of ibuprofen.

He smokes marijuana to relieve both his physical and emotional pain that followed his 2000 fall from a building. He doesn’t usually talk about this. He only talked about it while he was stoned: In 2000, in San Diego, he fell while he was climbing up from the outside of a building to take a picture. He broke a lamp while descending, and smashed his head on the ground. After that, he was hit twice by cars in Boston. When he had to retell this, he was at the brink of a breakdown. His voice trembled and his face turned red. He worked hard to keep from losing his composure.

That fall left him with brain trauma, leg and back pain, and blindness in one eye.

Piona says smoking pot makes him feel better. The passage of Question 3 allowing medical marijuana in Massachusetts, now has Piona wondering if he will be able to use marijuana legally and at less cost.

Piona insists he will be assured a medical marijuana card.

“I talked to my doctor today,” he said. “In eight months or six, I’m going to get a marijuana card.” But no doctor would confirm that. Piona’s doctor, Arun Kukherjee of Adult Primary Care, refused to comment because of patient confidentiality laws.

Piona does not have cancer, glaucoma, AIDS, or any of the exact conditions listed in the medical marijuana law that goes into effect January 1. His chances rely on an open-ended phrase in the law that allows physicians to authorize a patient who “has a specific debilitating medical condition and would likely obtain a net benefit from the medical use of marijuana.”

Piona describes his feeling when he smokes marijuana. “I felt like, enlightened, spiritually connected, centralized, while all my senses, sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing are turned all the way up – the maximum pleasures.” He added, “It makes my mind detached from the pain.”

(Charles Piona reminisced about his first time smoking pot.)

Now he hankers for a joint. Piona self-medicates. To stretch his stash of pot, Piona mixes his remaining marijuana, with tobacco – to fill up space for a joint. Piona heard medical marijuana is less expensive and of higher quality, and the dispensaries never run out of storage, not like his dealers.

When a $960 check from Social Security disability insurance landed in his mailbox, Piona said he would call his dealer, who lives in Malden, or another dealer lives down the street in Brighton, to buy $20 worth of marijuana. Despite trying to save money, he has indulged himself the luxury of buying two joints every week. Sour Kush Diesel is his favorite, but he preferred to mix them up, as it’s “better than having the same kind of stone all the time”.

Piona smokes pot in addition to taking prescribed painkillers: Tramadol, Ibuprofen, and non-aspirin. He says he has to take the pill as soon as he felt a slight pain – “It is hard to beat it back down.”

But the painkillers only reduced his pains — they don’t take it away entirely.

Now he waddles to a corner of the kitchen to get his pill box. Under the slim lingering effect of the first pill, he was distracted by the souring feeling in his feet. So, he clenched his feet and used only the sides of them. He opened the box carefully, showing only the first level, where he keeps Tramadol, Ibuprofen, and non-aspirin, and hid the variety of vitamins staying in the bottom.

While expanding his art installations from his bedroom into the living room and kitchen, he usually takes the first painkiller whenever he feels pain, and postpones the second pill till one hour after, no matter how painful he feels. To kill the pain, he has to take pills as soon as he feels a slight ache, but he cautiously keeps to intervals of one hour to protect his liver. He also asks only for non-narcotic pills.

He swallowed the pill. The pill went into his stomach, digested – its chemicals took 20 minutes to be absorbed into the bloodstream. If it’s the beginning of the month when he still has 20 bucks at hand for two joints, he would feel different – the cannabis goes directly into his blood and flows into the whole body all at once. It fully affects his pain-sensation in the shortest amount of time, together with his senses of frustration, and anxiety.

Piona says a normal day to him was like “walking on the blades”, and he learned to “keep a good face on.”

He used to love strolling. He refused to go around in a wheelchair and saved up for three years for a pair of orthopedically designed boots. He bought it from Herb Maggio, for 285 bucks, and sprayed them with glittering silver paint.

One time while he was smoking marijuana, he laughed about himself lifting his shirt up and showing his belly to people in the hallway after he woke up from the coma. When he found himself struggling everyday with memory – he forgot his key when he walked to his car, and when he went back to the house, he forgot why he was there – he spends days after days studying mnemonics tricks in the library. He kept forgetting what he just said, and he went back to the same coherent eloquent speech, with almost the same wording, a sign of reciting.

Scientifically, this is how marijuana makes him feel “better.” As Piona took a hit from the joint, the volatile cannabinoids (chemicals) from the burning cannabis entered his bloodstream and permeated throughout his body including his brain, like a drop of ink dripped into water. The cannabinoid receptors, the most abundant receptors in his nervous system, bind with cannabinoids. Cannabinoids resemble the structure of the endocannabinoids which are natural molecules synthesized from arachidonic acid in the body. He sensed the physiological changes in his heart rate, digest system, and most strongly, the part of his brain associated with the awareness of pain and anxiety, his best detachment and relief. It is supposed to affect every part of our bodies, but some people are more sensitive in some ways.

“My brain was reset to zero. I felt biologically encoded survival instinct again. I had to learn how to be a person again, I had to go through childhood, but as an adult.” He said he took a journal every day to remember and played racketball to practice on his depth perception. The ball was a yellow blob in his right eye, and his left eye showed only blackness.

Piona recited these stories with a detachment of feeling as if the conversations have already come up multiple times. He is private and detached from his pains.

“He is always very positive,” Cedrone said. “He doesn’t complain.” Neither she nor Lo Gallucio, a girl he dated around 2001, ever heard Piona talking about how difficult it was to try to fit in again. Annie Cedrone, who gave the house to the church, and shared it with Piona after seeing him standing in a yard sale, evicted, has only heard about him mentioning his back and leg pains.

Around Thanksgiving, he sat at the table with Scott Last and Cedrone. While he was cutting a turkey, he reminisced proudly his hometown, Brockton, Bridgewater State University, where he audited, and Cape Cod Community College, where he attended. In high school, he read Timothy Leary’s works about marijuana and acid before he tried them. He talks fervently about his list of father figures, as he grew in the absence of his father, and joked about it very briefly. “Those David Copperfield crap.” His parents divorced when he was four and had other spouses and children respectively. His mother hasn’t replied to his calls lately. He planned to send her a toy giraffe as Christmas gift. On his left arm, he has a tattoo says “Love Mom.”

It takes him a while to talk about being reclusive. He said, “It’s been a lot of work. It took me 12 years to just finally say, you know what, I don’t need to fit in, like a 37-year-old anymore. I am just me. I did that try-to-fit-in thing for so long, and try to be like I was ‘suppose to be’, I say wait a minute, I am the only one who feels my pain, I am the only one who feels my joys. I’m gonna do life exactly how I want to, and enjoy it.”

“Charles is a lot smarter when he is high. He smiles a lot. His conversation becomes more intelligent,” said his friend, Scott Last.

Piona said he began smoking pot recreationally at age 16. He published an article about alternative sentencing of marijuana charges when he was at Cape Cod Community College. Next year, when Piona will be 38, he is hoping that his pot use becomes medically acceptable.”