Burning the Bush for Sickle Cell

[boulder]

Burning the Bush for Sickle Cell

 

by Peter Gorman

 

For nearly 20 years, South Central L.A.’s Sister Somayah Kambui, a former member of both the US Air Force and the Black Panther Party, has been trying to educate the public about sickle-cell anemia. Not just the disease, but how smoking pot can alleviate the pain it causes and how eating hempseed oil can help alleviate its symptoms.

 

Sickle-cell anemia, an inherited red-blood-cell disorder, affects at least 75,000 Americans, and an estimated 2 million more carry the gene for it. However, it rarely affects anyone without African ancestry, and has remained largely unknown to most of the US public.

 

The disease causes normal, donut-shaped red blood cells to change their shape into something like sickles, or paisleys, when their oxygen is depleted. Those sickle-shaped cells catch on one another at joints and in organ tissue, causing unbearably painful capillary blockages and preventing oxygen delivery to vital organs. Those blockages can produce severe joint swelling, with debilitating pain that can last for weeks. In extreme cases, it can result in blindness, stunted growth, severe infections, and even stroke. Unfortunately, there is no cure, so medical science simply seeks to eliminate the pain. In many cases the pain reliever provided is oral-dose morphine.

 

“You know those old men and women you see sitting on the stoop in poor black neighborhoods looking like junkies?” Sister Somayah asks this reporter. “Well, they are junkies. US government morphine junkies.”

 

Instead of morphine, Sister Somayah has been trying to educate the public to the pain- alleviating and non-addictive qualities of cannabis in sickle-cell treatment. “Not only is cannabis a vasodilator—which opens up your blood vessels and allows those cells to become unblocked—but it is a fantastic analgesic as well, reducing pain to a bearable level.”

 

Even more important, she says, is the use of cannabis and hempseed oil as dietary supplements to keep sickle-cell sufferers’ red-blood-cell counts high. “The seeds and oil are a major part of the healing of sickle cell, because of the nutrients they contain and globin they produce. The essential fatty acids in hemp oil are vital to the health of someone with sickle cell. When divers get the bends, they have sickle cells. All you need to do is reoxygenate the blood, and the sickle cell returns to its normal configuration.”

 

Unfortunately, despite living in California and being a legitimate medical-marijuana user, Sister Somayah has been busted for cannabis five times since the passage of Proposition 215. Twice in 2001 her backyard herb garden—which has never been vandalized by anyone but the authorities—was uprooted and seized, and this past September, just before harvest time, it was seized again. The bust in the spring of 2001 resulted in 15 charges leveled against her, from which she was recently exonerated on all counts. The most recent bust left her without either cannabis or hemp oil—which she presses herself—resulting in a sickle- cell flareup that put her in the hospital and on morphine for nearly two weeks. “But no charges were filed. My attorney told me that when the L.A. narcotics officers asked the prosecutor to charge me, he said that unless the officers had proof that I was selling marijuana out my front door, to just leave me alone.”

 

Asked if she thinks they will, she says she doesn’t know. “The local police know I can grow and possess marijuana, and that when I share it is with other patients who are part of the Crescent Alliance Self Help for Sickle Cell.” The Crescent Alliance is a group Somayah started years ago. “I’ve been trying to reach patients about this for 20 years, and still millions don’t know about it,” she says sadly. “You’ve got kids so sick they’re having to remove major organs because of sickle cell and the oxygen depletion that results, and we could get it all taken care of it only the government would accept cannabis and hemp oil and publicize the issue and the cure.”

 

Asked what she would do if a benefactor came along to help her cause, she doesn’t hesitate. “I dream of having a sickle-cell self-help center where we could show patients how to eat, how take control of their lives and live pain-free. We’ve learned how to mix watercress, spearmint leaves, cannabis leaves, and a few other things and oxygenate the blood. We don’t have to suffer.”

 

For more on the Crescent Alliance, see Sister Somayah’s Website at geocities.com/ sistersomayah. For additional information on sickle-cell disorders, see the Sickle Cell Information Center at SCInfo.org