Julie has had MS since 1986 when she was a communications major at Illinois State University in Normal, 133 miles from Chicago, and a girl guitarist in an alternative rock band, which went by various names but ended up as Zero Balance. Home for spring break to attend her mother’s second wedding, she first noticed her foot dragging in the supermarket parking lot. Before she had time to worry about the foot, it cleared up. She went back to school.

Two years later, Julie relapsed with totally different symptoms. Now she couldn’t see. The disease “hit her optic nerve.” There was no cure. She was told to go home and rest. Instead, she tried to live her life. She got a job at Design Lab Chicago, a theatrical lighting firm, and then went to Europe for a month. She backpacked, limping through France and Switzerland. She stayed with her grandfather’s sister in Germany in his 500-year-old house. She went to Amsterdam, she says, although she does not elaborate on the obvious—the legality of marijuana in Holland. From that time until 2004, she tried maybe forty different treatments—acupuncture, hydrotherapy, Zanaflex, Valium, BETASERON. She was “debilitated, lethargic, one big ball of symptoms.” She walked with a cane, and then two canes, and then a walker. (Now she uses her walker indoors and outdoors a power scooter or a wheelchair.)

Julie was scared. She had many different symptoms, including facial paralysis. She moved back to Chicago. She wanted to be near her family and moved into a small apartment on the second floor, above her grandmother’s, in Beverly, on Chicago’s South Side.

Twenty-six years later, Julie is tired. No one understands her dedication to cannabis, not even her mother, who told her she understands that it is her only medicine but that she hopes Julie keeps an open mind. What about Big Pharma, why don’t they keep an open mind? Julie asked.

She is tired of reading about drugs that suppress symptoms. She wishes for a drug that will eliminate symptoms. Most of the new ones are focused on newly diagnosed people, she complains. And when you read the side effects, when you get down to risk of death, “Let’s eliminate that one right off the bat,” she jokes. She is often joking.

These days when Julie wants to leave the apartment, which she does no more than ten times a month, she has to call the fire department. She could have built a ramp but ultimately decided against it. She now lives on the first floor in a typical one-bedroom on the northside, a little down at the heels, probably built in the 1930s, with a fake fireplace. There is a large massage table folded up in its cover by one wall and boxes piled by the window. She has been in this apartment for over twenty years. So, when she recently donated, gave away, and threw out around eighty percent of her possessions, it was a big job.

Now, every day Julie spends around four or five hours working on leaving town, to move to Berkeley or Oakland. It’s hard to find an accessible, affordable apartment. She was going to go with a friend but that person got ill. She’s exploring hiring a personal assistant. She’s on a waiting list for six or eight apartments.

“I’m not completely clear on my exit strategy. No one has responded to me. Is anyone interested that I’m giving my body to cannabinoid science?”

When I ask about cannabinoid, Julie is happy to explain: “Cannabinoid science is not marijuana. It’s a common mistake. Anyone who uses the word marijuana, they are living under Prohibition to demonize this plant. I use the words cannabis and cannabinoid medicine. I am studying the science. This is what the plant is called; there are cannabinoids; we have a cannabinoid system in our bodies, even if you do not imbibe in the cannabis system. I’ve written a book, it took me five years to research: The Cannabis Papers: a citizen’s guide to cannabinoids. It’s on Amazon and on lulu.com. It’s a signaling system, it regulates all the other systems of your body. We are deficient in this system.”

From 2004 until 2011, when Julie worked to advocate legislation allowing medical marijuana in Illinois—today seventeen states have these laws but Illinois still isn’t one of them—she would drive the several hours to Springfield about once a month. Then, in July 2010, she was invited to speak at the Science and Compassionate Care Seminar at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Also invited were Dr. William L. Courtney and his wife Kristen Peskuski, who had managed to control lupus and many other ailments by juicing cannabinoids. Kristen talked about how cannabinoids can best be absorbed into the body by juicing, putting maybe ten or fifteen fresh palm-sized leaves in a blender with some apples or some carrots, and drinking the mixture like a smoothie, daily. “The focus is always on smoking the biggest, grandest bud; there’s gotta be a paradigm shift, because the juicing is what cures you.”

And juicing was best accomplished in California.

Julie’s tiny, old-fashioned Chicago kitchen doubles as her war room and she keeps manila folders full of clippings in piles. She hands me a printout of a multicolored pie chart showing the amount of CBD (cannabidiol)—one of the compounds in the cannabis plant—and the amount of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which she says is less able to heal disease. On the chart, dozens of arrows point outward, each representing its own compound with its own healing properties.

Julie started taking cannabis in 2004, when she had already been ill for nearly twenty years. She was so ill she was thinking of suicide. A lot of things contributed toward her decision to try using cannabis as a treatment for MS: she had smoked in college, and while researching online she read about a woman with glaucoma who used it. At the same time, she began talking to Illinois NORML (National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws).

Soon Julie began baking one-inch cube brownies and eating them three times a day. It helped with her symptoms and she thought, This is fantastic. She could speed around the living room doing twenty to thirty laps, exponentially increasing her energy level.

Each pan of brownies contained about half an ounce (roughly fourteen grams) of marijuana. According to Illinois law, possessing ten to thirty grams of pot is a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. Julie tried not to think about that. But cannabis helped so much that her most immediate response was gratitude. The sensation wasn’t like smoking where the effect goes to the brain. She was on an even keel all day long and it kept her numbness and tingling at bay so she could function well. Gradually, she weaned herself off pharmaceuticals and now she only takes Tylenol with codeine.

Julie began with a brownie mix, mostly Duncan Hines Double Fudge. She moved on to Ghirardelli brownie mix. She refined the recipe, sautéing what she genteelly calls “the plant material” in olive oil to release the benefits in it and to evenly distribute it. In other words, so she wouldn’t choke on a clump. She included many “add-ins,” such as walnuts and hemp seeds. More recently, though, she switched to what the NORML website calls Ginger Snap Surprise, which she buys already made, because she is too tired to bake.

Julie “takes” cannabis in a tincture of glycerine from an old brown glass bottle with an eyedropper, which goes right into her bloodstream. The tincture can also be made with flavored alcohol or with Everclear. There is also cannabis honey, the heat of which, stirred into tea, helps protect the compounds.

She likes dark chocolate and there is a box of chocolate almonds on the kitchen table. She takes her hemp juice, hemp oil. Sometimes she stops the cookies and brownies, like you would any medication. She is concerned about titration—in other words, how much medicine is good for her body.

Even back when she was “taking” brownies, Julie was sure that the changes she was going through were too profound to keep to herself. She began to speak about cannabis publicly and testified before the Illinois Senate, which, at that time, was in the first year of hearing a bill to legalize medical marijuana. Right away she wondered whether she should use her real name: She thought, Wow, do I say I’m Julie F. or Julie Anonymous? I’m talking about all my stuff and something that’s illegal. I can’t imagine sitting in a jail cell.