Julie Falco’s breaking the law, and she doesn’t care who knows it. Every morning, Falco isn’t ashamed to say, she eats a small marijuana brownie to deal with the effects of multiple sclerosis.
Falco, who’s 39, uses a walker to get around her Ravenswood apartment. She uses a wheelchair when she goes out. There are nine steps up to her apartment, where she lives alone; it takes her about five minutes to climb them, using her arms to hoist her legs up each step. “Sometimes I take the steps two at a time,” she says. “I call it my cardio.”
One day in 1986, when she was 20 and a student at Illinois State University in Normal, Falco was walking across a Jewel parking lot and found it difficult to lift her left foot. “It just kind of dragged,” she says. She thought she might have pinched a nerve. A few days later, onstage at a club with her band New Position, she felt shaky and weak. At the end of their next gig, she had to be carried off the stage by her bandmates. “The whole left side of my body, not just my foot, was stiffening up,” she says. “My legs were tight, and my arm got stuck in one position. I was like, Whoa, what’s going on?”
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She was hospitalized in Normal, where she underwent a series of inconclusive tests. The doctor ordered a spinal tap, which was also inconclusive, but it suggested Falco might have multiple sclerosis.
She tried to get on with her life. She traveled around Europe for a month, then settled in Chicago, where she moved from job to job, doing customer-service and office work for a theatrical-lighting company, MCI, a music studio, and a company that restored old paintings. On the side she DJ’d at weddings and private parties.
But it had drawbacks. The smoke sometimes aggravated her headaches, so she started looking for another way to ingest it. She got the idea of baking the brownies from a Web site, and she experimented until she got the recipe right last February. She uses a packaged brownie mix (usually Duncan Hines Double Fudge) and follows the directions on the package, but with one variation: before she adds half a cup of oil to the mix, she simmers half an ounce of ground marijuana in the oil for about an hour. Then it all goes in the mix with the rest of the ingredients before baking.
Around the same time, Falco read an article in Conscious Choice about Brenda Kratovil, a glaucoma and MS patient from Waukegan who was arrested in 2001 for growing marijuana plants in her backyard. In court, Kratovil tried to use a medical-necessity defense. Her eye doctor testified that marijuana was a viable treatment for her. Her lawyer argued in pretrial hearings that marijuana was a better option for his client than a 19th eye surgery, or steroid-based eyedrops that caused a toxic reaction in her body. As there’s no legal exemption for medical marijuana users in Illinois, the defense wasn’t allowed, and Kratovil was convicted.
