Julie Durrans says she lost everything when her health unravelled and she was prescribed an abundance of opioids at the age of 40. She shares how cannabis set her on the path towards wellness – and why she launched a cannabis club during lockdown.
Aged 40, Julie Durrans had a physically active life. She ran a successful travel agency, juggling jetting off across the globe with parenting two teenage children and looking after her allotment.
With her children soon to fly the nest she was looking forward to more trips abroad, when as she describes it, she ‘ran into a brick wall’ and her health ‘cascaded’.
“Everything just crashed at menopause time for me. I think I burned out because I was working too hard,” says Julie.
“Doctors couldn’t work out what was wrong. They just labelled me with fibromyalgia and discounted me. They refused to give me a rheumatology appointment or any of the diagnostic tests I was asking for, so I went private and was eventually diagnosed with Ehlers-danlos syndrome (EDS).”
Julie saw one of the leading experts in the field who prescribed her the opioid-based painkiller, gabapentin.
“I was on that medication for about seven years and it turned me into a zombie. It led to me losing my business,” she says.
“It was really hard to know what were side effects of the medication and what were the symptoms of the condition. And then more and more medicines were prescribed. I gained so much weight, but the doctors wouldn’t accept that it was the medication that was doing it to me.”
“Cannabis became my specialist subject”
Julie had stopped smoking cannabis in her 20s, but occasionally she would share a joint while catching up with a close friend. One night after consuming at her friend’s house she noticed the pain had subsided.
“I didn’t hurt anymore,” she says.
“At this point I’d had to sell my business and give up my allotment, all my kids had left home. I had lost everything and my mental health crashed. I started to seriously investigate the medicinal benefits of cannabis and found that it really worked for me.”
Julie continues: “Cannabis became my specialist subject. I learned all about the research [behind it] and looked into strains and different cultivars. I found out about cannabis clubs and got access to this whole other world that I didn’t know existed.
“This was before the legalisation [of medical cannabis in 2018], so as patients we had to do it ourselves. Through the clubs I got to know so many different producers and home growers. It became very obvious early on that the only way to get regular access to the cultivars that worked for me was to grow them.”
Building a community of cannabis patients
The Tiny Cannabis Club, which is run by Julie and friend Tim Devonshire, came about when the Covid-19 lockdown hit in 2020. Julie and Tim, who had originally met at another club, held regular Zoom meetings attended by cannabis patients, many of whom were shielding due to their health conditions.
“We started to support each other with so many things, from housing problems and access to care, to helping people make their own medicines,” says Julie.
“I was the first amongst us to get a prescription and it set a chain of events in motion. My health was at its worst at that point, I was at rock bottom. I could barely walk and my legs were collapsing underneath me. I had no confidence to go out and just felt so unwell all the time.”
Julie was initially prescribed cannabis for chronic pain, but she says the relief it has given her from anxiety-related symptoms has been huge.
“The thing that I found, almost straight away, was the reduction in anxiety that being legal gave me,” she admits
“To be honest, most of the improvement to my health since then has been because of anxiety reduction.”
The Tiny Cannabis Club has become a community for patients, many of whom approach Julie looking for impartial advice about how to access a prescription and navigate day-to-day life as a legal patient.
“What I like about the club is that it’s not about making money off patients or selling products to them,” she says.
“It’s purely a social space. We’re not affiliated to any organisations, we’re just a group of patients who are all with different clinics and who have had both good and bad experiences [of the system]. We just want to be frank and open about it.”
While Julie has been able to benefit from a private prescription (currently the only way to access medicinal cannabis legally in the UK) she recognises that it is not an option for everyone and would like to see cannabis decriminalised to permit people to grow their own medicine.
She adds: “I’m privileged in that I can afford to pay, but I’ve got friends who can’t and who really need the protection that a prescription gives them. It’s not fair that I’m legal and they’re not.”
Having a prescription for cannabis has also given Julie the confidence to advocate for herself with healthcare professionals and she believes it has resulted in her being taken more seriously.
Through private healthcare she was referred to an orthopaedic surgeon, a weight specialist and began seeing a pilates coach regularly. A combination of this, alongside diet and nutrition changes saw her lose six stone. Currently the only pharmaceuticals she takes are HRT and a low dose of medication for a recent diagnosis of ADHD.
Helping others access an alternative
Julie says she doesn’t know what the future would have held if she hadn’t been able to access cannabis.
“Without cannabis, the only option would have been to try more and more medications, because you get to a point where you just can’t cope with the pain. Cannabis gave me an alternative and it set me on a pathway to lots of other alternatives that now make up my main medical care,” she says.
“I know that I’ve got a future now and, for the first time in my adult life, I’m not depressed.”
For Julie, helping others to access this alternative is one of the main drivers behind her work with the Tiny Cannabis Club. That, and tackling the stigma that still comes with cannabis, particularly among medical professionals.
“I’ve had mixed responses from health professionals. Some of them have been really supportive and have even gone onto train in cannabis prescribing,” she says.
“Every time you educate somebody about it they’re hopefully going to be less judgemental the next time they smell a vape or see somebody consuming.”
Julie adds: “I just want to get it out there that there is an alternative. I lost everything when I lost my life as it was then. Now, I think it’s led me to something much better, but I don’t want other people to have to go through that.”
Find out more at www.tinycannabisclub.com
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