After spending lots of green on treatments and medications that did little to help in her fight against advanced glaucoma and severe scleritis, Sasha Delano finally found some green that really helped her – pot.

Suffering for more than a decade with abnormally high pressure behind her left eye and a painful, potentially blinding case of necrotizing scleritis, Delano had tried everything, no fewer than two general practitioners and four eye specialists had suggested ibuprofen, antibiotics, eye drops, steroids (which caused significant weight gain, mood swings, and insomnia), and two prescription anti-inflammatory medications, which not only made her nauseated, but were also pulled from the market for evidence that they caused heart failure, ulcers, and rare skin disease in a number of users.

With the pain severely impacting her ability to work as a professional artist and denying her favorite pastime of reading classic English literature, Delano began to fall into despair, unsure of how to move forward with her life. One specialist suggested surgery for the glaucoma (not uncommon) and chemotherapy for the scleritis (a radical course of treatment to eradicate the disease).

“You’ve heard about being caught between a rock and a hard place,” says Delano, a Southern California native who now resides in Santa Cruz. “Whatever’s harder than a rock and worse than a hard place, that’s where I was. I could barely see. I was in terrible pain. Nothing was helping and no one knew what to do.”

Approaching total hopelessness, Delano saw a print advertisement for a medical doctor offering recommendations for medical marijuana, allowed in California under 1996’s Proposition 215 – the Compassionate Use Act – that was approved by 56 percent of voters. Delano made an appointment with the doctor who performed a full exam, offered her a recommendation and a list of local medical marijuana dispensaries. She chose one nearest to her home, obtained her registration for a nominal fee, and made her way to the dispensary. “They were patient and kind, and the treatment [smoked approximately once a week and ingested via food, such as cookies, brownies, candy, or granola, two to three times a week] worked immediately.”

Since the passage of Proposition 215, 15 other American states have voted to allow doctors to make medical marijuana recommendations to patients in need. The nation’s war on drugs has gotten exponentially murky in the two decades since 215 passed in California, with anti-pot advocates blaming the country’s educational, cultural, and economic decline on more permissive attitudes toward marijuana and other drugs, while pro-pot politicos cheer the treatment seriously ill Americans are finally receiving, while embracing the righteousness afforded by state laws that have propped open doors for progress, if only barely. Research, reports, statistics, and experts of equal credibility are available on both sides of the deeply polarizing issue.

At the forefront of expanding the green light for medical marijuana is Tommy Chong, who became the poster boy for the counterculture and recreational pot use in the 1970s thanks to the stoner-comedies “Up in Smoke” and “Nice Dreams,” which he wrote, directed, and starred in with his professional partner, Cheech Marin, and who served nine months in federal prison in 2003 after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute drug paraphernalia (mostly water pipes) online.

Chong, whose research on the subject is admittedly more empirical and subjective than laboratory-specific, believes pot’s medicinal value – beyond whatever doctors and experts say marijuana does or does not do or can or cannot do – is its power to relieve fear, a tremendous asset in battling serious illness. “The problem with most disease is that it has been built up in our minds so big that the minute you get, say, cancer, you know all the ways you’re going to suffer. That fear and certainty is ten thousand times worse than anything that’ll ever happen to you as a human being,” says the 73-year-old Chong. “Pot takes your mind away from that. That body needs laughter and release, and pot is good for that,” although he does concede that attempting algebra under the influence “may not be such a terrific idea.”

Such playful idealism is only a minor shade of Chong’s concerns and interests in the ongoing battle over the distribution and use of medical marijuana, one that intensified considerably only last month when federal prosecutors launched a major crackdown on at least 16 California pot dispensaries, forcing stores – even those operating legally under the state’s Prop 215 – to shut down before December 1 or face criminal charges and confiscation of property. Despite medical marijuana being legal in California, it is apparently a violation of federal drug laws. Prosecutors argue that federal law “takes precedence over state law.”

Pro-pot advocates insist the impetus in maintaining the criminalization of marijuana on a federal basis is another kind of green: dollar-bill green! When pot is illegal, money moves fast and furiously from growers to distributors to users, federal agencies to local law enforcement to defense and prosecuting attorneys to non-profit organizations alike. “If pot becomes legal across 50 states, a lot of people lose a lot of money. It’s more lucrative for it to be against the law,” says one source on the condition of anonymity.

That said, marijuana has been politically demonized by the federal government since before it was officially outlawed in the 1970s by then-President Richard Nixon, with the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Marijuana is currently classified by the federal government as a Schedule I substance, a dangerous drug without medical value, although in 1988 the Drug Enforcement Administration’s administrative law judge, Francis Young, ruled that: “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.”

Roger Morgan, 72, founder and director of Take-Back America Campaign, has actively engaged in drug prevention work since 1997. His own life, which has been deeply affected by drug abuse when his stepchildren fell to addiction in the 1980s, believes the facts about marijuana are plain and simple. He emphatically rejects marijuana as a “real medicine” because its ingredients, dosage, and potency are difficult to measure and marijuana is not “reproducible in consistent form” as the FDA mandates medicines should be. Furthermore, Morgan cites “[marijuana’s] devastating impact on academic achievement, productivity, health, mental illness, crime, welfare, and traffic safety, and the economic impacts associated with each of those.” On a financial level, Morgan states that every tax dollar collected on alcohol and tobacco – “our two legal drugs” – has a social cost of $9. “Marijuana combines the harms of both,” says Morgan, “and the economic impact will be worse.” He also believes that approval of marijuana for medical purposes would “dismantle America,” leading to ever-more-serious addictions, birth defects, and other negative cultural and medical side effects. Morgan, who has published two e-books on the subject, says he has conducted copious research to support his claims.

Medical marijuana advocates, of course, have data that counters those reports point by point, including research conducted and reported by equally credentialed experts at equally renowned academic and scientific institutions.

“The biggest misperception about medical marijuana is that it's a sham and that it's a Trojan horse for full legalization. Neither is true,” says Kris Hermes, spokesperson for Americans for Safe Access, the largest organization of patients, medical professionals, scientists, and concerned citizens working to ensure safe and legal access to marijuana for medical and therapeutic purposes. “The science of medical efficacy is well-established and the one or two percent of the population who use marijuana medically is not interested in recreational use.”

Hermes believes that despite the recent setbacks for medical marijuana the tide is turning toward a wider acceptance of doctor-recommended pot. “We believe we will prevail in this legal battle because we have science on our side,” says Hermes, who also has shelves full of wholly credible research in support of his claims for marijuana’s safety and efficacy for medical purposes. “Eventually, science will win out over politics and everyone who might benefit from the medical use of marijuana will be able to do so.”

The truth about facts, figures, and stats provided by either side is that numbers bend and studies come with agendas and both sides are probably exactly right – so far as their data supports. There are precious few political issues so polarizing, or researched with such comically opposing results, as medical marijuana. The trouble with many spokespersons for both sides is that the issue becomes emotionally charged – pro-pot advocates know sick people whose illness is relieved only with marijuana, while anti-pot crusaders have been crushed when addiction has touched the lives of their loved ones – and so, when it comes to rationally discussing this subject and seeing one another’s point of view, objectivity goes up in a cloud of smoke.

This is an observation Tommy Chong makes on a daily basis. “I pick up the newspaper and on one page there’s a story about how they just discovered another disease that pot helps with,” he says. “On the opposite page, there’s a story about how some big evil pot grow in a national forest was disrupted by the DEA. Side by side – that’s how [America] sees this issue right now.”

As for medical-marijuana patient Delano, she recognizes her every inhalation places her in the eye of a storm not likely to soon ease. She is, however, grateful for the easing of her painful symptoms, while navigating her way from horrible and terrible treatment options. “It’s not like I’m proud to say I use pot or that I’m some hippie, or that I even care about the politics surrounding all of this,” she says. “But I’m not some criminal or junkie either. I’m just a regular person, like your neighbor or your pool cleaner. All I can say is, before I had this option, I had no options. Is it right for everybody? No. But, is it wrong for everybody?”