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Illinois Valley News, Cave Junction, Ore. Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Marijuana key to man’s recovery
By Dan Klapheke
IVN Staff Writer
On October 8, 2005, Troy
Davenport was drunkenly barreling
down an Arkansas road in the dark
of night. He lost control and flew
off the road, his car slamming into
and wrapping around a tree. He head
butted the trunk at full force and was
out cold.
“My last memory is a bottle of
Crown Royal being passed around,”
Davenport said. “Came to me, I
passed it on. I wake up, regained
consciousness 7 months later in a
nursing home.”
Davenport received a frontal
lobe brain injury from the wreck and
spent nine months in a hospital and
nursing home. He was wheelchair
bound and being tube-fed, and had
to learn to walk again, but he left
the nursing home in 2009 to try and
regain control of his life.
But with a severe brain injury
such as Davenport’s, returning to a
normal functioning life isn’t without
a price. Davenport said he suffered
immense pain for “three years of
misery” following the wreck.
“I’d wake up in the morning,
before I could even get my coffee
made I was puking in the sink,”
Davenport said. “Violently, past dry-
heaving. And then I’d be miserable
the rest of the day.”
He quit the medicine he was
being given at the nursing home, as
Davenport said it only made him
feel worse. The intense nausea and
discomfort came from a buildup of
fluid in the back of his skull, even
with a drainage tube running from his
head to his stomach.
But there was one thing
Davenport held on to, and that was
the prospect of medical marijuana.
“I was at the brink of suicide
before I moved out here,” Davenport
said. “And the hope of becoming
a medical marijuana patient--I
was literally a medical marijuana
refugee.”
Davenport delved into Google
research in finding a cure to his
symptoms, and what he said he kept
finding was that the symptoms of his
condition were all covered by medical
marijuana.
According to Oregon Public
Health’s Oregon Medical Marijuana
Program
(OMMP),
conditions
covered by medical marijuana
include cachexia, cancer, glaucoma,
HIV/AIDS, nausea, PTSD, severe
pain, seizures, muscle spasms and
multiple sclerosis. There are 66,880
OMMP patients, with 5,880 of them
in Josephine County. Davenport is
one of the patients, and his OMMP
membership covers his nausea, severe
pain and seizures.
Since moving to the Valley in
2009, Davenport’s symptoms have
decreased to coming up once a year,
if that. He vomited once in all of
2015 and hasn’t yet this year. And in
celebration of his 10 years since the
accident, last year Davenport decided
to go on a walk.
“My way of saying thanks to all
the angels that I didn’t hurt anyone,
I chose to hike 420 miles on the
Pacific Crest Trail to promote brain
injury awareness and prevention,”
Davenport said. “That’s my way of
taking a bite out of reefer madness.”
Troy Davenport and his hiking partner earlier this year.
His hike started in Ashland,
and Davenport said he headed 210
miles north to Charlton Lake. Being
disabled, he didn’t want to get too far
away from home or out of the state, so
he turned around and went back down
the trail. He arrived back on October
6 of last year, two days before the 10
year anniversary of his wreck.
According to Davenport, doctors
told him he shouldn’t have been able
to survive the blow from the wreck,
(Courtesy photo for the Illinois Valley News)
but it wasn’t Davenport’s first knock
to the skull.
“My brain was so scared and
calloused that when I hit the tree--it
wasn’t my first rodeo,” Davenport
said. “It wasn’t so hard for my wires
to get reconnected.”
Since his recovery and the hike,
Davenport said he’s done his best to
raise awareness for brain injury and
medical marijuana awareness. He
frequently posts on related Facebook
pages, as well as his own page called
HikerXFourTwenty, but said he
doesn’t quite know how it all works
and connects. But he’s not giving up.
“If I’d given up before I got here,
none of this would’ve happened,”
Davenport said, referring to the hike
and his life in general. “I wouldn’t be
a living proof guinea pig that there’s
this much medicine.”
Theater of the Absurd: by Robert Hirning
Back in the spring of 1974 the Oregon
Legislative Assembly adopted Senate Bill
1011 in special session. This sweeping piece
of legislation ushered in all sorts of land use
regulations from zoning and building codes to
major comprehensive plans. Up to that time
most Oregon cities had already adopted similar
ordinances but for the rural unincorporated
areas of the county this was the portent of big
changes to come. Josephine County wasted
no time in rushing forward and the so- called
“counter culture” communities of the Illinois
Valley, Sunny Valley and Williams immediately
realized how a cadre of good ol’ boys that
controlled local politics would soon have a
vast new tool box of anti-hippie ordinances.
Somehow the Bill 1011 ended up on the fall
voters’ ballot where it was soundly defeated
in these rural precincts. How it actually got
on the ballot in the first place remains unclear
but it took hardly 24 hours for the county
government to declare this negative vote null
and void citing precedence of state law. In a
magnanimous afterthought the newly formed
Planning Commission invited us to meet with
them and discuss our ideas and desires in what
we were calling a “Leave-us-alone Zone.” This
of course was just going through the motions
and by the following July when the law took
effect the big hammer came down. But that part
of the story comes later.
A self picked blue ribbon delegation from
Takilma, including this writer, Delbert Kaufman
the unofficial mayor and several others, made
arrangements to meet with the Planning
Commission at their temporary office on 4th
Street across from the library and, at that time, a
block from the sheriff’s headquarters behind the
courthouse. After parking the truck we hurried
down the sidewalk to the meeting. Suddenly a
deputy appeared blocking my path demanding
that I show him some identification. At other
times I would have been thunderstruck by such
an infringement of rights but this was rather old
hat for veterans of various 1960s movements
and demonstrations. Politely declining and
reiterating the laws about “probable cause”,
that identification is only required for a driver
of a motor vehicle but not for a law abiding
citizen simply walking down the sidewalk, I
proceed around the officer and down the block.
Suddenly an unmarked black car with side
spotlights appeared from around the corner, the
driver feverishly talking on the radio, and two
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my truck was the reason for the entire hubbub.
This Om sign is a Hindu peace symbol of sorts
looking like a backwards 3 with intersecting
squiggly lines which was painted on a brown
oval in the center of a yellow sun. Somehow
the cops claimed that this was the identification
symbol for a secret underground hippy pot
collective down in Southern California called
“The Brotherhood.” Farfetched as it sounds,
this was their excuse. Now, over forty years
later it all seems laughable when the sheriff’s
department can hardly field more than two
officers at a time and responding to real crimes
is often “beyond available resources.” Instead
of amusing themselves by shaking down
hippies who blundered too close to their hive,
today’s sheriffs have had to leave patrolling
the streets up to private citizens, some of
whom may even have long hair. The offending
truck with the Om sign on the back door is
permanently parked out in the pucker brush and
I find myself advocating for more officers on
the street, hopefully, to serve and protect. The
rest of the story about the county’s attempts at
code enforcement will have to wait for another
day. Stay tuned.
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more deputies appeared out of nowhere, again
blocking the sidewalk. Crowding around me
with arms folded they demanded identification
and again I politely declined. By this time
people were stopping to watch including the
whole planning commission who stepped
out on the porch to take in all the action.
Presumably following orders from the guy
in the black car, the officers grabbed me and,
per nonviolent training, I went limp as a rag
doll. This action meant that that the cops had to
lower a disobedient person gently to the ground
and then deal with a limp body. Searching my
pockets they pulled out the wallet and recorded
the information. “Oh they got the hippie!” the
onlookers were mumbling in hushed tones
but then the officers hadn’t planned for their
next move. “Am I under arrest?” I asked “and
what are the charges?” Having broken no laws
they had to let me stand up and walk off. This
really disturbed the onlookers for if no crime
was committed then maybe there really was
some truth to claims about police brutality and
unnecessary force and profiling, just as black
and white protesters had been saying for years.
As it turned out, after a complaint was
filed by the ACLU, the Om sign on the back of
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