The Good Herb: A Traditional New Mexican Plant Reemerges

Note: Names and locations have been changed in this week’s Drug Peace Bumblebee column.

New Mexico naturopath and traditional curandera (healer) Esmerelda Martinez was 19 before she realized that her grandmother’s famous tinctures were cannabis based. “When I was a girl and we visited the family ranch down in Sinaloa (Mexico), I knew she was a healer: we’d see ranchers ride in from hundreds of miles in all directions for her medicine, which she cooked up in the kitchen. She just called her main tincture ingredient ‘la hierba buena’: the good herb. Once I realized what it was and she saw that I was going to be a healer too, she began teaching me her recipes.”

Fast forward three decades, and now the 50-something Martinez, after studying modern herbalism in Santa Fe, finds herself helping patients – including “a lot of veterans” – navigate New Mexico’s medical cannabis program.

Welcome to herbal medicine at the beginning of the Drug Peace Era. “It is strange to be teaching how to deal with paperwork so that someone with PTSD, cancer, a war injury or severe arthritis can have access to a medicine that my grandmother used to make without electricity or running water,” Martinez told me when we met in a south central New Mexico enchilada joint.  “She lived to be 89, by the way.”

New Mexico’s medical cannabis program, though an unmitigated success, does require more of a paper trail than some sate programs. It also requires annual renewal via a doctor. “I start sending out reminders to my patients two months in advance,” she said.

Martinez, though, because her tinctures reside in a legal gray area for now, has to be found by word of mouth. “This is kind of ridiculous, to feel I have to be low key about my practice, but it’s not to protect me. It’s to protect patients who are former Border Patrol agents and veterans whose insurance is at risk until federal prohibition ends,” she told me.Lives are at stake, so this is the line this healer with 30 years’ experience is walking. If she advised getting scripts for pain opiates instead of freeing people from them, she’d be able to underwrite public radio shows.

Joining us for local grub this day was a woman on the younger side of middle age named Maria. She was consulting with Esmerelda about whether to officially join the New Mexico medicinal cannabis program to treat her second incidence of melanoma. She showed me the scar on her cheek from recent surgery.

“I can’t believe I have to worry about legal ramifications when I’m looking for medicine to make sure I stay well,” Maria told me. “I mean on the federal level.”

Maria’s point carries particular weight in the American Southwest. To say that both social and medicinal cannabis is embedded in New Mexico culture is like saying the Red Sox have a place in Bostonian hearts. To give just one piece of evidence, Len Goodman of state-licensed provider New Mexicann says that his monthly orders drop by half at traditional Land of Enchantment harvest season in October. In other words, folks are growing their own medicine when they can, just as they always have.  Indeed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican/American War in 1848 guaranteed the “inviolabl(e) respect” of former Mexican (now U.S.) citizens’ traditions and rights.

“I have no choice but to help people wade through the bureaucracy,” Esmerelda told me. “That’s part of being a curandera now. But oh, it will be so much easier when federal prohibition is behind us and my patients don’t have to worry about things like Border Patrol checkpoints.” (New Mexico-based Border Patrol checkpoints have been largely honoring state medical cannabis paperwork, incidentally, but it’s still a stressful situation for patients.)

As the Drug Peace Bumblebee, whose job it is to spread cannabis information worldwide as the Drug Peace Era dawns, I was of course curious about these multi-generational cannabis tincture recipes that Latina healers have passed from mother to daughter and granddaughter for centuries in my home region.

But when I asked if she would reveal specifics, Martinez laughed. I got the message. Would I ask a Japanese woman for her mother’s Miso recipe, or a Brooklyn bagel maker for the family dough secret? Probably, but I’d get the same laugh.

Esmerelda, in other words, is willing to help any patient who comes to her, but she’s going to keep the exeact components and ratios of her grandmother’s elixirs a closely guarded secret. “I do educate my patients, and I may pass all the elements on one day, to a protégé or in a book,” she said. “But not any time soon.”

Martinez did say that in addition to cannabis, her orally-administered medicines are rich in a variety of essential oils and other traditional Latin-region desert medicinal herbs. For patients who won’t be able to find her, she said, “The basics of, say, a Simpson’s cannabis oil recipe is right on YouTube,” she said. “This will heal.”

As a cannabis journalist, what I found most fascinating was Esmeralda’s decades-long experience with local cannabis strains — specifically how effective they are. When I told her about that the argument some regulators are making that, for patient safety, cannabis must be as uniform and tested as any pharmaceutical, she scoffed.

“It’s sativas that grow here, of course,” she said, referring to New Mexico’s traditional warm climate varieties of the plant. “And I’ve never, in three decades of work, seen a patient have a negative reaction to my medicine. And it is nearly always effective. Even when I’m with a terminal cancer or AIDS patient in Hospice, if she’s using cannabis medicine she passes aware of her loved ones around her, and generally with a smile on her face. And I’ve seen some very painful and unpleasant passings from people on prescription opiates. One thing I know: when it’s my time, I want to have as many cannabinoids in my system as possible.”

What else does Esmerelda want? “To give my real name to you the next time we talk. To allow everyone who can benefit from it to be able to use cannabis.”

 

Enjoyed this article?

Subscribe to our RSS feed

Written by admin

More post by

admin has written 2733 posts on What Is Marijuana?

Follow me on Twitter

Follow me on Facebook