Eligh used to take more prescription pain medication than you can imagine. Like hundreds per month - Percocet, Oxycodone, Morphine - you name it.

Eligh looks old and young at the same time. He walks gingerly and staggers a bit into the room. We're at North End Club 420, where Eligh and people with various ailments come to get their medicine. That's medicine with a capital "M" - Mary Jane - medical marijuana.

A lot of people still struggle with the "medical" part. But they're in the minority in Washington state, according to a family of polls and one statewide vote, which decriminalized the possession of marijuana for a short list of medical conditions - sort of. The Medical Use of Marijuana Act was passed by Washington voters in 1998 and provides a so-called affirmative defense in court for possession of up to a pound and a half of cannabis and 15 flowering plants. "Affirmative defense" only applies after a patient has been arrested and charged. So it's not as cool as it sounds. The protection, which works more often than it doesn't, won't protect patients from federal law, which still deems marijuana possession verboten.

But that hasn't stopped patients from doing their thing. The law is considered by patients to be an important step toward legalizing marijuana for medical use for real. What we have now is sort of a pseudo-committal legal grey area that gives a lot of people hope for something better. Meanwhile, Medical Marijuana is an official movement in Tacoma, with clubs such as 420 sprouting up like, well, yeah, you know. Eligh is one of about a dozen people who cycle through Club 420 on a Monday afternoon. He is one of a softly estimated 35,000 medical marijuana patients in Washington.

As he shambles into Club 420, Eligh favors his right leg. His wife, Elizabeth, a nurse, walks with him, clearly ready to help should he stumble. Eligh says he began taking pain medication after an accident at work crushed his spine in several places. His back had to be patched back together with metal screws, bone grafts from his femur, and a few other bits of borrowed tissue from various body parts. Later, the screws started to extrude from the bones - literally unscrewing themselves - and tried to push their way through his skin from the inside. He lived with constant pain that most people simply can't imagine.

All of the drugs he took to manage his pain were prescribed. None of them helped the way they should. The side effects were often worse than the pain that the drugs were supposed to relieve. Opiates such as Percocet - which are standard fare in the pain management game - kill your appetite. They make you weak; they make you constipated; they keep you up at night; and they make you feel sick, he says. Over time, says Eligh, he developed a tolerance for the family of opioid drugs that he had been prescribed. He had to take more and more to alleviate his pain. Sometimes, despite the overwhelming number of pills he had been prescribed, he ran out. Then he had to deal with withdrawal. At a certain point, he says, he began to experience withdrawal symptoms on a daily basis, regardless of how much pain medication he had taken. There were times that the pain was so bad, the agony so inescapable, that he considered suicide as an out.

"I'm 35. I've got a wife and two kids," he says. "If it weren't for them, I would've put one in my head and been done with it."

Eligh, who asked not to have his full name revealed for obvious reasons, also credits marijuana for supplying the will to go on. Thanks to marijuana, these days Eligh takes only two pain pills a day. He sleeps better at night. He can eat. And his pain is managed. Marijuana is the reason - the good stuff, which he eats or smokes in a vaporizer, which is a contraption that heats the herb just enough to generate a harmless, potent vapor.

As a general rule, medical users are encouraged to vaporize or eat cannabis rather than smoke it. Inhaling marijuana smoke is harmful to the lungs according to some studies. That's about the only significant health risk associated with marijuana cited across major research reports. Of course, other, more recent research suggests that even very heavy, long-term marijuana users who had smoked more than 22,000 joints over a lifetime showed no greater risk of developing lung cancer than infrequent marijuana users or nonusers. That's according to a Fox News article that cited researchers at UCLA's School of Medicine. Researchers were surprised. By all accounts, overwhelmingly, marijuana meets FDA criteria over "whether a new product's benefits to users will outweigh the risks."

"Everything has gotten better (since he started using marijuana to treat his pain)," says Eligh. "I am 150 percent for medical marijuana."

So is Dave, another Monday afternoon visitor to Club 420. Dave has bulging disks in his spine, degenerative disk disease, and arthritis. He's youngish, works in sales, and runs sales seminars for some respectable companies. Dave started using medical marijuana when the side effects of pain pills such as Percocet, Oxycodone and Phenternol became intolerable.

"I can conduct business all day when I'm stoned," says Dave. "Could I do that on Oxycodone? Hell no."

Michael, one of three Club 420 founders, says he meets people like Eligh and Dave every day - people who leave crying tears of relief, joy, and appreciation.

"We help a lot of people," says Michael, "because we're patients too, and we realize that we only have each other to turn to."

Michael has AIDS and says medical marijuana has changed his life. AIDS patients such as Michael use medical marijuana to soothe nerve pain, to stimulate suffering appetites, and to mitigate nausea caused by other AIDS-related drug treatments, for example. Michael is really, really smart. Like an encyclopedia with long hair. And he's angry. He's angry that old myths about marijuana persist. He's angry about what he describes as corporate and government machinations aimed at depriving him and other patients of the only thing that relieves their agony. He's angry about the general ignorance that persists even in the face of overwhelming evidence supporting the usefulness of medical marijuana - ignorance that keeps thousands of patients living in fear and unnecessary pain.

"We're more angry than afraid," he says. "That's what made us start this club. We got scalpers on one end trying to sell medicine at prices people can't afford. We've got cops on the other end trying to bust us. And we've got criminals staking us out, following us home, robbing us, and trying to take our stuff. All we want to do is not hurt."

Michael says he makes a difference in someone's life every day. It's a mission that comes with significant risk. Places such as Club 420 are targets for robbery on one end and police action on the other. For now, he says he and other patients feel like they have to create their own change regardless of the risks. And contrary to what some may assume, there's really no profit motive. It's not a stoner wonderland by any stretch.

"We're not making money. We're losing it. I can't afford a sofa," he says.  "I'm probably going to end up in jail. Hell, I'm ready to die for this. I've been dealing with AIDS for 17 years. Nothing really scares me that much. I'm making a stand."

Meanwhile, Gov. Christine Gregoire is expected to sign a bill that will give more health care professionals the authority to recommend medical marijuana. Senate Bill 5798 allows naturopathic doctors, advanced physician assistants and nurse practitioners the power to authorize marijuana for medical use. The state Senate approved the measure 37-13 last week. State advocates, meanwhile, have begun a ballot initiative that would give Washington voters the chance to authorize marijuana possession statewide. Washington voters have consistently polled positively on marijuana legalization.

But that's another issue, another article.

This is about medical marijuana users, not recreational users - a division that most people don't know enough about or care enough to make.

"A lot of the patients here have been loaded with 100 different medications and told to go home and die," says Mike, another Club 420 founder. "We help them however we can. It pisses me off that it's 2010 and people still don't get it. It's taking a bunch of stoners to figure it out."