When I was in high school, I crashed doing an airwalk grab on the library steps. I have it on video. I smashed two vertebrae in my lower back. The surgery left me with metal in my back and an attitude. That was like eleven years ago. I have pain that can be crippling for a few days, sometimes it's not so bad. I have taken a lot pain killers including Oxycontin and Vicodin over the years. I like that stuff but it makes me drool and recite the alphabet non-stop. Mostly, I get by with an epidural injection every few months and daily doses of ibuprofen or naproxen. I smoke marijuana too.

I find that marijuana doesn't block the pain much but it sure helps with my attitude. I've been depressed since the accident. I guess, I just can't accept that I''ll never be a world class skater and I'll always walk a little bit like my grandpa. I was prescribed Zoloft at first, then Wellbutrin for depression but marijuana works much better for me. Dude, I'm only 28. I want to have fun, have some laughs. Anyway, I'm sitting around smoking and joking with some friends, and this guy Doug says, "Dude, you can smoke legally. Messed up as you are, no offense, you can qualify for medical marijuana. Medical marijuana? I visualize the herb in little capsules. So Doug knows this guy who knows a guy, call him Bob, who is totally down with the whole medical marijuana scene.

Bob and I drive up to Santa Monica so I can get on the program. The medical marijuana dispensary is between a nail salon and a Tae Kwon-Do studio. Inside, it's like any other store, a glass display case with rows of big glass jars like your granny might keep cooking stuff in except these are filled with marijuana buds, with neat little tent cards propped up in front of them with product names like L.A. Confidential, Blueberry, Kush, and Trainwreck.

I reach into my jeans for my roll and Bob says, "You gotta get a referral letter first." So we walk past the cute salesgirl in a tight pink t-shirt. She was pretty hot. We go out the back to a patio with some plastic chairs and a picnic table. Dr. Dean will see you now. The doc is pretty cool, in his forties I'd say, talks to me for about 15 minutes, lots of questions about my medical history (I have a copy of my last MRI report with me) and my psychiatric history. I sense that he's happy to talk to someone who is really messed up physically versus some of these anxiety and ADD types. Dr. Dean decided that I was a suitable candidate for medical marijuana, took the $150 out of my hand, and gave me a signed letter certifying that I was a patient under his care. The letter was good for a year, after that I could renew it each year for $100. He said that he had written several thousand medical marijuana recommendations in the last few years and that none had been successfully challenged in court.

With that reassurance, I couldn't wait to get back to the front desk and the pink t-shirt. She said I should call her Sandy and she started out with a brief primer of the major marijuana strains: "indica is for a body high, more numbing", she said, "whereas sativa is more for the head, more abstract, better for doing creative work, listening to music." I spend the next 20 minutes, looking and smelling, and checking out Sandy. Finally, I sense that Sandy wants to move on and Bob is getting impatient so I finalize my purchase. Incidentally, you can't sample anything on the premises. On the way home Bob fills me in on the etiquette of being a bona fide medical marijuana patient. Words like "weed", "dope", and getting "stoned" are not to be used anymore. Those words helped to criminalize marijuana in the past. Now, I'm to refer to marijuana as medicine.

It's still not a perfect world. The Federal government doesn't recognize the legality of California's medical marijuana law. The DEA raids dispensaries regularly. I'm talking about SWAT teams with guns drawn. They intimidate but make no attempt to identify the patients. They confiscate marijuana and the dispensary's computers, and cash. It's mostly harassment. They want the dispensaries to go away but they return the confiscated items after a while. The authorities also pressure the landlords to evict the dispensaries.

What's changed most for me since I've become a medical marijuana patient? I definitely get a much better grade of marijuana now. It costs a more, but I don't use as much. By law, I'm allowed to have as much as half a pound for personal use, but I find I keep a much smaller amount because I have a reliable and legal source. Some of the people I bought marijuana from back in the day were not people I would have chosen to hang out with otherwise, no offense intended.

I really liked smoking. I started when I was 15 and smoked for over 13 years. Let me tell you, I'm one of those addictive personalities. Part of it is genetic, I'm sure. My father is a recovering alcoholic, sober over 20 years now. Most of women in my family are compulsive overeaters. If it feels good, I'll get hooked on it. A lot of my friends started smoking when I did, but some were just chippers - only smoked a few times a day, or could go days without smoking. My best girlfriend is still a chipper after smoking for 13 years. For me it was love a first puff. I was up to like a pack a day in no time.

I would still be smoking if it weren't for my husband and my son. They just wouldn't let up - nagging and making me feel guilty, I finally gave up and quit about six months ago. That may have sounded easy - I quit smoking six months ago - but I had tried to stop many times. I tried nicotine gum and the patch, but I still felt really tense. I felt like I was walking a tightrope and at the first stressful test, I fell off the wire.

I'm a nurse, so we like talk about drugs all the time at work. The doctor I work for suggested I try Zyban. - said it had worked really well for a lot of people. So I did and I kid you not, within a few days, I didn't care that much about smoking anymore. When I did smoke, I didn't seem to get the same satisfaction out of it. Awesome, right? Sure, but now I don't want to give up the Zyban. I can honestly say that I can see myself taking this drug for the rest on my life.

Come to find out smoking was like a medicine for me. I can see now, looking back, that I was borderline depressed most of my life. Like, duh, what teenager isn't depressed, right? The link between nicotine and depression has been known since the late eighties, not long in scientific terms. Nicotine stimulates the production of two brain chemicals - dopamine and norepinephrine. The short story is these chemicals make you feel good and combat the depression. So smoking is like a way of self medicating, a way of treating undiagnosed depression. This also explains why people get hooked on nicotine gum.

Antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft are not successful as nicotine replacements because these drugs help the brain create serotonin, another feel-good brain chemical, but not the same ones that nicotine produces.

Zyban (as well as WellbutrinSR which is the same formula) stimulates the production of dopamine and norepinephrine just like nicotine does, but hopefully with less dangerous side effects. Zyban should not be used by severely depressed teenagers. Suicides have been documented for this class of drugs. Also these drugs can interact with many other prescription drugs, so make sure your doctor knows what else you're taking before he prescribes Zyban or WellbutrinSR. Finally it's not cheap, $100 a month. A generic, called Bupropion, is available, and it will run $35 for a month supply. Still, it costs less than cigarettes and your loved ones won't be on your case.

Kiyoshi Fukuda, a dentist from Santa Rosa, California, is a registered sex offender. He admitted to having sex with a child under 16 and even though he disclosed his status to the state licensing board his record remained "clean" on the bureau's website. Even Fukuda was surprised by that one.

Over a third of California's 937,100 licensed healthcare workers have not been fingerprinted - a crucial step in vetting workers by checking criminal databases and intended to prevent rapists, drug addicts and others with rap sheets from becoming licensed to provide health care services.

Incredibly, over three-quarters of psychiatric technicians; nearly half of family therapists, social workers and dentists; and 12 percent of physicians were not fingerprinted by their relevant licensing boards.

Among them was Michael Marcus, a dentist from San Jose who was arrested in July 2005 after allegedly fondling a 17-year-old patient. He was charged with three misdemeanor charges of sexual battery, on top of three others he had received in 1996. So far, he's only gotten a slap on the wrist - five years of probation - and says he has the right to continue practicing until he is found guilty by a court of law.

Sure, Michael.

The cases, which are numerous, also included some off-the-job criminality that eventually found its way into the examination room. Escondidio nurse Mary Eileen Cahill-Therrien was convicted of vandalism, driving under the influence, and disturbing the peace in 2000 and 2001.

Despite showing up at a home-care assignment drunk (and being asked to leave after stupidly leaving a patient's catheter in) she managed to find another job, where she was fired only weeks later for - surprise! - being drunk.

BUT WAIT. Undeterred by her spat of bad luck with, you know, the whole drunk at work thing, Cahill somehow got yet another job which she ultimately lost due to - wait for it - her unholy love of drinking. While Cahill sounds like a girl worth going out on the town with (or an aunt worth calling for a beer-run on prom night), I'm not so sure I'd want her taking charge of my catheter experience -just a thought.

These cases are among some of the most brazen abuses that can occur in a doctor-patient relationship. If the licensing board won't protect us from being anesthetized under the hands of child molesters, rapists, violent criminals and drug addicts, do they really serve any function at all?