On May 5, 2000, Students for Sensible Drug Policy’s guest speaker, Joe Blundell, was hit by a train, causing severe bodily harm.

“Right where you’re waiting for the trains to come, it says, ‘mind the gap.’ I didn’t mind the gap very well,” Blundell said laughing. “When I woke up, I had lost half my blood and one of the wheels completely nixed my fingers right off.”

The doctor looked at him when he woke up and said, “Son. I have no idea why you’re alive.”

“The train literally, physically crushed me,” Blundell said. “I was drug about 70 yards and when the train finally came to a stop, one of the wheels on the train was resting on the center of my spine.”

Workers tried to lift the train off of his body using a crane, but couldn’t lift the train high enough to get him out.

A worker came down and gave him horrific news.

“Eventually a man came down with two big knives and said, ‘I’m sorry. We can’t lift the train up enough. We’re going to have to stab your lungs to get you out from under here. Try to let out all your breath.'”

While noting that these are painful experiences, Blundell said the road to recovery was paved with more pain.

“The pain of being run over by a train and the pain of having my lungs stabbed pales in comparison to the pain I suffered under the doctor’s opiums,” he said.

The “doctor’s opiums” is a reference to pharmaceutical drugs which were made at one time from poppy plants. According to his information, none of the drugs given are still made of opium.

“It’s actually synthesized from coal tar and petroleum,” he said, “As are most pharmaceutical medicines. While suffering under the ‘doctor’s opiums,’ the side effects are hellish and embarrassing.

“Having your lungs stabbed hurts. Five days without a bowel movement is the most painful, god-awful experience you can imagine.”

The doctors told Blundell that the constipation was a side effect of the drugs and gave him laxatives to soothe him.

“These are the medicines the doctors have chosen to administer to me as some sort of humane treatment for my excruciating pain?”

He used the prescriptions for a year and a half before Blundell found what he describes as a better way.

“On Morphine, Codeine and Demeral, I would lay in bed like a junkie,” Blundell said. “I would literally get bedsores from how long I would lay in bed strung out on Morphine.”

Since Blundell began using cannabis, he has become more active in his community. Blundell has become mayor of Cliff Village, where he has helped pass an ordinance to allow marijuana for medical purposes.

He also started a business designing self-heating and self-cooling buildings. Information on his building design can be found at geo-gro.com.

The SSDP’s next meeting is 7 p.m. March 18 on the first floor of Spiva Library.

The meeting is open to the public.