Honoring the trailblazers with MS who changed cannabis policy

March is Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month — and at the Marijuana Policy Project, we are honored to recognize a community that has been absolutely essential to the cannabis reform movement: people living with MS.

For decades, MS patients have been among the most courageous and effective advocates for medical cannabis access in this country. When the science was still emerging, and the stigma was still overwhelming, people living with MS stood before legislators, testified in courtrooms, and shared their deeply personal stories with the world — not just for themselves, but for every patient who deserved safe, legal access to medical cannabis.

No one embodied that spirit more powerfully than Cheryl Miller, a New Jersey woman diagnosed with MS in 1971. 

Cheryl found that cannabis eased the severe muscle spasms and chronic pain that had left her largely immobile — when little else would. Rather than suffer in silence, she and her husband Jim became tireless advocates for cannabis reform and medical cannabis access.

In 1998, in a defining act of civil disobedience, Cheryl was arrested for openly consuming cannabis outside a congressional office, making national headlines and putting an unforgettable human face on the fight for reform.

Cheryl passed away in 2003, but her legacy endures in every law that has since been passed to empower medical cannabis patients. New Jersey's own medical cannabis law is informally known as the "Cheryl Miller Medical Marijuana Act" — a fitting tribute to a woman who gave everything she had to the cause.
 
The evidence supporting cannabis as a treatment for MS symptoms has grown substantially since those early days of advocacy. Patients report meaningful relief from muscle stiffness, chronic pain, sleep disruption, and bladder dysfunction — symptoms that can dramatically diminish quality of life and that are often difficult to manage with conventional therapies alone. For many, medical cannabis has not simply eased their symptoms; it has restored a sense of control, dignity, and independence.
 
Because of the activism of patients like Cheryl, millions of Americans in states with medical cannabis programs now have legal access to this medicine. 
 
But our work is not finished. Too many patients still live in states where medical cannabis remains out of reach, and too many others continue to face undue barriers of cost, accessibility, and legal uncertainty.  
 
This MS Awareness Month, we recommit ourselves to the fight — in Cheryl's memory, and in the spirit of every MS patient who refused to accept a world where suffering was the only option.