Ten years ago, 29-year-old Albuquerque Realtor Anthony Towers was hit in the head with a brick at a party.

"The right side of my skull was shattered," Towers said. "I had to have surgery to remove bits of skull from my brain."

Since then, he has had four more surgeries to remove cysts from inside his head, and a lot of traumatic headaches.

"Sometimes I wake up and it hits me like a semi-truck," Towers said. "I've woken up on the kitchen floor before when the pain just took me out."

Towers said he's taken prescription medicine for the pain, but some of the drugs he's been prescribed also slow his already low resting heart rate, which worries him.

"I don't want to die in my sleep," Towers said. "A small amount of cannabis administered at the onset of these headaches alleviates the pain and allows me to function like a normal person."

Towers attended a Department of Health Medical Advisory Board hearing Friday in Santa Fe about whether to add new conditions to the list of ailments that qualify patients to use marijuana as medicine under the state's Medical Cannabis Program.

Towers was lucky. The board voted to recommend that his condition — cluster headaches — be approved. The board even amended the petition to include migraine headaches, ankylosing spondylitis and bipolar disorder as qualifying conditions.

But that doesn't mean patients with these ailments can start smoking, eating or — as one patient suggested at the hearing — bathing in marijuana just yet. The board's recommendations will be sent to Secretary of Health Alfredo Vigil, who will make the final decision as to whether to add these conditions to the list.

Two other conditions that were proposed Friday — blepharospasm (a neurological disorder that causes abnormal contraction of the eyelid) and hepatitis C in patients undergoing nonantiviral treatment — did not get board approval.

About a hundred people attended Friday's hearing.

One conservatively dressed middle aged couple was there to plead on behalf of their son that bipolar disorder be accepted as a condition. A Los Lunas patient took the microphone several times to advocate for the program as a whole. Some patients used the meeting as a place to connect with other patients in the relatively new community of medical marijuana users.

Paul Culkin, a clean-cut young man wearing a suit and spectacles, walked around with a clipboard handing out slips of paper containing contact information for the New Mexico Medical Cannabis Patients Group, an nascent group he hopes will serve as a focal point to unite patients and give them a voice in the way the state program develops.

"Without a solid, unifying voice, we really have nothing," said Culkin, 30, a military veteran and medical marijuana patient who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Medical Advisory Board meets twice a year to consider new conditions for the Medical Cannabis Program.

When the program was established in 2007, there were seven qualifying conditions. Eight more have been added since then.

The following conditions are covered by the program: cancer; glaucoma; multiple sclerosis; damage to the nervous tissue of the spinal cord with intractable spasticity; epilepsy; HIV/AIDS; painful peripheral neuropathy; intractable nausea/vomiting; severe anorexia/cachexia; hepatitis C infection with antiviral treatment; Crohn's disease; post-traumatic stress disorder; chronic pain; and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Contact Phaedra Haywood at 986-3068 or phaywood@sfnewmexican.com.