Five chronically ill Americans explain why they use marijuana as medicine, and the film follows the fight to make that legal nationwide. Robert Randall and Irvin Rosenfeld, among the few patients ever granted federal permission to use cannabis, describe what it treats and what it costs them to stay on the right side of the law. Rhonda O'Donnell, Jacqueline Patterson, and Tom McMullen add their own cases, each with a different illness and a different reason marijuana works when other prescriptions did not. Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard psychiatry professor, lays out the clinical argument for reclassifying the drug. Running through all of it is lobbyist Aaron Houston's effort to move a federal medical marijuana bill through Congress, meeting with legislators and building the political case one patient story at a time. The film stays close to these individual accounts rather than the broader culture war, treating legalization as a question of what sick people are allowed to do to feel better.