NYC Radio: WABC's Curtis Sliwa Admits Using Medicinal Pot

Guardian Angels founder and WABC 770 AM personality Curtis Sliwa says he’s been treating his chronic Crohn’s disease by smoking pot, and he’s going to make it legal on 4/20 — the aptly chosen day he’ll officially begin a medical marijuana regimen to fight the illness’ nausea and pain.

“I will be there on Friday, with my documentation,” he said of his opening-day trip to the new cannabis dispensary, one of just three legally permitted to operate in Manhattan.

The NY Post reports Sliwa has been battling the debilitating intestinal disease for more than two years, describing it as a lingering after-effect of having been shot in the gut by Gambino Mafia members in 1992.

At his worst, he was down to 150 pounds. “I was projectile vomiting” by last Thanksgiving, he recounted. “I could not digest any food. They were going to put me on an IV in order to feed me. I looked like I came out of a concentration camp.”

Over the months, and through flare-ups and surgeries, doctors gave him far harder painkillers — including oxycodone and fentanyl.

But after an operation in December, he went cold turkey on the hard stuff, fearful that he could become irreversibly addicted.

And when over-the-counter painkillers didn’t help, he figured, “I really should just apply for medical marijuana, at least to encourage my appetite and put more weight on my rack.”

Sliwa smoked pot in his teens, he says, but became militantly against it after 1979, when he started the Guardian Angels. “If I saw you with a joint in your mouth, you might have been sucking concrete,” he recalls. “I was aggressively anti-marijuana.”