Like fuelling up your car to ensure it goes a bit further, using marijuana is a life-changer when it comes to dealing with debilitating pain.
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That's how one man summed up his illegal use of the drug for medical gain during the Wollongong Medicinal Cannabis Symposium at the weekend.
A show of hands at the Woonona-Bulli RSL Club on Saturday revealed the majority of the 100-strong crowd were either sufferers of a serious illness looking for therapy or carers of them.
One man, who did not want to be named, told the Mercury using cannabis had given him the ability to "operate on all levels" again.
"I use cannabis as an edible; I know for pain relief eating it is a slower method [of release] but once the full effects of it come on it's so good for pain," he said.
The 60-year-old has used marijuana for medicinal purposes since 2007 and likened it to "putting $20 of something in your petrol tank" - saying if it helped make you go further and function for longer, then "why wouldn't you use it?".
"It freed me, it gave me life. For pain, it's incredible - no side effects and no chance of dying from it, so that's got to mean something," he said.
A woman, who also chose not to provide her name, was among many others who simply came to listen and learn.
"I have some friends that have problems and I just wanted to get myself up to speed with a few things," she said.
The symposium - organised by Bellambi cancer survivor Paul Lawrence - heard from Doctor Andrew Katelaris, who was deregistered in 2005 after refusing to stop recommending and supplying cannabis to patients, and other guest speakers.
Mr Lawrence, 53, illegally uses medicinal marijuana to deal with the constant pain he suffers after a massive operation to remove a football-sized tumour from his spine.
After a bad experience with painkillers, he gave them up altogether and turned to marijuana about a year ago.
"The quality of life that I've achieved in the last 12 months is just phenomenal - I'm doing things I didn't think I was capable of doing," he told Saturday's event.
"We need to learn that pain is one aspect of our lives; we can't just take a pain pill and expect pain to go away, if we don't feel pain within our body we don't know what's going with our body. We need to feel a degree of pain, but we need to make it a manageable degree of pain."
Mr Lawrence said one of the best ways to overcome pain was by "distracting the mind".
