Marijuana as medicine...

As a cancer survivor, I used marijuana in the course of my treatment. Mind you, this was back in the late 1980's, when the hysteria over marijuana was much worse than it is today. My doctors were concerned that I was smoking anything at all, and prescribed Marinol for me. But it didn't work well, and I found that by taking half the prescribed amount of Marinol, and smoking a little marijuana, I could keep the nausea at bay. By a little, I mean less than a gram a day--consider that one cigarette weighs about a gram.

In any case, it was instrumental to my recovery. I gained weight, and was able to drag myself to the chemotherapy treatments time after time. This was no small feat, and there is something almost pathological about voluntarily checking yourself in for a treatment that will result in such severe symptoms for a week or two afterwards. Then, one day I woke up feeling good, and I knew that it would be time for another cycle of treatment. It was demoralizing to say the least. But I am alive today to tell the tale, and my tale today is the negative press reports about medical marijuana, evidenced in the headlines one reads in the newspaper daily.

My objection is simple--no distinction is made between marijuana that is produced for profit by those who choose to live outside the law, and marijuana that is produced for medical purposes. Both are referred to in the newspaper as Pot, and are designed to conjure up a public image that equates illegal use with compassionate, medical use. Typical headlines, often on the same page, will read Pot Club raided by Feds alongside Huge Pot Farm Busted--$1 million in plants seized. When I have queried our local newspaper about this issue, I have been told that "pot" is a lot shorter than "marijuana," so that is the reason why this is done. Hogwash.

When people are arrested for drunkeness or prescription-drug abuse, we do not read that they were arrested for "booze" (which is shorter than alcohol) or "downers" (which might be construed as pejorative). But it is considered perfectly fine to slam sick people, equating their marijuana use with garden-variety drug abuse. One reason for this is the fact that sick people are too busy trying to get well to take issue with small matters that are not life threatening. Another is the fact that medical users are politically marginalized. There are not enough of them to make a difference at the polls, and public perception of the problems they face are shaped by the newspapers, which in turn make no distinction between illegal use and legal, medical use. A vicious circle, that.

The stupidity of this position is further illustrated by looking at the statistics that highlight the harm done by various drugs, prescription and otherwise. Alcohol is involved in more auto accidents and violent crimes than all other substances taken together. In addition, prescription drug abuse accounts for more problems than all other drugs combined, save alcohol. But the leader in all health problems associated with drugs is tobacco, which is of course legal. The hysteria surrounding marijuana is cultural, and there are those who maintain that even compassionate use is a slippery slope. After all, what good can come from legalizing another harmful drug?

The fact of the matter is that marijuana use is prevalent, and our prisons are overcrowded with those arrested for the use or production of marijuana. Tobacco and alcohol may cause more problems, but tobacco and alcohol financed the American revolutionary war. Marijuana did not.