Have you felt it? Truly felt it?
Just to make sure you’re on the same page with me, let’s try an exercise. Picture yourself sailing a small boat way out at sea. It’s a beautiful day, light wind, sunny, and (most importantly) you are a very good sailor and navigator. Suddenly a large meteor smashes a hole in your boat and it sinks in seconds. You are now hanging on to some flotsam (that’s floating nautical junk for those with no sailing experience), but it’s not going to float for long… and you see shark fins circling.
Suddenly you hear an engine! You see a speedboat making a beeline for your location! “I’m saved”, you think. Up comes a sporty speedboat with the music blaring. It’s full of what looks like the worst kind of right-wing fraternity turds… but it’s the most beautiful sight none the less. But instead of rescue, you are taunted, laughed at, and called names. A few beer cans are launched at your head and then, with some muttered excuse to your pleas for rescue “You’re wet, it’ll ruin the leather”, they speed off. That’s rage.
Now… picture that the one person that you love more than anything in the world is the one in this hypothetical situation… and all you can do is watch it all unfold. That’s blind rage.
So what’s with the exercise? To impress upon you all the level of rage that wells up in me when I hear the uninformed, illogical, fear-driven, anti-change arguments against medical marihuana that are spouted by various talking-heads in media and government. I do my best to push it down and channel it into more productive pursuits, but deep inside I just want to rend, tear and squash. I am assuming the best, that these opponents of medical marihuana are simply missing the “empathy boat” and don’t understand exactly what they are saying when they advocate against this truly amazing medication being made available to those who need it to treat any number of ailments.
So… to any and all opponents of medical marihuana I say this… take any argument you have against medical marihuana and preface it with “Your mother should die because… (insert reason here)” and you should see that NONE of your arguments are remotely valid. In fact, even arguing the point makes you come off as an insensitive twit who’s either too ignorant or too stupid to be making decisions for yourself… and you should certainly forget about making them for others.
In case you haven’t guessed yet, marihuana saved my mother’s life. It wasn’t prescribed by a doctor either, or obtained legally.
While my mother was undergoing her first round of chemo, we found that she had severe reactions to every anti-nausea medication we tried. Being a slight woman to begin with, she was quickly in danger of malnutrition. I did my research and (thanks to an old college connection) purchased some marihuana for her to try. It worked like a charm and she quickly began to eat, gain weight and rest easily without any nausea. Her doctor even noticed that she had started to gain weight after months of steady loss and asked her what she was doing. She told him what she was using and his response was “I don’t condone it on a personal level, but I can’t fault the results”. Sadly, five years later she came out of remission and passed away.
It was this experience, and the requirement of skirting the law to obtain a simple and effective treatment, that brought me to research the situation and complexities involved in our current stance on marijuana in general. The more I researched, the more convinced I became that this stance is neither logical nor compassionate and is in sore need of an overhaul before it ruins the lives of more innocent citizens.
My mother spent much of her 5 year gift traveling the world with my father. Enjoying life with a fervor only known to those who have faced death and won. She was able to see her grandchildren grow up, have long talks with her own children, experience the world with her college sweetheart and be a light in all their lives for a little while longer. Those 5 years were very special to all who knew her, and they never would have happened if we had simply followed along with the current legislation and trusted in big pharma to save her.