Reefer Sanity

By
Greg Diamond
– December 10, 2011Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

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Waterfall bong diagram

Better living through technology! Graphics credit to Wikipedia's "Waterfall Bong" entry. Keep reading the Orange Juice Blog for more exciting technological hits. Note: Orange Juice blog does not explicitly endorse this or any other specific cannabis delivery technology, although Orange Juice Blog does admit that it loves brownies.

There is an op-Ed in today’s New York Times that everyone — and I mean everyone — ought to read before claiming that they can express an informed opinion on the use medical marijuana.   Author Marie Myung-Ok Lee, who teaches writing at Brown University, writes about her mother-in-law being in the horrific late stages of pancreatic cancer.   As Lee explaints, her mother-in-law “had only one good day, and that was the day she smoked pot.”

For the past month, we’d been trying to get her to eat anything: fresh-squeezed carrot juice made in a special juicer, Korean rice gruel that I simmered for hours, soups, oatmeal, endless cans of Ensure. Sometimes she’d request some particular dish and we’d eagerly procure it, only to have her refuse it or fall back asleep before taking a bite. But this time she sat down at her favorite restaurant and ordered a gorgeous meal: whitefish poached with lemon, hot buttered rolls, salad — and ate every bite.

Then she wanted to go to Kimball’s, a local ice cream place famous for cones topped with softball-size scoops. The family had been regular customers starting all the way back when my husband and his brother were children, but they hadn’t been there since her illness. My husband and I shared a small cone, which we could not finish, and looked on in awe as my mother-in-law ordered a large and, queenishly spurning any requests for a taste, polished the whole thing off — cone and all — and declared herself satisfied.

We were of course raring to make the magic happen again, but it never did. The pot just frightened her too much. She was scared her friend would be arrested for interstate drug trafficking, that my husband and I would be mugged in New Haven; she was afraid she’d become addicted or (à la “Reefer Madness”) go insane. It was difficult watching her reject something that had so clearly alleviated her nausea and pain and — let’s admit it — lightened her mood in the face of the terrible fact that cancer had invaded nearly every essential organ. And it was even worse to watch her pumped, instead, full of narcotics that made her feel horrible. The Percocet gave her a painfully dry mouth, but even ice chips made her heave. We were reduced to swabbing her lips with little sponges dipped in water, and waiting out her agony.

Someday, most likely, President Obama is going to write his memoirs of his Presidency.  Hopefully that will be in a more enlightened time.  He will, I’ll bet, explain that he had to do what he did out of (misplaced) political expediency and will admit, as Johnson and Carter and Clinton have had to do before him, that it was a mistake.  He’ll ask, explicitly or implicitly, for our apology for not having acted to restore sanity when he could.

I’ve had a wasting disease that killed my appetite dead for months.  I lost 55 pounds.  It was a struggle to eat even 400 calories per day.  I marveled at the effect on my body, and at my lack of hunger, even though I realized that this interesting physiological adventure could end up with me being dead.  I knew that marijuana was a likely treatment for my lack of appetite — that in my case it might literally save my life — but I didn’t use it because it’s illegal and I’m a lawyer and I didn’t want to set an example of law-breaking for my daughters, whose tender age and brown skin would provide them much less shelter from the ravages of the judicial system than would my middle-aged pinkness.  And,  as an advocate of “regulating it like wine,” for over 20 years I’ve abstained largely because I didn’t want my political position on marijuana to be taken as self-interested special pleading.  I want the legality of medical marijuana to be honored by the federal government because it’s right, not because I might enjoy getting high.

President Obama may ask to be forgiven in that prospective memoir, but I won’t forgive him.  I’ll vote for him as a means to an end — a better chance of better policies than the other candidates would offer in a wide variety of areas — but he knows better than to allow the persecution of the medical marijuana industry in California.  And, back east, I doubt that Ms. Lee and her husband and others who loved her mother-in-law will easily forgive him and his administration either for the fact that the “one good day” that this cancer victim had in her terrible ordeal stood out so strongly and uniquely from all of the others, when it could have been a ritual that provided her comfort and greater health every last damned day of her suffering life.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)