While municipalities, police and prohibitionists fight over control of medical marijuana and ideologues do everything in their power to eliminate or remove its availability, a growing number of cancer patients are crying out for relief.
Cover: Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin. Boing Boing photo.
Cancer has a way of changing one’s outlook on many things. Unlike other some diseases, while it often provides a relatively long, living, descent, and more recently, a hope for remission and even cure, it often provides a miserable way die … and a miserable way to live.
Xeni Jardin is editor/partner and tech culture journalist at Boingboing.net. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and writes about living with breast cancer.
Before living with the disease and its treatment she did not believe in the medical value of marijuana and thought the claims about its therapeutic value were simply come ons from dope dealers.
She has changed her mind.
[excerpt] “You realize you can use marijuana now,” my friend said over the phone. “You realize it can help you through this, right?”I was driving home from the clinic where I’d just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer wasn’t just in my breast. It had probably been growing in my body for a long time without my knowledge, the doctor told me. The disease had already colonized at least one lymph node, and perhaps spread further. Maybe I was metastatic. Maybe I’d die soon. Maybe I wouldn’t. We didn’t know.
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I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t believe there was a true therapeutic use for cannabis. I believed “medical” was a fig leaf to help black market capitalists sell more drugs to addicts.
I got this, I told my friend. I don’t need and won’t need marijuana. And I appreciate your offer of help, but I’ll be fine. Besides, I really don’t feel any different than a few hours before I was diagnosed. I’m fine.
God, I was so naive. And I was so wrong.
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May our nation soon come to its senses. May more people with cancer be able to safely, legally, affordably access this powerful drug, and find relief in it. Cancer patients should not have to navigate the world of barely-legal pot doc storefronts or dispensaries designed for druggies. Cancer patients should have easy access to cannabis, if they want it. No law or social stigma should stand in their way. Period.
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Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing’s in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email:xeni@boingboing.net.