a straightforward argument for medical marijuana
My name is Kyle Hamilton, and I am 28 years old. I write this, knowing that I have committed a crime, knowing that the statute of limitations has not expired for that crime. But the story I have to tell is important enough that I will risk my freedom to tell it.
Last August, my boyfriend got a phone call... and received some really bad news. His father, he learned, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, stage 3 (metastasized) -- meaning, it had already invaded his bloodstream, and caused malignancy to take root through the rest of his body.
It took us a while to get there to see him. Erik had shown me photographs of his father, who looked like a Harley-Davidson motorcycle rider... as we moved from Chicago to Tucson in a beat-up 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon. Once we arrived in Tucson, and got settled in, his parents sent us two plane tickets to fly back and see them.
And he looked different from the photos. He looked more frail, and more like a bag of skin loosely covering his withered muscles and bones. He had quit his job, because he could no longer do the work, and he was bald because the chemotherapy had caused all of his hair to fall out... and he looked as though he was dying, and it hurt me, and it hurt Erik, and we both cried later that night when he couldn't see it, when he couldn't see us.
Over the next few days, I learned what medications he was on. There's a 72-hour patch full of extremely dangerous narcotics that he was wearing. There were anti-nausea drugs. There were things designed to stimulate his appetite... and none of them worked very well. He was in pain all the time, and he had no energy, and he had no appetite, and all he could seem to do was sit and watch TV. He got worse, and worse, and worse as the days went by.
Finally, he couldn't bear it anymore... and his wife, Erik's mom, called up his sister, who brought him over some marijuana. He smoked about 1/3 of a joint, that night -- he offered me a hit off of it, but I'm not going to take medicine away from someone who needs it -- and then went to bed. I stayed up for a little while longer, and went to bed as well.
The next morning, he was a changed man. He was walking, he was doing things, he was cheerful, he had an appetite, and it was as though he wasn't suffering. He'd finally gotten a good night's sleep, he said -- the first good night of sleep that he'd had in months. That, plus the appetite stimulation, helped him a lot.
I had already been a medical marijuana supporter before. I knew, intellectually, what it could do, and how it did it. But it was then that it hit me, on that visceral level, just what it could mean... not only to those who suffer from cancer and other chronicly debilitating illnesses, but for their families and friends, their support networks, each of whom has to rely on each other for support.
It is not just for the cancer patients themselves, who actually need the marijuana for their chronic, debilitating conditions, but also for the sanity and well-being of their caretakers, that I believe that medical marijuana should be legalized.
And even though I'm not a doctor, even though I'm not a nurse, even though I'm very, very limited in what I can do... if someone has cancer, I will recommend to them, very seriously, that they look into marijuana as a means of controlling their secondary symptoms. It is, truly, a miracle drug.
Reverend Kyle A Hamilton
of the Church of Universal Life
07Aug2005, 0407PDT