A DOSE OF DESPERATION

MEDICINAL POT: No column in months prompts as quick, instant or unanimous
response as the one here on Sunday, calling the continued resistance to the
medical use of marijuana wrong and offensive.

We judged withholding a drug that might ease the passage of the terminally
ill to be moral sadism.

Some responses were short and sweet: "Your Sunday column on pot and the
dying?" e-mailed L. "I can sum it up with two words: Hear hear."

But the longer messages were the ones that evidenced heat, heart and anger.

A few of them this morning ...

JUST WAIT: "I too am a 'boomer,'" wrote M. "I've lost both my parents but
if I had them back, and one was suffering I'd buy any drug from anyone at
any price in order to keep them pain-free. Will we have to wait for one of
the policy makers to have a terminally ill parent or loved one? Wait until
their own road has been radically shortened because of cancer?

On that day, the weed will be grown and harvested in the sidewalk cracks
and the boulevards dividing major highways.

What is it they say? A conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night.

We're helpless in the grip of policy makers who haven't faced the music yet."

SUFFERING: "Well, well," e-mails Susan. "Finally someone who has something
intelligent to say when it comes to the issue of legalizing marijuana.

I watched my father go through the battle with cancer twice.

I wished fervently both times that there was something that could help him
be more comfortable. The drugs they gave him to stop nausea definitely
didn't work. If I'd had the nerve, I would have scored him a joint.

But being only 15 at the time, I was too afraid my dad would find out his
little girl smoked pot. The second time he went through it, I had outgrown
that phase of my life. Marijuana is not the only fight either.

Hemp IS the wave of the future.

It's hard to believe our out of date government will ever forget Reefer
Madness. As much a joke as that 'movie' was, some of the older generation
really believes that garbage. Get over it. Get on with it. The legalization
of marijuana for medical uses will come eventually. But how many people
will suffer before that time comes?

Too many, I'm afraid."

TO DIE ALONE: "My dad never left his upstairs bedroom in the last 10 months
of his life," recalls Richard. "We changed doctors, drugs, begged
clinicians for more painkillers, better, different, anything. Have you any
idea what it's like to hear your dad cry himself to sleep every night?

And when sleep doesn't come, just moan? Our family spent more than a year
watching him flail between the two extremes offered us: Unsuitable
medication that did nothing to relieve his pain, or narcotics that put him
in a zombie state not far from death.

We asked about marijuana at the time and were told it wasn't possible.

They were quite willing to write us prescriptions for anything in the drug
cupboard -- mostly because they were sick of talking to us -- but not for
the drug whose name begins with M. My dad didn't allow anybody outside the
family to come upstairs his last few months.

Yeah, we were in the house, but there's no question in my mind that he died
in a private orbit of pain. Alone. That was two years ago. Where is the
sense in withholding anything that might give the terminally ill comfort?
Do only the desperate see this? It's appalling."

HOSPICE: "I've been with many terminally ill patients like the ones you
mention," e-mails Joyce, a former nurse. "You will not be surprised to
learn that in many hospice settings, the medicinal use of marijuana is not
unknown.

Indeed, in two cases I know of, the schoolyard purchase you offer as a joke
is not that far from the truth.

Friends and relatives of the terminally-ill often bring in what the law
officially forbids.

Staff look the other way. Wouldn't alcohol, caffeine and tobacco be in the
same category as marijuana if they were introduced today?

Addictive, dangerous under some circumstances? I'm not alone in thinking
the present prohibition on the medical use of marijuana puts home, clinic
or hospice settings at risk for turning a blind eye to what obviously works
for many. I can't tell you how many calls I've taken thru the years from
desperate people, in search of the -- ahem -- resources needed to ease the
struggle for their loved ones. Illegal or not. It's well past time the law
was changed."

There are two dozen more, but I think you get the idea.

TAX IT: "Just because I am a teenager doesn't mean I smoke that stuff,"
begins J. "Doesn't mean I don't either.

But that shouldn't matter.

Withholding a drug that has been proven to ease pain in cancer patients is
evil. Put yourself in that position.

What is wrong with giving comfort to a human being?

Legalize the drug, tax the hell out of it, maybe even reduce the GST. Make
everyone happy."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski