LAWMAKERS FINALLY SHOW A BIT OF COMMON SENSE

My father died a hard death from lung cancer in 1983. From the first
diagnosis, about six months before he passed, there was never any
real hope, since his type of cancer is nearly always fatal.

Still, he tried to beat it with ever-more aggressive chemotherapy
treatments that took his hair and his body and his energy.

Toward the end, he weighed about 120 pounds, in large part because he
had no appetite and didn't eat.

I had a solution. I offered to get him some marijuana to stimulate
his appetite, but he refused on the grounds that even if it worked
and made him more comfortable, it was still illegal and he didn't
want to spend his last days in jail.

I know his experience was not unique, and I've heard dozens of
versions of it over the years, stories of people who might have been
comforted by the medicinal use of marijuana, and were denied that
comfort. But I've always been angry about that, about the fact that
our government was so stubborn it would refuse a small comfort to a
terminal patient. And they refused it on the grounds that marijuana
is a so-called "gateway" drug that can lead to the use of more
destructive chemicals, like heroin or cocaine. Not all marijuana
users graduate to heroin, they opined, but all heroin users started
with marijuana, so we can't allow its use in any circumstance.

As if a terminal patient had the time to graduate to heroin use.

Successive federal governments have held the line on the medical use
of marijuana for cancer patients and glaucoma patients, even though
13 individual states passed laws legalizing it for that purpose. The
fed's intransigence resulted in some weird news footage as federal
drug agents raided medical marijuana outlets permitted by local law.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before common sense
prevailed, and it looks like that sea change may finally be taking
place. Among the other positive changes being made by the Obama
administration is its decision to stop prosecutions for medical marijuana use.

Perhaps they are just bowing to public opinion. The majority of
Americans support the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes,
and almost 50 percent support the decriminalization of small amounts
of marijuana for personal use.

But perhaps they've just decided that keepingmarijuana out of the
hands of terminal patients and patients suffering from diseases like
glaucoma is another institutionalized cruelty that we can simply do without.

Like waterboarding, for example.