Skip to main content

A question of political coursage: Medical Marijuana

A friend's father has stage 4 lung cancer metastisized into the lymph nodes--prognosis: several months. He can't tolerate visiting his son and daughter-in-law to play with his grandchildren because he can't get comfortable. It's not pain so much as discomfort (there is a difference), and the upset stomach he gets from traveling even short distances in a car.

Clinical studies suggest strongly that medical marijuana would relieve his worst symptoms, allowing him a few more precious weeks to watch Scoobie-Doo with his grand-daughters.

I suggested that he move out of state, maybe to Elkton, Maryland, a few miles from his current house.

Twelve states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, ,and Washington) have active medical marijuana programs.

Delaware doesn't. According to the Trust for American Health, nearly 4,200 of our citizens will come down with cancer next year, the nation's 11th highest rate. More than 1,700 Delawareans will die from it, says the National Cancer Institute, and many of your neighbors will suffer nausea, vomiting, headaches, and chronic muscle pain--just from their treatments.

Similar situations pertain to patients with AIDs and other chronic diseases.

Dozens of medical associations and respected research organizations across the country and the world support the use of medical marijuana, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Federation of American Scientists, the Lymphoma Foundation of America, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

In fact, it is difficult to find a legitimate medical organization that doesn't support medical marijuana.

Almost as difficult as it is to find citizens with the political courage to stand up and demand that their state legislators take responsible action since the Federal government won't (Bush or Clinton, it hasn't mattered).

I'd like to be able to say that we don't have medical marijuana legisltation in Delaware because our lawmakers are too busy featherbedding state employment rolls with their relatives, or because they're more closely focused on issue like keeping First State citizens from finding inexpensive medications on the internet (or mandating the use of bicycle helmets for those old enough to drive cars).

But the real reason is our own lack of moral courage.

One of the sites you can link to from this blog is Delaware Citizens in Favor of Medical Marijuana Legalization, where you can sign a petition in favor of legalizing medical marijuana.

Only fourteen people (including me) have signed it. Four people felt obliged to remain anonymous, and at least one person appears to live in a Scandinavian country where they don't have capital letters. So let's call it NINE people in this state who thus far have found the personal and political courage to advocate for a cause espoused by the American Medical Association and lots of suffering, dying fellow citizens.

Maybe--I really hope this is true--the problem is that you just didn't know it was there. Could be. If so, we've cured that now. Wish we could cure cancer and AIDs that easily.

But now that you know, how about it? Today, before you leave this blog to see what somebody else has to say, take the requisite two minutes to sign the petition.

And have the courage, especially if you think of yourself as a Libertarian, to sign your name.

Comments

The Last Ephor said…
I would love to meet the person who really and truly thinks that denying *any* drug to a terminally ill person is right, fair, moral, just or whatever.
Duffy
I've met them; well-meaning nanny staters who earnestly believe that even when you are dying they know better than you do.

Many of them, unfortunately, are physicians.
Washington has a state marijuana law on the books written by a doctor who didn't think asking a lawyer about drafting pitfalls was necessary. We also have a US attorney in Western Washington (who succeeded John McKay, one of the administrations' eight targets in the big purge) who goes completely batshit over medical marijuana and can't wait to jail people about it. So technically we're on the bus, but mostly clinging, outside, to the bike rack.
vijai said…
Ultimately, the politicians who have demonstrated such hostility toward the historical and
scientific record of marijuana as a medicine will go down as some of American
history's biggest dunces and/or liars.

- - - - -
vijai

http://www.marijuanaaddictiontreatment.com

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...