(This question started as a hijack of another thread.)
Did the current laws hasten Emmitt Scott’s death? Mr. Scott, if you recall, amused the nation by calling police after people raided his garden to steal some of the cannabis that he grew to mitigate the pain he suffered from a failing kidney.
Instead of helping him, the police were obliged to cut down all of his contraband plants and charge him as a criminal.
Twenty days later, without his daily cup of cannabis tea, Emmit Scott died.
According to a neighbor, “All of the sudden when this bust started, you know he looked like he went downhill and just got sick.”
…the preliminary ruling is that he died of liver failure. So:
[li]what does marajuana do to prevent liver failure?[/li][li]he was supposedly drinking it to help with a kidney problem. Where’s the connection?[/li]
Now then…where’s the debate?
Confiscating the mans marijuana certainly didn’t relieve his suffering but I don’t think that it contributed to his death.
Cancer patients, on the other hand, frequently lose their appetite as a side effect of chemotherapy drugs. Marijuana is effective at both relieving pain and stimulating appetite in this case. To deny patients this course of treatment, the terminally ill ones is particular, is incompetent at best and criminal at worst, in my opinion.
That’s what we get for letting politicians instead of dictors decide medical policy. The current mindless yammering of government-subsidized anti-marijuana propaganda makes a mockery of the physical and emotional agony of hundreds of thousands of terminally ill patients and serves to keep them in that state.
–Nut Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
When I saw this topic, I thought it would be about Peter McWilliams.
McWilliams was on chemotherapy, but he died by choking on his own vomit in his sleep. He barfed in his sleep as a result of the nausea brought on by the chemotherapy. He had previously kept his nausea at bay with marijuana, but the Federal crackdown on medial marijuana took that option away from him.
tracer, IIRC, Peter McWilliams actually died on the floor of his bathroom from the acute nausea brought on by the protease inhibitors used to keep his HIV infection in check. He was exhausted and unable to clear his airway, aspirated his vomitus and suffocated.
Same cause of death, different circumstances, and I hope to Goddess the people who persecuted him find themselves in the same hopeless circumstances someday. Peter was a damn fine writer and a good person. He is sorely missed.
Well, the law is the law, right or wrong. I am 100% in favor of legalizing medical marijuana. But he should have KNOWN that if you call in the police to help you save your illegal crop, “zaniness will ensue.” That said, it seems like a no-win situation for him: let crooks steal his stash? Call police, who will have no legal choice but to confiscate it? Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly, for a variety of obvious reasons.
Poor schmoe . . . Shouldn’t happen to a dawg . . .
NutWrench, one way or another this is a bold claim:
When I first read this, I thought you were suggesting that lack of marijuana was keeping terminally ill patients in the state of being terminally ill. I’ve reread it, and I don’t think you are suggesting marijuana cures terminal illnesses. So, my second thought is that you are suggesting that “hundreds of thousands” of patients have absolutely no effective pain relief if they don’t have marijuana. That too, is a bold statement. And one that I would very much like to see proof of.
Son of a bitch. I didn’t know y’all were talking about the same Peter McWilliams. I correspond with him via email for a short while back in 1996 after reading Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do. He seemed to be a pretty good guy and I’m sorry to find out he passed away.
While my eyes tend to glaze over when chronic smokers tout the herb as an all-around panacea, it is easy to prove that it can help for a variety of things and has less unpleasant side-effects than most pharmaceutical products. (It’s the pleasant side-effects that seem to be controversial.) Personally, while I have smoked a fair amount of pot in my youth, it never occurred to me to use it as an analgesic, except in the rare instance of a tension headache. Before I quit smoking it, I was making it into oil-capsules, which I used for fun, to sleep, and as gifts for sick elders who were having problems with their prescribed drugs and didn’t want people in their co-op to smell them burning herb. (Or was that a dream that happened to someone I don’t know? I forget.)