A Medical Marijuana Essay

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody.”

-- Mother Teresa 1910-97: in The Observer 3 October 1971

Compassion is commonly defined as having three components: a deep awareness of and sympathy for the suffering of others coupled with the wish to relieve it. And indeed, it seems our society is quite comfortable with the first two, having to do with recognition and understanding; but when it gets to the third, the issue of relief – let’s call it the “doing something about it” -- divisions arise. And this makes some sense given that the first two are passive states of mind, while the third, which could be described as passive if we focus on the “wish” (noun) rather than “relieve” (verb) requires no other action. On the one hand, reams have been written on the benefit of contemplation, and there is no denying it’s the wise thing to do much of the time; on the other hand, doing nothing under the guise of pretending careful consideration has a long history of justifying discrimination, prejudice, and inequality. And so it is that disease and disability are political issues as much as health concerns.

Consider the medical marijuana issue. Does a person’s determination that marijuana relieves their pain and suffering give them the right to have it? What we are really talking about here is the right to one’s own body. Pain and suffering are physical and psychological manifestations that only the agent experiencing them can sense. In a word, what pain, or suffering, exactly is, is particular to the individual. And this very specifically relates to the politics of the body.

In his book on the relationship between illness and the goals of medicine, “The Nature of Suffering” (1991), Eric J. Cassell writes: “Sick persons must be empowered in relation to the body – freed from fear and from bondage to the body to the degree possible. To accomplish this they must be provided with knowledge, medications, and other tools to control the manifestations of disease and the support needed to behave normally despite them”(243).

Key here, are the concepts of empowerment, freedom, and knowledge. Given the subjective nature of pain and suffering it seems not only right to allow a sick person’s access to marijuana, but unethical and immoral to do otherwise. As Martin Luther King Jr. might say if he were alive on his name’s day, whether we help those in need of succor is not a choice but a duty: “injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

It is our obligation to empower and enable the suffering and disabled, release them from the fear of seeking relief; and provide them the knowledge to access those tools necessary to a functional life. So, too, is it our duty to use the Constitution as a force for good. A cornerstone of the American political covenant is the right to the “pursuit of happiness,” and that striving would include the freedom to seek palliation from a life of pain and suffering.

And so Michael Oliveri, who has Muscular Dystrophy, and Diane Rivera-Riportella, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease, were two of the many who gathered to applaud the New Jersey legislature’s courage in making that state one of 14 that have legalized the use of marijuana to help patients with debilitating illnesses. “It’s nice to finally see a day when democracy helps heal people,” said Charles Kwiatkowski, 38, one of the many who assembled in Trenton before the vote and celebrated the measure’s approval. Mr. Kwiatkowski, of Hazlet, N.J., who has multiple sclerosis, said his doctors have recommended marijuana to treat neuralgia, which has resulted in his losing all sensation in his lower and upper right arm. “The M.S. Society has shown that this drug will help slow the progression of my disease. Why would I want to use anything else?”

Why indeed! How ironic it is that in an age obsessed with a pharmaceutical fix for everything, an organic remedy as old as recorded history turns out to be the best medicine. The day will come when marijuana will reign as the most effective treatment for depression. But that coronation will most certainly come in the face of a strong and well-heeled opposition from the drug makers who peddle snake oil remedies that have become more and more suspect in their effectiveness, and increasingly perilous in the insidious side-effects they cause. Can you imagine their worry and outrage at the thought of a threat to their insatiable greed. Or even worse, the plaguing nightmares they might suffer at the thought of patients producing their own medicines and managing their own treatment plans.

Which brings us to Cassel’s third component in empowering the sick -- the provision of knowledge. There’s no gainsaying the modern idea that knowledge is power. But knowledge, like medicines themselves, is prescribed and dispensed. It’s no accident then, that in terms of the spiritual and physical liberation marijuana offers; and its potential to affect transformation and healing; and its resistance to appropriation and control, cannabis has been seen as a threat. After all, given that power produces knowledge to serve its own ends, what we know and have been told about marijuana manifests itself in cultural productions, like the film Reefer Madness, for example, which reinforces the wholly fallacious Gateway Drug theory, and other such nonsensical propaganda that has been generated and perpetrated by categorizing marijuana as a narcotic -- as if smoking a joint were the same as shooting heroin. In his later work, Michel Foucault, the 20^th century French philosopher, re-conceptualized his power-knowledge dyad, renaming it Governmentality, meaning that knowledge is controlled and dispensed in such a way as to ensure that governments produce those citizens that are best suited to fulfill their policies. Our government’s long history of demonizing marijuana is a case in point.

It is a tragic fact that the drug lobby in Washington -- which is so powerful in and inextricable from the government itself as to be complicit in the big lie that marijuana is an empty panacea and worthless placebo -- epitomizes the kind of avaricious quackery that reaps huge profits by proliferating false promises and pyrrhic promises.

Sadly, it’s not the suffering “hip” that need to be educated on the medicinal virtues of pot; it is rather our sick and debilitated brethren who deny themselves relief out of a governmental induced ignorance -- fellow citizens that desperately need the enlightenment of truth.

It’s time for the truth about marijuana, and it’s time for a grassroots movement to restore the use of cannabis to its rightful place as a healing sacrament as old as humankind itself.

Best - Randy Tessier (January, 2010)