As I'm sure some of you have read, Senator Bill Mescher of Pinopolis has recently begun proposing a bill that would allow the use of medical marijuana in South Carolina. This bill comes twenty years after the death of his wife, who "died a long, agonizing death" battling lung cancer.

The full story can be found here.

After reading the above mentioned story, a quote from Sen. Mescher really hit home for me. He says, "People won't let dogs die with that kind of suffering."

When I was thirteen years old, my mother died of cancer. Like Sen. Mescher's wife, it too was a long and agonizing death. I remember watching my mother deteriorate from the bubbly, full-of-life woman I grew up with to a shell of a person she would never be again. It was truly heartbreaking to watch the pain she suffered, no matter how much she tried to hide it. We lived in New Orleans, and she would routinely make trips to Bethesda, MD for chemotherapy treatments, sometimes for weeks at a time, usually with no one by her side but her shadow.

When she'd return home she was a completely different person. We all knew she was in terrible pain, nauseous constantly, barely eating anything at all. Anyone who has watched a loved one die from this disease, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Medical marijuana use was, of course, out of the question due mostly to the fact that in Louisiana it is a violation of federal law to "prescribe" marijuana regardless of state laws. Instead, she took a cocktail of medications every day, of everything ranging from Morphine to Zoloft. In order to numb the pain when that didn't work, she would routinely call on my older brother to mix copious amounts of alcoholic Pina Coladas. As far back as I can remember before her diagnosis, my mother never drank a day in her life.

Is it possible that the use of medical marijuana may have prolonged her life? Maybe not. Would she still have died? Most likely. But now, ten years later, I firmly believe that her quality of life would have been vastly improved had she been legally allowed to use marijuana as a tool to combat her pain and allow her to be human again. This wasn't a woman who came even remotely close to the modernized stereotypical image of a pot smoker. She was not a child on a playground looking to get high, or a hippie still clamoring for her glory days.

She was a mother, a wife, a sister, and my best friend; and for many other people out there, she is that suffering friend or relative who's pain could be eased simply by smoking a little reefer.