MEDICAL MARIJUANA MARCH

by Julian Heicklen

April 29, 2000

Marijuana is one of God's greatest gifts to humanity. It is a wonder medicine. It has been used as a medicine for 4800 years. It is used in the treatment of nausea, pain, anorexia, aids wasting syndrome, multiple sclerosis, spasticity, bronchitis, asthma, stroke, epilepsy, glaucoma, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Crone's Disease, Wilson's Disease, and Tourette's Syndrome. Many very sick people are being denied appropriate medical care, because it is a crime for a doctor to prescribe, or even advise, his or her patients to use marijuana.

These are the times that try our souls. In 1998, Larry Hirsch, a Philadelphia attorney, filed a class-action suit on behalf of 165 medical marijuana users. I was one of the plaintiffs–the only one that did not use medical marijuana. I read their stories and I cried, not only because of them, but for my country. How can a society torture the sick by denying them medicine? I felt that I had to join them in their anguish.

Here are two of their stories:

Candice Kluge has Crohn's disease. She was given powerful medications, including morphine and steroids. She gained 30 pounds. The medication was highly toxic and caused osteoporosis. She lost the ability to walk. When she stopped the steroids, she had grande mal seizures.

About 1996, she started on marijuana. Her diarrhea, stomach spasms, and pain stopped, her spirits lifted, and she was able to eat regularly for the first time in 2-1/2 years. She has stopped prescription medicine altogether.

When she started marijuana, her children called her pothead, and her husband threatened divorce. After observing her progress, her family supported her medication. Because of the difficulty of obtaining marijuana, Candice grows her own.

Candice would like to return to college, but she is denied disability aid because she uses marijuana. If she discontinues the marijuana, she will be too sick to return to school. The Republicrats want to put her in prison and deprive her of her medicine.

In 1986, when Cathy Jordan was 36, she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) (Lou Gehrig's disease). She was told that she would not live for 5 years. After two years on prescribed medication, her condition was deteriorating. She experienced bouts of uncontrollable crying and stopped using the prescribed medicines except for Clonapin to aid in sleeping. She started smoking two marijuana cigarettes per day. Her appetite returned. The marijuana eases the constant twitching in her extremities, the pain from muscle spasms, the ache in her hands and neck, and the headaches. Not only was she alive after 12 years, but she still could talk as much as ever. The Republicrats want to punish Cathy Jordan for using medical marijuana.

In the future, one of these stories may be your story. I want you to be able to use appropriate medicine without the fear of imprisonment. That is one of the reasons why I am the Libertarian Party candidate for Attorney General of Pennsylvania. If I am elected, Pennsylvania will stop torturing sick people by denying them their medicine. Third party candidates need to get 22,000 signatures to get on the ballot. I hope that those of you in the audience from Pennsylvania will sign my petitions to get on the ballot.

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

Eleven score and four years ago our forebears brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that there are certain unalienable rights; that among these is the right to be left alone. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. Many of its victims are among us. We have come to dedicate our lives to see that the dream shall become reality. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do so. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it must never forget the indignities and suffering that they have endured. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who suffered have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these horrors we take increased devotion to that cause for which they suffered so much–that we here highly resolve that they shall not have suffered in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

BENEDICTION

May the Lord bless you and protect you

May the Lord's countenance shine upon you, and may the Lord be gracious to you

May the Lord lift his face to you and grant you peace.