To the Editor,
I, too, am an old fart, 60 in a couple of months. I never did drugs as a teenager. Yes, like most of our generation, I tried mescalin but not the rest. I didn’t drink to excess. Yes, I drank but I grew out of it for my kids’ sake. Now that I’m an old fart, I always wondered why I didn’t become an alcoholic or a junkie since our generation produced so many. It was the way we were brought up. Today, with the legalization of pot comes many worries. Yes, if you teach your kids not to use any, even alcohol until they are over 25 when their brains are fully-developed then we won’t have problems.
Unlike our generation, kids today will teach their children better, they will talk about it and not be preached at like we were back then. Also, I got my license to use pot two years ago. I don’t smoke because I was around secondhand smoke all my life and I’m asthmatic. But I use a vaporizer. I use a gram a day and it does help so much.
It calms my anxiety and panic attacks. It doesn’t drive me into paranoid episodes. It helps with the pain I have due to knee replacement surgery. I have the shakes real bad, not diagnosed with anything about that yet but going on family history I can imagine what is causing it. When I’m using the pot, I don’t shake at all. I’m going on three months without taking pot. I wanted to see what the pot was doing to me and for me. I don’t get those wild rides people seem to think happens, when you use responsibly. Not everyone who takes it would go to those lengths; not everyone would become a junkie. We shouldn’t label all those who try pot as such.
Maybe some of us just learned a little better than others.I see my daughter using pot. She has many physical problems and the pot helps her tremendously. She doesn’t go overboard, she’s not paranoid, she doesn’t suffer from depression, but she is pain-free while the high lasts. And that is the reason most people are fighting to have it legalized. Surely you can understand this; we don’t need to worry about being arrested to get the pleasure of having a few hours every day without pain, being able to do normal things without having to sit down and say I can’t do this because I’ll be suffering for the next few days.
Do you really object to people who need it to help with their health not wanting to be arrested for using it? We aren’t asking to legalize heroin or morphine or any other opiates. All we want is to be able to sit back and use something God put on this earth to use. I was using Tylenol 3’s to help with the pain and now the government says, ‘oh no, that’s drug prescription abuse’. We need to cut down on what we give patients who are going through chemo. Those who have cancer that can’t be cured – do you want them to suffer and have to buy it off the street and worry about being arrested? I hope for all the people who need help managing their pain that they look into it. Because it does help and not all will become junkies because some of us know better.
Dannielle Perrault,
Cornwall
