Stirring the pot

President Barack Obama did something new the other day, though it should have been expected given what we know about him and his administration; he conducted a virtual town hall meeting with Americans.

Using the Internet, in other words, he took questions from just about everywhere. According to the White House, 92,927 people had submitted over 104,000 questions; in order to reduce them to the workable number of a dozen or so that he’d actually have time to address, the online participants were told to vote for the questions they thought most important. In the end, over 3.6 million votes had been cast.

In an array that included questions about the auto industry, universal health care, mortgages and education, the top vote-getting category was “jobs.” And the top vote-getter within that category asked “whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation.”

The President looked at the question for a moment. “I don't know what this says about the online audience,” he remarked with that grin.

“But, seriously,” he added, “no, I don't think this is a good strategy to grow our economy.”

But the question and ensuing buzz about it did stir discussion in some quarters, and that’s a good thing.

I could go on at some length about the advantages that might result were we to make an honest woman out of Mary Jane; the salient argument might be the predictable reduction in our prison populations.

But I want to narrow the focus here to the matter of medical marijuana, for it has special significance to me.

Back in the late 1980s my Dad was diagnosed with leukemia, in a form that mainly attacks the elderly.

Aside from fatigue, the most devastating effect of the illness was a devastating loss of appetite, and it’s hard to do well if you don’t eat.

This is when I learned to shuck oysters; I don’t do oysters myself, and found that prying them open is a real challenge. But he really went for Blue Points, so shucking got easy. He loved lamb chops, too. But that was about all that appealed.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t eat, you see; it was just that the appetite was gone.

Now, we knew somehow that ingesting marijuana in any form generates a keen, almost relentless, appetite, and we were certain that if we could bake some loaded-up brownies for him, for example, he would then eat great plates of food and bowls of soup and it would help. He liked brownies, too.

We talked about it some. I remember so clearly wishing, wondering if, we could get our hands on some. Not that we were afraid of breaking the law; we just didn’t know how to get it. Didn’t have the right connections, you could say.

Dad died in 1990. If he'd had an appetite maybe he could have made it through just a couple of years more, long enough to receive the new treatment discovered in 1992 that might well have worked for him.

It should not be surprising that I absolutely support making marijuana legal for medical purposes. In California and other states where the law now permits it, the Obama justice department has indicated that state law in the matter should be respected.

Hysteria over marijuana needs to be tamped down across the board, and not just in the minds of those who talk about how bad it is over their cocktails.