Social Issues: Legalization of Marijuana - Essay Example

Name it and he plays it well, be it basketball, baseball or boxing. He was a health buff and had always zealously guarded his health. We lost touch for a good number of years while I also pursued my own career in another place of the country. We were able to see each other again when our high school batch organized a grand reunion of sorts. At that time, which was just a few years back, he was still in the pink of health. He even joked he never felt any better or younger during that time. Our high school days were some of the best years of our lives.

It was very memorable for most of us, the carefree days of youth. We experimented with a lot of things, starting with trying how to smoke our first cigarettes. We also got into drinking binges at times, just for the heck of it and then some. Those days were simply crazy and we laugh aloud about those days when we can recall it during our reunion. I remember it was Jimmy who mysteriously produced small packets of marijuana leaves and we eagerly tried it. It was my first taste of weeds and experienced those feelings of euphoria people so enthusiastically talk about.

We knew it was banned (even now) but the effects were simply wonderful. I can specifically recall the feeling of floating in the air, a low blood pressure soon ensued but we knew there would be no long term effects (Bell, 2004, p. 62). Both of us see nothing wrong with using marijuana as long as it is done only for recreation. This was our philosophy then and it is the same even now although it is still being banned. A few years after that joyful reunion, we got the sad news that Jimmy was diagnosed with a Stage IV cancer of the bones.

The discovery was only accidental, since he had gone in for routine check-ups for something else but then the doctor noticed something odd with the X-ray results. In the remaining months and weeks of his life, I saw how he suffered and endured pain. On rare occasions when I was able to visit him at the hospital, I clearly saw how the irreversible progress of the disease did him in, due to nausea and loss of appetite. The last weeks of his life were eventually spent at home, when it was obvious there was nothing anymore science can do to help him.

To ease the pain, he somehow got out his mysterious packet of marijuana again. He said he needed to smoke it to somehow ease the pain in his bones and alleviate his feelings of nausea. I really pitied him but there was nothing I could do to help him. I knew marijuana is still illegal but I dared not condemn him for using it again. Everybody knows marijuana has medical benefits but the government authorities would not relent yet on lifting the illegal tag. This was no time to be judgmental to a person in the last remaining days of his life and even encouraged him to just smoke marijuana whenever he feels like it, I said softly to him.

He died soon after the last meeting I had with him last January of this year. I attended his funeral and bade him farewell. There is a strong movement to have marijuana use declared legal for medicinal purpose. What is clearly needed here is a paradigm shift by its opponents who are misguided but attitudes are slowly changing (NYT, 2011, p. 1). There are a number of strong reasons cited by opponents of marijuana use but most of them are woefully based on wrong notions based on false science. People who have not endured severe pain will never understand how effective marijuana can be.

I had seen how just a few