What helped me through cancer? Weed

Renata Gortan

When people about to start chemotherapy ask me what helped me through cancer, I give them a list. Weed is at the top of it.  

It’s not something I’ve written about while chronicling my treatment, but with the federal government moving to loosen restrictions on imported medical marijuana, now is a good time to have a rational discussion about its benefits.

There are groups that will cry foul at this and rage about the insidious nature of the drug, that as a nation we are all going to become addicts, but chances are if they saw someone they loved convulsing from the pain, they’d hand over that spliff.

Medical marijuana is not about getting stoned or feeling high. It’s about natural pain relief with minimal side effects.

Modern medicine is wonderful and I thank it for keeping me alive but everything comes at a price.

Chemotherapy is a brutal treatment that wreaks havoc on your whole system, breaking your body in order to cure it. The accepted way to deal with it is to prescribe opioids such as Endone or OxyContin, otherwise known as hillbilly heroin. My pharmacist was so concerned when I went to fill out my prescription that he sat me down and talked through how to take it. This was the man who had been supplying me with all my chemo meds but he was more worried about Endone than anything else.

Two footballers had just overdosed on it and he wanted to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to me. Endone is prescribed to chemo patients as pain relief because it works.

It’s strong enough to stand up to all the other drugs floating through your body. But it comes with nasty side effects, including potential psychotic episodes, difficulty breathing and hypotension.

Addiction kicks in almost instantaneously. Like a pillowy bed that you gently sink into, it takes the aches out of your body so that you feel like you’re floating. It’s the medical version of a lullaby, soothing you to sleep.

When you wake, often in agony, it’s all too easy to grab another and repeat the process. I stopped taking Endone when the side effects became too much to bear.

I switched to marijuana because it also offered pain relief, caused drowsiness which was blissful when the steroids I was taking for chemo gave me insomnia and as a bonus, it stimulated my appetite.

I talked to all my doctors before taking it and there were no contra indications so I went ahead. It gave me all the benefits of Endone without the side effects.

If medical marijuana had been legal, it would have been easier to find, I would have known exactly what I was getting and my oncologist would have had a viable pain-management alternative.

The biggest arguments against marijuana as pain relief are that it’s illegal and potentially addictive.

If the government approves medical marijuana it will be legal. And, as someone who has taken both forms of pain relief, I can tell you that it is a lot less addictive than legal heroin.