...if I may share one of my own. Names have been omitted to protect the anonymity of both living and deceased.

A Few Years Ago, my aunt was diagnosed with some type of cancer. I cannot remember the type of cancer that she was stricken by, though I remember that she was battling with it for something like seven or eight years.

Her doctors, and I use the term here with some contempt, initially put her through some of the most insanely painful shite that humans have devised in the name of 'treatment', and she was Not Doing Well, though keeping a brave face on.

Her treatments for pain went through the usual pharmacopaea, ending up, of course, with various flavours of the opiates, and 'really really ending' with Morphine. Lots of Morphine. As muuuuch morphine as you want, for free. REally.

This basically destroyed any quality of life she was capable of enjoying.

I'm not sure who in her life suggested it, but at some point in this insanity, someone suggested cannabis instead of 'Big M', and she was desperate enough to try anything.

She found it worked for her as well or better than the morphine, and did not destroy her quality of life. She quickly progressed to what one would refer in the vernacular as a 'chronic' level of tolerance, something her teenaged children taunted her gently over, but she nevertheless had a pretty good last-five-years or so, and was active up till the very end.

What made everyone in the family quietly furious with the system was that she basically had to pretend to take the firking morphine, and her husband, my uncle, had to buy her preferred pain medication 'off some guy in a bar', as there was nothing resembling 'medical MJ' in Canada at the time, and the holy-jihad War On Drugs was jus' getting into full swing. People who smoked pot were 'druggies' or 'potheads', or, worse, might be deeeeallllerssss...

My uncle's unfortunate choice of pain medication for supressing the pain of watching his wife die before his eyes, slowly, was to take two quarts of whisky. Per day. I am not joking. One-in-the-mornin' and one-in-the-evenin'. He is the ONLY person that I have ever known who qualified as an alcoholic by any definition of the word who was NOT AN ASSHOLE. He really just used it to dull his pain, so he could get through his own life, being a productive and precise tradesman. I personally watched him do various and sundry tasks around his own and our house, and his workmanship was impeccable.

He really should have given his wife's medication-of-choice a try, but for him it was absolutely taboo.

I don't think he drinks anymore, thank God.

I don't ever go through a day without thanking God for my own preferred pain medication. Please understand that I smoke in a day what the average 'abuser' takes maybe four days to a week to go through, and I'm currently not-quite-smoking as much as I'd like to, due to financial constraints. My aunt was probably smoking as much as I am, right now, maybe a bit more.

Neither my aunt's, nor my pain medication were subsidised by the taxpayer in any way, and I LIKE it that way. I purchase what I need, from many different strains that are available, grown by experts, legally, and yet quietly, whilst in an open yet secure location. The transaction is honourable and pure, in the most honest of capitalistic senses. The dispensary and I both profit by the exchange, and I do not need to feel guilty for burdening my neighbour in any way for my medication in a Public Health System run amok.

May sanity someday return to the world. Please forgive me for ranting a bit.

I miss my aunt.