Patric Mayers, with his testimony and personal lobbying, was instrumental in getting the California Legislature to pass a state law allowing cannabis for medical use. Mayers’ life was saved in 1976 when his doctors illegally advised him to use marijuana for his chemotherapy nausea. At this point, Mayers weighed only 93 pounds. The easily smoked cannabis eased Patric’s nausea and gave him an appetite for food. This lifesaving function of cannabis, if developed in a laboratory, would be hailed around the globe and in every medical publication and would be Nobel Prize material. Instead, there is a forced silence because there is no money to be made on it.

    Mayers received the “best flower tops of Thai and sinsemilla” free from dealers and students in his San Francisco law school where Mayers was class president when stricken with cancer in 1975.

    Healthy, vigorous, and living in L.A., Mayers was shocked in 1981 to learn that the state attorney general, in charge of the medical cannabis program, refused to supply federally grown or even police-impounded contraband marijuana to cancer patients; cannabis to which he had legal access for doctors to prescribe or obtain for dying patients.

    In 1982, Mayers got mad and caused the L.A. Times, other media, and Willie Brown, Speaker of the California Assembly, to demand compliance with the state’s 1979 marijuana law.

    Following a few months of visible compliance, the policy to block medical access was back in full force. After 10 years of run-arounds, refusals, and harassment, the well intentioned “Compassionate Marijuana” program lapsed automatically.

the authorized on-line version of Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”

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