The best medicine?

[jbmac]

100 years ago or so, hemp was a component in many medicines.  A tonic for the mind.

[illcommandante]

When I was three, I lay on the floor before the stove, with a inch of Vicks on my chest. Mom's way of apologizing for my Klan family's botched attempt to kill me. The Vicks was for the rheumatic fever they didn't bother to get me antibiotics for. I went into septicemia again in the first grade. I taught myself to read "The Abyss" by lessons sent home from a school that didn't want it's ****** back. I learned to walk again at six. At sixteen I gave Bowerman a 4:11 mile (Hypermasculinity compounded by bird bones from osteoporosis). I arrested doing that. On a battlefield, near death, a Korean ROK saved me when he told the Marines I was "Hmong". But, I was just in endocrine failure. And now, I had wounds too. Wounds that still bleed, fortytwo years later. Marijuana ddn't get me home form the war. Heroin did. Because the army doctors refused to care for a "****** passing for white".  When my navy chasers refused to torture me for Admiral McCain, he sent marines to punch my kidneys to mush. When my unit mutinied, they put me in irons and threw me down the stairs backwards. With my hand in a cast. A hand broken from the osteoporosis so bad I couldn't press a clutch because my leg bent. After six years of service and four field advancements, they punched my kidneys to mush and threw me to the murderers at The Veterans Admnistration. With the story that I was a "Black" And, that was enough for the VA. They stole my boots and sent me out the door in acute pancreatitis. With Pappy Ford's sheriffs waiting to finish off the ******. On a cold winter's night, I swam the Umpqua to escape a lynching. That took some time to get over. Marijuana got me over it.