Debate: Should a 7-year-old cancer patient be given medical marijuana?

Even the New York Times thinks pot should be legalized’but does that mean it’s okay to treat a child’s leukemia symptoms with it?

According to Mykayla Comstock’s family, yes.

The cancer patient is just 7-years-old, and according to The Oregonian, she’s one of 52 minors in Oregon’s medical marijuana program.

‘My Kayla has a treatment plan in place for chemotherapy. She is receiving a multitude of chemotherapy drugs both intravenously and through intramuscular injections,’ Makaylas’s mom, Erin Purchase, wrote on her Facebook page, Brave Mykayla. ‘She has to undergo treatment for the next three years, until she is 10. She will lose her hair, feel nausea, pain and depression. She won’t feel like a child,’

According to Health Canada, medical marijuana can be used to treat severe pain, cachexia, anorexia, weight loss, and severe nausea from cancer.

Purchase agrees. She told The Oregonian that thanks to marijuana, Mykayla is ‘like she was before’a normal kid.’

Though many people support Purchase’s decision to treat Mykayla’s symptoms with medical marijuana, her father, Jesse Comstock, is worried about its effects on her development.

Mykayla says it makes her feel ‘funny and happy’ and helps her ‘eat and sleep.’

What do you think? If medical marijuana helps ease a child’s suffering, is it acceptable to use it? Or should Mykayla’s family consider another method of pain relief?

-Katharine Watts, Associate Web Editor; Image from the Brave Mykayla Facebook group

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