where is one supposed to make these “comments” and in what format should they be made (email, facebook, a letter, a report, public debate?) regarding the document and requirements specified.

AFTERWORD to my book Sexe, pot et politique (in French)

In February 2016, I almost died.
I travelled three weeks to India without my medication. After ten days I had lost 4.5 kg and had slept only about twenty hours—two hours a night, five or ten minutes at a time. I started having accidents, running into the walls, falling down stairs. I was crying for nothing. For everything. I really understood how insomnia can become fatal. I consulted several doctors—Homeopathic and Ayurvedic. One of them told me that if I had died, the cause of death would have been classified as “heart attack” or “stroke” or “accident” or even “suicide,” but not the real reason: menopause.
I suffer from the most severe form of menopause. My hot flashes last between three and five minutes each, and are sometimes so powerful that I vomit; the bed sheets are to wring in the morning because I lose on average two kilograms of water during the night. I’m always thirsty. I always have to go to the toilet. The noise bothers me. I forget. I get depressed, I try to figure out why and I can’t find out. It infuriates me. I have no more concentration, libido, nor joy of living.
The doctor had heard of this extremely severe form of menopause, but had never met a woman still alive to talk about it. I told him that I did not take any more hormones since almost two years because suspicious activity had developed on my ovaries. The oncologist told me at the time: “Stop the hormones! But it’s hell without the hormonal patch! I had no life. I took four kinds of drugs that hazed me terribly—antidepressants, two kinds of anxiolytics, sleeping tablets. I was very profitable for the pharmaceutical industry, but I was no longer functioning. Until I found after two months of agony without the hormones, a drug—a plant—which eliminated ALL of my symptoms and gave me a completely normal life.
—Since when do you take this medicine? asked another doctor I consulted.
—Since December 2014.
—And why did not you bring it with you?
—Because I cannot travel with it, especially not in your country, because it is illegal.
—Really? What is it?
—Cannabis.
Her face has changed completely. She frowned, then frantically typed some things on her keyboard, turned the screen towards me and showed me the grave dangers of this plant. It was written there, in black and white, before my eyes, on solemn documents. The same words that are used everywhere to demonize this plant, invented to fill in official reports, to feed a distorted economy. And then she said:
—The worst is that you can become a sex maniac. And since you are travelling without your husband, maybe you’ll be tempted by…
She had not finished her sentence that I realized the extent of the struggle ahead.
I left India emaciated and weak. When I returned home, upon setting foot in the house, I took the equivalent of one grain of rice of cannabis oil. One tiny grain. After ninety minutes, all of the symptoms had disappeared, for twelve hours. I was back to normal. Two rice grains a day and I sleep well. I am in a good mood. I’m functional, productive. And my entourage can also breathe again, otherwise I’m really not bearable.
I am a legal patient in Canada, where we use cannabis to treat symptoms—mainly pain, nausea and tremors—but not to cure diseases. Also, I cannot find decarboxylated crude oil (i.e. whose components were activated) in Canada. I buy the raw plant (from legal producers provided by my doctor), with which I make biscuits. It is a longer, more complicated and less accurate method, but the result is the same.
Ironically, in South Africa, where cannabis is still illegal (oil producers risk their freedom every day), the utilization of the plant is much more advanced. I found myself in a circle of about a thousand people. Many people in the group use cannabis to treat cancer; some are healed, even after having a diagnosis of a few weeks to live … years ago. Not all, this is not a miracle cure! But the cancer cure rate of patients in our circle is about fifty percent. Knowing there is an average two-percent success rate for chemotherapy, these healings cannot, must not be kept under silence! And when the great laboratories of the world and even the National Institute of Cancer of the USA admit that components of the cannabis plant kill cancer cells, it must be investigated, studied, understood. Used! On the one hand, members of the US government deny the therapeutic value of cannabis and on the other, patents are granted for its medicinal use (e.g., US Patent 6,630,507). To say it is hypocrisy would be an understatement. This should be our right, not that of the industry, to choose between chemotherapy and cannabis oil.
And to the eternal question, ‘Are you stoned?” the answer is no. I do not take enough for that (0.1 g twice daily). THC tolerance threshold varies greatly from one person to another. One can feel euphoric effects with a tiny fraction of a grain of rice. While others need several grains. People who must take large doses, for cancer, for example—about a gram of oil per day, or even more—feel the effects of THC. Some cannot tolerate this dosage, so they use suppositories. In this case, the effect of THC is greatly reduced, actually almost not felt, but it does its anticarcinogenic job anyway.
My group also has people who suffer from Parkinson’s, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis (a woman saw lesions on her brain decrease by half), disorders related to anxiety and depression, arthritis, Crohn’s disease (many are cured), attention deficit disorders (lots of youth work better than with Ritalin), epilepsy or Dravet’s syndrome. I taught piano (or rather developed motor skills using the piano) to a boy suffering from this syndrome. These children have between two and three hundred seizures a day. By removing a component of the plant, the CBD (they do not need the THC), they only suffer two seizures per month! And we want to deprive them of that? On an extraordinary quality of life?
I have the choice between risking cancer, risking death by madness or by accident and risking prison. What would you choose?
Cannabis has been illegal for less than one percent of the time of its utilization in history. We are living in this one percent. Information about cannabis found in this book is not fictional. Unfortunately, the circus of politics either. If leaders really had the interests and health of the population at heart, they would change, tomorrow morning, the wrongful classification of this plant at the United Nations, which defines it as a dangerous drug. A poison. Cannabis was, before politics got involved and messed everything up, used to treat more than one hundred diseases and symptoms.
The science has categorically proven that cannabis has extraordinary medicinal values, both palliative and curative.
I know, I owe my life to this plant, like so many others.
Lucie Pagé
August 2016

P-S.: Regarding the recreational side of things, I would like to know who said that the euphoria caused by alcohol is more acceptable than that caused by pot. Especially knowing that alcohol treats nor cures no diseases whatsoever!