No stoner jokes, please

[Re: “Weed for health,” People, News, Oct. 29] Although this article was sympathetic to medical marijuana users, as a Federally Licensed Medical Marijuana User who is also married to one, I must say that I was offended by the line in the subhead, “get high on his supply.” Although highness sometimes occurs, it is not the goal. Symptom alleviation is, and often that is under-managed.

Also, we do not “score weed,” we acquire our medicine. Please refrain from using vaguely or pointedly derogatory jargon when discussing medical marijuana. Our lives are difficult enough without having to deal with the winks and giggles that come with the stigma of terms like “dope,” “stoner” and the like.

>>Russell Barth, Federally Licensed Medical Marijuana User, Patients Against Ignorance and Discrimination on Cannabis

[Re: “Weed for health,” People, News, Oct. 29] Cannabis is a weed, if by definition a weed is a plant other people don’t like.

Cannabis is a sacred herb written about in biblical times and prior wherever it grew, for those who enjoy history. It is Earth’s best medicine and most industrially versatile plant. Right now it’s hard at work decontaminating the radioactive soil at Chernobyl, and bringing relief to millions of Canadians.

Some people call it marijuana, pot, grass, whatever else and all for different reasons. Because it is nature’s botanical crowning achievement after 3.5 million years of R&D, it has a lot of enemies afraid of competition from a plant harder to eradicate than dandelions and safer than water.

>>Bruce Codere

Investigate McGill drunks!

McGill University was recently named as one of the top universities in the world. But for those of us who attend the school, it’s better known as a party haven, where more emphasis is placed on drink than on academia. (Sorry, but it is true.)

If you think this problem only occurs during frosh week, you would be wrong. There is no obligation for the students who live in residence to act accordingly or to respect the community. Stand on the corner of Parc and Prince Arthur ANY evening at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., and you will find groups of McGill students drunk, shouting, urinating, fighting and disrupting the neighbourhood. This is a nightly occurrence and the school does nothing.

So, are universities only responsible for students from 9 to 5? Or, if they live in residence, should this responsibility be extended to include overseeing anti-social behaviours?

Get on this more “shady” side of one of the world’s top universities.

>>Andy Katman

The language of remembrance, clarified
by Sting

When we show each other our distinguished wounds, are we also expressing reverence toward the fallen—or only a tribal arrogance? Sometimes the very language of remembrance can unintentionally increase ethnic antagonisms. It’s enough to know that the ugliest truth has more to the scenario: “holocaust” is a word without borders.

Politicians are wrong if they think this term should refer exclusively to events in Jewish history. That’s what Montreal M.P. Irwin Cotler suggested in an editorial earlier this year. Does anyone really need a unique word for the sadly recurrent and diverse phenomenon of human extermination? Does any other term—in Rwandan, in Native American, in Armenian—taste less bitter? Need we compare atrocities of such magnitude? Should we rank one above any other?

The lesson to be learned from genocide is not to remember it historically, but to anticipate and avert it unconditionally. In the case of the Middle East tensions, universality of purpose is more important than partisan righteousness. If we tried facing the truth of man’s inhumanity to man in all its chaos, we could find ourselves ashamed as our enemies are supposed to be. And one way to keep an enemy is to exalt your own sufferings as if it could claim an exclusive vocabulary.

Is there any alternative to tolerating the status quo of irreconcilable differences? Regardless of where we come from, we better start diminishing our tragic history if we want it to stop interfering with our future. It’s the fervour with which each side claims it deserves Jerusalem that guarantees war instead of co-existence. The British songwriter Sting clarifies my point when he sang: “Without freedom from the past, things can only get worse.”

The past should teach us more about hope, which binds us, than about pains, which divide us. We cannot look forward if we can’t see through borders. But how do we begin if our terms of reference get in the way?

>>L.S. Cattarini

CORRECTION

Rabbi Arik Ascherman’s discussion last Wednesday at Congregation Beth El in TMR [“Rabbi reaches out,” Front, Oct. 29] was a conversation with Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, titled “The Jewish State and the Jewish Tradition of Human Rights: A Conversation Among Jews.” It was a complement to two other discussions, one at Montreal’s Islamic community and another at McGill’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.

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