Cancer patient dies three weeks after hospital room raid seized his marijuana extracts | Opinion
I found out this weekend that Greg Bretz died last week.
Here’s hoping that his story will inspire the Kansas Legislature to put compassion for terminally ill people over outdated war-on-drugs politics.
I didn’t know Mr. Bretz as well as I wish I did.
I only encountered him in the last month of his life, after he was cited by Hays police the week before Christmas on criminal charges of using marijuana extracts, while he was flat on his back in a hospital room dying of inoperable cancer.
Police, called in by hospital staff, confiscated his vaping device and some THC-containing paste that he ate on bread to alleviate his symptoms. This, after a doctor told him to do whatever he wanted if it made him feel better, because there was nothing more that medical science could do for him.
I spoke with Hays Police Chief Don Scheibler several days after my story ran and he said the officer who wrote the citation was uncomfortable about it, and the same day sent an e-mail to the prosecutor’s office asking that the charges be dismissed.
Apparently, the prosecutor agreed at some point.
But nobody told Mr. Bretz.
He was cited on the Monday before Christmas. He wasn’t informed the charges would be dropped until Tuesday a week later, three days after my story ran and brought some unwelcome national attention to Hays, its hospital and its police department. In the meantime, a friend helping with his care told me he had tried to contact the prosecutor about it but couldn’t get a callback.
So while Hays ultimately undid the mistake, Mr. Bretz spent his final Christmas believing that he was still under criminal charges.
One thing that Scheibler told me does resonate. The young officer told the chief he felt he had no choice but to issue a criminal citation under the circumstances, and followed the rules when he saw a law being broken.
In this case, it’s the law that’s broken.
Kansas stands as one of only three states that doesn’t make allowances for the use of marijuana and/or its extracts by the terminally ill.
Our state is unnecessarily cruel and senseless in that regard. Cancer patients are routinely prescribed debilitating opioids — hard drugs — for pain control, and nobody seems to have a problem with that.
Nobody, that is, except the patients themselves.
When you’re undergoing treatment for cancer, two of the biggest issues are pain and loss of appetite. Marijuana relieves pain and makes you hungry.
Opioid drugs have to be taken in larger and larger doses to achieve the same pain control, you suffer withdrawal if you stop taking them, and they cause nausea, vomiting and constipation — none of which is conducive to extending or enhancing the quality of life on the final downslope.
In the last 16 years, 23 bills have been introduced on the subject in Kansas. According to a Legislative Research report, only two have passed. One legalized some CBD products and the other specified they can’t take your kids away for using CBD.
But while CBD is a marijuana-extracted product, it’s virtually devoid of the ingredients that make it useful to terminally ill people.
The Legislature had an interim committee on the subject last year, but it didn’t amount to much. I called Legislative Research Tuesday morning and there are currently no medical marijuana bills pending.
Supposedly, legislators will be working on one this session.
There seem to be two big hurdles to overcome: 1) making sure that nobody uses marijuana for enjoyment and 2) making sure Democrats don’t get any credit.
That’s not enough to justify the stalling — 16 bills and 23 years is quite enough. Thousands of people have died in misery that could have been alleviated while the Legislature dithers.
This should have been done long ago — certainly in enough time to have let Greg Bretz make a dignified and peaceful exit, without getting rousted by the cops in his hospital room.
He wasn’t faking it. And neither are thousands of other Kansans with painful and life-threatening conditions.
