Albert is a Staten Islander who has pancreatic cancer.
He said that smoking marijuana eased the nausea he felt from chemotherapy and restored his appetite.
“Without marijuana, I don’t know what I would have done,” he said.
Albert said that it shouldn’t be illegal for cancer patients and others with grave illnesses to use marijuana if it helps them.
That’s why he supports legalizing medical marijuana in New York state.
“This helps,” said Albert, who didn’t want his full name or details about his background published. “Marijuana helps.”
State Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn) is pitching a medical marijuana bill, and held a roundtable meeting on the issue in Albany on Wednesday.
The state Assembly has also made moves on the medical marijuana front.
For many advocates, it comes down to helping people like Albert, who learned that he had pancreatic cancer on Palm Sunday 2012.
A Wall Street broker for 30 years, Albert said “there’s no doubt in my mind” that his illness is related to the environmental fallout from 9/11.
“I came home covered in that dirt,” he said. “The stench was in the stock exchange for months. They told us it was safe. I’m losing friends left and right.”
Albert said he became violently ill and lost his appetite after starting chemotherapy to battle his disease.
“I didn’t eat for five days,” he said. “I was throwing up. It was terrible.”
Worried about addiction, he said he didn’t want to take pain medication like Percocet and OxyContin.
“I know how addictive it is,” Albert said. “I didn’t want that.”
Synthetic marijuana pills were no help either.
Then Albert said a friend suggested he smoke marijuana.
“I was hesitant,” he said. “I hadn’t smoked in 25, 30 years.”
But, Albert said, “I figured I have nothing to lose.”
He said an hour after trying it, he was at the supermarket, “dropping $100 on junk food.”
“The nausea stopped,” Albert said. “My appetite came back. Whatever it did, it worked.”
But he doesn’t consider what he did to be “getting high.”
“It’s not recreational, like kids watching cartoons and eating popcorn all day,” he said. “It wasn’t smoking to get high. It
helped alleviate the nausea.”
And doesn’t believe that marijuana leads users to try other, harder drugs.
Albert has been in remission for two years, and only very occasionally takes a puff or two of marijuana to ease the pain these days.
To those who oppose legalizing medical marijuana, Albert said, “You don’t know what it’s like until you walk in the other guy’s shoes.”
He said he supports Ms. Savino’s bill “100 percent,” and reached out to her to offer whatever help he can to get it passed.
“Why stop something that’s going to help people?” he said. “You’re telling me alcohol is better?
Ms. Savino said it was key that people like Albert are coming forward and telling their stories.
New Yorkers who use marijuana to treat their own illnesses, or who seek it out to help their ill children, testified during Ms. Savino’s roundtable on Wednesday.
“They are admitting they are breaking the law,” she said. “We need to fix that so people don’t face criminal prosecution because they can’t get relief from traditional medication.”
Of Albert, Ms. Savino said, “He would have kept this to himself, but he felt it was more important to tell the real truth to people.”
The state Assembly budget proposal includes provisions for medical marijuana, according to Crain’s New York Business.
That includes a 10 percent tax on its sale, 15 percent of which would go to the local government of the area where the marijuana is grown and dispensed.
Proponents say that medical marijuana could generate $200 million in revenue for the state annually.
