Lucy Haslam remembers her son’s first “drags” of a marijuana joint.
Dan puffed on the drug, sourced illegally from a friend, as his conflicted parents, Lucy and Lou, looked on.
With a chemotherapy port protruding from his shirt, the young man hadn’t wanted to eat for days – a result of bowel cancer treatment.
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His parents hadn’t approved of marijuana but had become desperate, trying anything they could to help ease their son’s suffering from his disease.
“He just looked at us and said, ‘You’re not going to believe it but I’m hungry’,” Lucy tells 7Life after her son’s puffs on the reefer.
“He asked for steak, eggs and beans – so that’s what we had.”
Lucy smiles as she recalls the moment her boy went from a sickly cancer patient to gaining back some control of his life – after just three puffs of cannabis.
Conservative to criminal
Lucy and Lou were well-known and “conservative” members of their community in the regional NSW city of Tamworth.
Lucy, a nurse, confesses now that she would shake her head at patients who said they had used cannabis to dull the pain of their condition.
And Lou, a police officer who headed the drug squad for north-western NSW, was a strong advocate against the use of any illegal substance.
“He spent his life locking up people who used cannabis,” Lucy says.
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