Marijuana — Menace or Mitzvah?
NEWS ITEM: Religious leaders — from Reform to Orthodox — are increasingly supportive of the medical use of marijuana.
Should marijuana be forbid
To everyone who is a Yid?
Is puffing on the suspect weed
Offensive to the Jewish creed?
Or is cannabis kosher now,
On grounds it soothes the fevered brow
And eases torments of the ill
Who can’t be helped by any pill?
(Some brand such pity criminal!)
What patients crave, the law forbids!
(A blow to valid invalids!)
Officials point to drug abuse,
And sad effects of over-use.
(Adjust each dosage! Count each puff!
How many drags comprise “enough”?)
The thorny arguments persist
Twixt gendarme and the activist.
Now many members of the tribe
Would choose to let the docs prescribe.
These questions stimulate debate
O’er what is marijuana’s fate.
In Israel (don’t act surprised)
The weed has long been legalized
If authorized by an M.D.
— Sometimes it is provided free!
It often seems beyond our scope
To keep up with the latest dope.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO