Aromatherapy
Mom was born in 1927, the birth year of fossil fuels. Harry Arnslinger was leading his maniacal but successful campaign to replace hemp with oil, instilling“ Refer Madness” into a gullible population.
“ I love the smell of it,” Mom continued.“ I always have. The first time I smelled cannabis was when my Uncle John came to stay at the log cabin. I was nine. He and Dad would sit by the fireplace and smoke their pipes. I told my dad he should get some of Uncle John’ s tobacco. It smelled better. Dad told me Uncle John’ s tobacco was cannabis. Uncle John had glaucoma, and the cannabis was his medicine.”
It still breaks my heart that we can’ t use the aromatherapy. After my husband began using cannabis for his glaucoma, the younger children in the family always told him how good he smelled. To designate such a lovely aroma as evil is sad.
Calm Down Honey
Barbarism
Historically, to unlock the secrets of healing, we have done unbelievable things to the body. Things like bleeding people, using heavy metals for infections, and other things I would just as soon not commit to long-term memory. For the record, of all these things, I find plucking out a man’ s eyeball over smoking a joint to be among the most barbaric acts in medical history.
The Rebirth
After two months of prep work, my husband was admitted to TMC for eye removal surgery. We checked in at 8 a. m. He was in his gown, his IV started, and his eye numbed, so he wasn’ t in pain. The clock read noon, and we were both hungry when they came for him. As they began to wheel Gene into surgery, a lady from accounting stepped in the way.
Gene had been a patient of the amazing doctors at the Truman Eye Foundation since a stroke in 2007 left him with acute neovascular glaucoma. After four years, the clinic had exhausted all treatments; his eye was blind, but his eye pressure remained a painful 60 psi, with normal being 11 psi. Think of an overinflated tire exploding over and over, causing him to have teardrops of blood. The only treatment left was to remove his eye and replace it with a glass eyeball, a procedure that would require three surgeries over the next three months. The lady was here to tell us that the grant had expired and wasn’ t renewed; thus, we needed approximately $ 36,000 to proceed.
My husband chased after me as I slammed the door of the surgical suite.“ Calm down, Honey. It’ s okay!” he said.“ Oh hell no, it’ s not okay,” I responded loudly.“ And calm down, Honey is my line!”“ Maybe it’ s for the best,” he said softly.
Our primary care doc of nearly 20 years was concerned that Gene would not live through the surgery. The possibility of another stroke, worse than the first one that led to the bleed in his eye, was high. I, too, had the deepest fear that this would not go well. My diabetic husband had too many risk factors. Still, the man had no quality of life and lived in constant pain. To get kicked out with both his eyes did not seem like a blessing at the time. I was pissed. All that buried emotional grief for nothing!
One hour later, in a life-changing conversation, we sat there as Mom told us about the lost remedy for glaucoma— cannabis. The rest is history. We had a pretty good run from 2011 to 2014 when the raid came down.
Katie Thomas and Bo Brown making a salad from edibles found in nature during a May foraging event in southern, MO.
Jim and Katie Thomas.
Thanks to Master Foragers like my mom, Bo Brown, and Katie Thomas of Blue Key CBD( above), the lost knowledge of all the plants has been found and is being shared exponentially. It turns out people like the idea of a free salad.
Katie Thomas will host foraging events all summer along the Bourbeuse River. For the schedule, check her social media or visit her Forage Way page.
Come on down to the river, and let’ s all graze together!
Dolores Montgomery Halbin, RN, BSN, and Ordained Nurse Minister, resides in SW Missouri. After her husband passed in 2015, she retired from nursing. She worked with the 2014- 2018 Missouri campaigns for legalized medical marijuana. She continues as a cannabis reform activist volunteering with Canna Convict Project and working toward Federal decriminalization through educational speaking and freelance journalism. Dolores Halbin, doloreshalbin @ gmail. com. July July 2025 2025 39