Open Letter to Tom Batiuk
Dear Tom:
As readers of your long-running strip, Funky Winkerbean, we’ve grown used to your bleak take on life and your menagerie of characters damaged by amputation, disease, divorce, and mental illness, from Funky’s divorce and subsequent battle with the bottle, to that girl who lost her arm when her boyfriend was driving drunk, to the drunk-driving boyfriend shipping off to Afghanistan, to Darrin who’s seeking his biological parents and dating a girl that looks eerily like his sister. Sure, some of the plots have been ill-considered, others ill-carried out, but that’s why you’re there: to provide a pessimistic antidote to treacle like “Marmaduke” and “Dennis the Menace”.
I’m writing specifically about Lisa, who’s been battling cancer for god-knows how long. When I wrote about her struggles on August 15 and August 25 2006, Lisa’s cancer had been an ongoing theme since 1999. It’s kinda depressing.
On July 3, 2007, you finally decided to drop the bomb once and for all, and sometime this fall, Lisa’s going to die:
Tom you are a person who has survived cancer. You know how painful and sickening the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy can be, causing nausea and wasting. And you surely know about the negative, never mind addicting, effects of pain relieving drugs like Oxy-contin, morphine, and so on.
Tom, there is an army of cancer patients who use a very effective drug that helps relieve nausea and stimulate the appetite. It’s a drug that many cancer patients depend on in their darkest hour. It’s also a drug that is currently illegal: marijuana. As someone who is not only a cancer survivor, but as someone who feels “his own cancer brought a new realization and a renewed mission”, you have the power and the responsibility to raise awareness and support for medical marijuana, which at this very moment is being debated in the US House of Representatives.
It is neither fair nor moral that the US Federal Government is raiding the homes of cancer patients. It is wrong, not to mention absurd, for a Federal Government that supposedly stands for “states’ rights” to be undermining the efforts of 11 states like Ohio, California, Rhode Island, among others.
Mr. Batiuk, you have some prime real estate on the funny pages, real estate you are already using to advocate for cancer patients and for those who are not yet patients. I urge you to do the responsible thing: please feature medical marijuana in Ms. Moore’s story, without stigma or shame. With legislation pending in Congress, and with a growing majority of the country supporting legalization to some degree or another, it is the right thing to do.
Thanks.
Brendan Skwire
Philadelphia, PA
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