Why the dying deserve illegal drugs

It was about a year ago when my dying father, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, turned to me and said ‘Sean, can you get me some heroin?’. For a moment – understandably – I wondered if he needed this ultimate painkiller for some fairly ultimate pain, but he didn’t look like he was in agony. And when he followed that up, with a puzzled frown, and the remark: ‘Or maybe some opium, or weed, I’d like to try them,’ I realised that this was nothing to do with analgesics. Dad wanted some psychotropic fun.

For a week or so I wrestled with the practicalities of this request and maybe even the moralities – but then my third stepmother and my Dad’s fourth wife (or maybe fifth, we’ve never been quite sure (sixth?)) nixed the idea, on the highly sensible grounds that it would interfere with his required and legal medications, and, also, get people arrested.

My Dad died about five months later, without ever getting to try smack, opium, weed, mushrooms, acid, E, any of it. It was not a tragedy, no one need to send letters of sympathy. He died at a ripe old age after a rewarding life, surrounded by loving family, with all his marbles, and – ironically – with just enough morphine pumped into his system to ameliorate most of the cancer pain but not enough to get him remotely high.

Ever since then, I’ve been wondering about Dad’s almost final request. My father was quite the buccaneer when it came to women, hence the Henry VIII quantity of wives, but in many other ways he was timid and cautious: didn’t travel that much, didn’t like risk or danger, found much foreign food too weird, was never exactly a passionate off-piste skier, couldn’t even swim. However, as he saw Death’s black hat appearing over the hill, this attitude changed. Dad realised he had maybe missed out on some adventure and exploration; he also realised, being an intelligent man, that who gives a fuck about the law if you are nearly dead.

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The law, of course, would have seen it differently. If I’d been arrested buying some skag for the old man I doubt the police would have amiably let me go – with my stash – if I’d told them, ‘but it’s for my dying father, he wants to get stoned’. And yet this raises the question: why are we so puritanical about giving drugs to very old or very dying people? drugs which might actually make them happier, cheerier, gigglier, not just reduce bone pain or cure their bed sores.

I’m not the first person, of course, to have this idea. The Aztecs used to prohibit alcohol for common people ­– until they hit 60, when they liberally doled out the booze, as it was felt any damage liquor might do didn’t matter by then and the oldies had done their dues, avoided live heart extrusion, and deserved a night on the fermented cactus juice. Though even then the Aztecs had double standards: the aristos reserved all the exciting psychedelic fungi for themselves, which they imbibed as they pierced their penises with cactus thorns.

More recently, we have the example of the Brompton Cocktail. This was a mind-bending liquid invented by surgeon Herbert Snow in 1896 at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. The exact ingredients are debated, but it seems to have been an enticing blend of liquid heroin, cocaine and decent cognac. Snow invented it as a way of soothing yet pepping his otherwise depressed, lonely, terminally ill cancer patients.

The result, according to some reports – and the cocktail was popular for several decades, so it was clearly efficacious – was that the patients, in their final months, became notably ‘more sociable’ and ‘cheerier’. As you would if you were knocking back half a pint of heroin, cocaine, and cognac every day. Other doctors mixed the Brompton with cannabis or amphetamines, presumably inducing different kinds of sociability and cheeriness, maybe they even got dying people to chuckle helplessly or get the munchies or go for mad giggling jogs down Knightsbridge.

And then it all stopped before world war two. Why? The official reason is that ‘better’ painkillers were found and the cocaine was apparently deemed unnecessary, but one can’t help feeling that the overwhelming joylessness of modern medicine played its deadly hand here. Drugs aren’t meant to be ‘fun’. Using drugs for fun is using drugs for recreation. Dying is not recreation, it’s annihilation. It must be endured, with, if you’re lucky, your freaked-out wits about you, so you can really feel the termination with all its desolate force.

And I say: to hell with this dark, stupid, anhedonic nonsense. With all the wonders of modern pharmacopoeia, imagine what incredible, euphoria-inducing drugs we could invent for crumblies facing their quietus. If we can invent drugs that cure erectile dysfunction or obesity or maybe even Alzheimer’s (we hope), we can surely devise drugs that dispense with existential dread and isolation and also make dying people laugh pointlessly for hours. Or have dreamy trips. Or spiral into glittery ayahuasca vortices of spangly lights where they might descend to the grandiose undersea of universal consciousness where they could have a chat with God and ask Him what’s next. It sounds more amusing than another dusty pill for constipation.

Naturally, there are counter-arguments. You may not want nonagenarians sucking on bongs but the drugs could be dispensed as most drugs are: tablets, spoonfuls, injections. There is the question of addiction but let’s get rid of that one, right off the bat. Most old people are addicts anyway, they are just addicted to more boring stuff for heart disease, blood pressure or gum problems, and even if they do become addicts they are gonna keel over before it becomes an issue.

Finally, there is the problem that all these lovely new happy drugs for dying folk might leak onto the black market; we could see spaced-out octogenarians being mugged by kids during their coke-and-china white cocktail moments but it is surely not beyond the wit of medicinal man to ensure the good stuff is locked away and administered at the point of need. After all, we manage to deliver morphine (in boring doses) in hospices, every day, and I don’t see ever see headlines about ‘another hospice raided for its excellent hezza’, do you? The case is closed, the doctor’s bag must open. We need to bring back the Brompton. It is high old time to smack my granny up.