By Ben Rodgers
Editor
We lost a member of The Press Times family on Friday, July 12, and in her typical fashion she wanted to use her passing to send a message.
Now is the time to legalize medicinal marijuana in Wisconsin.
Melinda Anne Roberts came into our life as a subscriber who got a free sample of our paper when we launched in De Pere last August.
She was so blown away by what we are doing that she had to become a part of it.
Melinda, an avid history buff, spent years traveling around Wisconsin and blogging about every single historical marker in the state.
At the end of her history journey, she was living with a Stage IV diagnosis of metastatic colon cancer.
As the cancer was growing and she was dying, Melinda spent her last days on this earth chronicling the history of Wisconsin until the cancer got so bad she physically couldn’t work.
She shared some of those stories in this paper.
Melinda knew she didn’t have long on this world and spent the little time she had left writing, so the stories of others would live on.
If she has taught me anything, it’s that history is alive all around us, in places we drive and walk past without ever knowing who was there or what happened at a site centuries ago.
With so many stories to tell, it’s devastating her’s didn’t last longer.
Even with her diagnosis, Melinda still wanted to become more involved in The Press Times.
In fact, she virtually forced herself into covering Green Bay government for us when we expanded again.
We were happy to oblige.
I’ll never forget the phone call when she told me the cancer has spread to her brain.
Without effective health insurance (she was on a plan from the Affordable Care Act), Melinda had a desire to treat her cancer naturally, also because other forms of treatment were financially unattainable.
That meant she wanted to obtain medical marijuana.
Melinda wanted to go the Upper Peninsula, where she could legally buy her medicine, but by that time her vision was blurring, headaches became severe and she didn’t want to drive across town, much less to another state due to the risk of having a seizure behind the wheel.
Melinda also didn’t want to have any of her friends drive her to Michigan at the risk of them getting pulled over and arrested on the way back.
We don’t know for sure that medical marijuana would have extended her life, but we do know it would have made her at least feel better and kept the seizures at bay.
Currently, 33 states have medical marijuana, including our neighbors to the north, south, east and west.
Wisconsin is truly behind the times.
Melinda called our state “Draconian” in this regard, and I have to agree with her.
In November last year, nearly 1 million voters in 16 counties and two cities overwhelmingly said “yes” to medical marijuana.
We lost a member of our newspaper family, and because of Wisconsin laws, she spent her last days suffering when relief was readily available.
Now is the time to legalize medical marijuana so more people with their own stories to tell don’t suffer like Melinda.