France, June 16, 2023

Dear reader,

With these few words, I would like to share my testimony on what cannabis can bring.

I am 61 years old, I followed a university curriculum, I had a child, all in all a person well integrated
into society. I have had a chronic disease for nearly 30 years. My pathology is serious and often
disabling. My treatments are heavy and very painful to bear, resulting in peripheral neuropathies,
severe anemia, incessant muscle pain, insomnia and loss of self-esteem.

At one time, I had to take opiates or morphine to support the side effects of my illness as well as anti-
anxiety medications.
I was very tired of the side effects of the drugs, some of which had no real effect. My natural
curiosity and helped by my medical specialist, I looked for an alternative that I found in the use of
cannabis.
Indeed, thanks to cannabis under medical supervision, my life has completely changed. After a long
state of "survival" where I was fighting against my pathology, I was finally able to regain a taste for
life. Cannabis allowed me to completely stop opiates, morphine and all anxiolytics. Very important
effect, I was able to eat normally and stop my carcherie, which no medicine had succeeded in doing.
Better days were dawning, and I could make plans again. Cannabis helps me in my daily life and has
no side effects on me. Cannabis is, in many ways, an essential natural medicine for a community. The
use of cannabis is above all also a fundamental and human right, that patients can be treated by all
the means available to society. Cannabis has positive effects for many pathologies of our modern
societies, such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, post-traumatic stress or epilepsy, for example. Cannabis
then is like love, it soothes all pain and heals so many wounds. For veterans, greatly injured by our
collective failures on the world stage, to reject such medicine is a betrayal of their heroism, their
sacrificed youth and what remains of their future.

A betrayal that every mother's heart rejects.
Cannabis is my religion.

Beatrice Budin
European mother, French activist for medicinal marihuana