Mario Ambrosini was right about medical marijuana, but erred in his method
DAYS before Mario Ambrosini’s heart-wrenching death on August 16 2014, he called some close colleagues (among whom I had the honour of being counted) to his bed and asked them to take on the fight to find a cure for cancer and have marijuana or cannabis legalised for palliative care.I knew Mario since 1995, when, on behalf of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was home affairs minister at the time, he oversaw my appointed task as chairman and, with Queens University’s Jonathan Crush, co-drafter of the Green Paper on International Migration, which gave rise to SA’s Refugees Protection Act and Immigration Act.More recently, Mario and I were co-founders of the Parliamentary Institute of SA, which went — appropriately, given Mario’s Italian ancestry — by the acronym PISA.Ours was a fiery relationship and we had some heated debates. The temperature did not moderate even when we disagreed about what causes cancer, a puzzle of science tragically personified by the visible and unstoppable det...
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