By November 2017, despite the marathon surgeries and endless rounds of chemotherapy, Jake Honig’s rare form of brain cancer had begun spreading throughout his body. The 7-year-old from Howell came home for hospice care with a slew of painkillers to relieve the pain and nausea.
“Unfortunately those medications did extremely little if anything for his symptom control,” dad Mike Honig recalled. “In fact, the side effects were so brutal and barbaric, it was hard to watch.”
Desperate, Jake’s parents turned to medical marijuana.
“He went from not being able to take a sip of water, let alone eat food, to eating four meals a day,” Mike Honig said. “He went from agonizing pain where he couldn’t walk, to where he was playing with his sister and watching movies and laughing.”
This is a story all New Jerseyans should hear, because the Legislature’s canceled vote March 25 on full-scale marijuana legalization was more than a buzzkill for recreational weed users. It was a failure to help ailing children like Jake, whose name was on the medical marijuana reform bill that Gov. Phil Murphy and Senate President Steve Sweeney shamelessly tied into the package.