Last Resort

Mykayla Comstock is eight years old with leukemia, and her family in Oregon decided that cannabis was her best shot at survival. Not just painkillers—the actual cure. VICE documented it in a series called Stoned Kids, and it’s the kind of thing that sits between two truths you can’t reconcile.

The easy judgment would be to call them reckless, but that ignores what childhood cancer treatment actually is. Standard chemotherapy works by being slightly more lethal to cancer than to the kid’s body, which is a gentler way of saying poisoned. So when that fails, when the doctors run out of options, when your child is suffering—I get why people reach for something else. Anything else.

The documentary doesn’t pick a side, which means you’re stuck with both things at once. Parents making what they believe is the right choice for their dying daughter. And a choice that violates every rule we have. You can’t resolve that tension, and an honest documentary won’t try.

I’ve never had much use for stoner culture. But this isn’t culture. This is a specific desperation, specific to a kid, and it doesn’t leave room for irony.

You watch it and somewhere in there you stop analyzing. You just think: fuck cancer. Not as a joke. As a fact.