Medical marijuana guy

The scraggly, emaciated guy looked at me intently, with something to ask, like any encounter on a city street ultimately involving my spare change. But we were at Georgetown hospital, and I was waiting to check in for chemotherapy.

"How long you been doing this?" he asked. That's a typical chemo-patient ice-breaker, the equivalent of "Heading home?" to the person next to you on on a flight. The typical answer is along the lines of "Four weeks," or "Five months," maybe "Coming up on a year."

"Five years, on and off," I said. He didn't seem to understand, or for that matter, to care that much about the answer. But he did have more questions.

"Where do you live?"

"The District," I said. "Just up the street."

That made him happy.

"You know about medical marijuana?"

Medical marijuana has been legal in the District since 2010, and District voters approved recreational use in 2014. But it's still not the kind of thing you chat about casually in the chemo check-in line, at least not at Georgetown.

"I haven't had any problems with side-effects," I said. In years past, some chemo patients used marijuana to alleviate nausea, although new anti-nausea drugs such as Zofran have worked just fine for me.

"Yeah, side effects, but it will cure you," he said, getting excited, starting to grin. "My tumors are down 20 percent."

"Hey, that's great," I said. Good news is cause for celebration, although I imagine his oncologist would attribute his success more to the chemo he was waiting in line for than to marijuana, medical or otherwise -- not to mention baking soda.

"Baking soda," he said. "You know about baking soda?"

I do know about baking soda -- I bake a very well received banana bread, all credit to the good people at Cooks Illustrated -- but I do not know about baking soda in this particular context.

"Baking soda?"

"Yeah," he said. "it's a base, it balances the acid in the chemo." Or something like that.

He knows this to be true because he read it on the internet, although the claims for baking soda apparently exceed balancing the acid in whatever. "Dr." Tullio Simoncini says baking soda will attack tumors, but don't try to e-mail him about it, because he may be in jail or otherwise prohibited by Italian authorities from communicating with patients. Yes, I discovered all this thanks to Google, which also points helpfully to this reality check for anyone swayed by the stoner in line. Still, such things remain good business and good politics, at least in certain districts in Nevada.

At risk of appearing judgmental, these people are clearly crazy. However, as I've acknowledged, I can't always claim to rely on rational expectations myself.  So I did not argue with medical marijuana guy about baking soda or anything else. I said with all sincerity what everyone always says in the chemo waiting room, in the hope that something, FDA-approved or otherwise, will work: "Good luck."