Spray Noszel (Pics)
Spray Noszel (house paint and chalk on paper) Artist: Alison Boston
I painted this picture Friday afternoon while visiting the studio of local artist Frances Semple.
But why would I call my painting Spray Noszel? Especially in light of the title of this post?
Well, my father swallowed a spray nozzle Friday afternoon; and my father wrote a small booklet called The Right to Choose. It’s a book that discusses his opinions concerning international drug laws, and the need to review those laws in the LIGHT of the Christian faith.
It’s both ironic and most suitable (not to mention an indication of my father’s absurd sense of humor) that he would choose in his diagnosed-late-stage-dementia to swallow the spray nozzle from a bottle of Cannamist just after attending an ecumenical service in the chapel of Mount St. Mary’s Hospital where he is spending his last days. My father’s choice is further emphasized by the fact that the priest leading the service went to the same theological college as he did (Wycliffe Hall, Oxford). Dad was after all initially ordained as a Church of England clergyman but was conflicted by what he considered a contradiction in the 39 articles and left to join the United Church of Canada - where he encountered backlash for inviting the congregation to kneel when they prayed…but that’s another matter altogether!
The right to choose a substance is tied to basic human rights.
My father believed profoundly in the individual’s right to choose whatever s/he wanted to put into their mouth. In fact he argues that “…the right to receive or use a substance for oneself is actually protected by Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and by Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights….”
He goes on to say:
“…If some decide what others can use there is no equality. …I don’t believe that anyone can be regarded as free. If he or she cannot decide what substances go into his or her own body.”
My father’s right to use an alcohol-based cannabinoid spray was being restricted by the institution he is spending his last days in. I had told him his doctor has prescribed Sativex and that it was prohibitively expensive, so I was going to give him Cannamist instead even though the institution had told me not to. He willingly took it. Then - back in his room - after going to the chapel service, I was giving him a squirt and he bit the spray nozzle off and swallowed it; this after refusing to swallow ground salmon, broccoli, potatoes, and thickened water (which he had drunk two glasses of two days before.)
Dad, June 03, 2006 after receiving his first cannabinoid treatment.
To say that my father was exercising his right to choose may seem ridiculous to those who would believe that a dementia patient doesn’t know what’s going on. But many of my father’s care givers have said the same thing, and that is that he has lively eyes and they believe he knows and understands everything that is going on around him.
Dad believed the church has abdicated its responsibility by allowing the State to legislate what goes into a person’s mouth.
Father’s belief in the right to choose is strongly tied to his Christian faith, and he was deeply disappointed in the Church’s disinterest in what he considered a serious violation of human rights and a denial of the individual’s right to the Grace of Christ. He argues this at length, using many biblical quotes to support his argument, in his booklets The Forsaken Fountain and The Right to Choose. Ten years ago, at the age of 78, he wrote in Forsaken Fountain:
“This book is written out of a sense of urgency. There have been executions, and there will be more. Millions of people around the world are in prision because authorities want to prevent them from selling substances which some people want to buy and are willing to pay for with a lot of money. Furthermore people are buying hazardous substances without adequate information and some die in consequence….
My sense of urgency has been sharpened by lack of concern in churches. Even though the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act was under consideration by the Canadian Government for over two years, from February 2nd, 1994 to June 20th, 1996 no church organisation was heard by a Government Committee. When I tried to gain the attention of local church organizations to the Act, they were not willing to give it time on their agendas.
The lack of concern in the churches obscures the truth that faith in creation and grace are denied when we prohibit a substance. …
Grace teaches that each of us has to deal with our own substance abuse problem in our own way. Attempting to deal with these problems through law obscures grace. Lack of interest by churches is tragic because they are mandated to mediate grace…”
A little further on he says:
“…I am approaching my 79th birthday and may not have much time left. FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS I HAVE TRIED TO AROUSE CONCERN IN THE CHURCH REGARDING THE PROHIBITION OF SUBSTANCES, AND I AM HOPING THIS BOOK WILL MAKE SOME PEOPLE IN THE CHURCHES THINK AGAIN….”
Although he never smoked pot or used drugs (other than alcohol) Dad found support and interest for his concerns among drug users and the families of drug users. He founded the British Columbia Anti-Prohibition League, and sent out a regular newsletter (before the days of email and the internet) to rally support for his conviction that we should end the war on drugs. He was also active as a volunteer with the Vancouver Island Human Rights Coalition and on June 24, 1998 the VIHRC passed the motion he had first presented in March. The motion reads that:
The Canadian Government and the United Nations be asked to include in their Human Rights Code that individual adults have the right to choose substances for their personal use.
A second motion was approved that the VIHRC call upon other groups and individuals to support the motion by writing letters as well.
Dad received a medal from the Vancouver Island Human Rights League for his work on this topic.
My father, the Reverend Henry Boston (on right) with Gardie Gardom, the then Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, after receiving an award for his humanitarian activities campaigning for the legalisation of cannibas and an end to the war on drugs. (1999)
Dad’s efforts, combined with the efforts of BCAPL and VIHRC acheived results. Last Friday I attended the first public debate organised by Voices of Substance.
Retired Seattle Chief of Police Norm Stamper speaks at Voices of Substance inaugural public debate and says all drugs should be legalized and sold under license.*
Mayor Alan Lowe opened the event which featured a potpourri of expert speakers.
Among them: Norm Stamper from LEAP and Paul Battershill, chief of Victoria Police. Indeed, the event was funded in part by Victoria Police and the City of Victoria. Religious speakers included Rev. Al Tysick, who recently collaborated with other social agencies to build Our Place and Ike DeJong former police officer and retired Pastor. My Dad was not there, but I was, and I heard Norm Stamper say that he doesn’t know how to debate the issue (about the war on drugs) with someone whose reasoning is faith-based.
I answered Dr. Stamper’s questioning by speaking about my father and his booklets. My father’s books prepare a path for other religious leaders to follow in using Christianity as an argument to end the senseless war on drugs. The next time I saw Dad, I told him about the Voices of Substance event and Norm Stamper’s question and my response.
Even though Dad is diagnosed with dementia, he always understood what was being said to him, and whenever I engaged in conversation about the War on Drugs or medical cannibas, he would get excited, and start to cough and choke - the choking of course stemming from his efforts to speak.
Dad did not believe in defeat.
There is much more to this story, about how my coming to an understanding of my father’s mission in life came to me in the last months. Last October, I heard Dr. Lloyd Axworthy speak in Budapest, Hungary. Invited by the International Red Cross, his talk ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ opened my mind to the magnitude of the problem my father was working on, and the power of the individual voice to instigate massive change in the world. Dr. Axworthy talked about people thinking he was crazy when he first proposed banning anti-personal land mines, and now of course, we have the Ottawa Treaty reflecting those values. He also talked about the media writing that he was crazy. And he talked about other causes that had taken more than one lifetime to acheive.
When I heard him speak, I thought about my father and the work he had done, and how the media and others had responded to him, calling him crazy. Then I saw the film ‘The Corporation’ where rBGH and the Fox media cover-up is exposed, and I realised my father had only a small portion of a very large message about our planet The Garden of Eden and the way we are managing it.
In Forsaken Fountain my father says he is writing with urgency, that innocent people are getting killed by the war on drugs. His sense of urgency was not amiss, for today - even though all Latin American countries have signed the Ottawa Treaty banning the use of anti-personal landmines, in Columbia this horrific weapon is used by traffickers to protect their plantations and set a trap when they leave the cocoa fields with the harvested crop. Of course, it’s children and farmers who fall victim.
AND THAT IS THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS, which costs the U.S. an estimated 40 billion a year according to some, and 69 billion a year according to LEAP. In Canada, our substance-related expenses run 38.9 billion a year, with 540 million being spent in Greater Victoria. **
When I first got home and visited my Dad, I took Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking with me. A book my Dad had given me more than twenty years ago and that I have carried with me ever since. I opened it at random, and it fell open at the first page of the chapter ‘I Don’t Believe in Defeat’. I asked him how much he wanted me to read, and he said (at that time he could still form occasional phrases) “The whole thing.”
The next day we sat with the book again, and I opened it to the contents and read each title to him, asking him which he wanted me to read. He jabbed his finger at the title: “I Don’t Believe in Defeat.”
“What again?” I asked, “We read that yesterday.”
He nodded his head and jabbed his finger at the title again.
Swallowing Spray Nozzle Last Desperate Cry to the Church To Take Action and End the War on Drugs
I think my father choosing to swallow a Cannamist spray nozzle while in the care of a Roman Catholic hospital is his way of expressing his opinion now that he can no longer speak. I think swallowing it when I was giving him his spray was his way of ensuring that I write about it.
After he had swallowed it, he sat with his mouth and eyes closed, breathing peacefully. I asked him if he was okay and he nodded his head. Several minutes later while he was being looked at by the nurses, I asked him again if he was okay, and again he nodded his head yes. He was very resolute in his silence, with his mouth closed (he usually lets his mouth dangle open these days so if he closes it, and keeps it closed, he is making a statement!) It wasn’t until I left that he started to choke. They suctioned him, but the nozzle was already working its way through his digestive system.
Dad is in no condition to be digesting plastic spray nozzles. But it’s a typical Dad manouver that this happened after I had offered him - as I said previously - mashed potatoes, ground salmon and ground greens and after swallowing two spoonfuls of greens, he had refused to swallow anything else - that is: UNTIL HE GOT THE SPRAY NOZZLE. Now why would a man who had refused to swallow his dinner, swallow a spray nozzle?
As I have already mentioned, many will say it is the action of a demented person. But I don’t think that the action was demented at all. Rather, I think it was deliberate and intentional. I believe my father was taking full advantage of the situation to make a statement. And if it wasn’t Dad speaking, then it was God speaking through him.
I believe my father swallowing the Cannamist nozzle is one last plea from him to the church to get active in ending the war on drugs.
And why did I call my painting Spray Noszel? It’s how I worked out my anguish about having held the bottle that he bit the nozzle from. Afterall, even if the incident does draw attention to his beliefs, I don’t feel very good that he ingested a spray nozzle.
But there is one more point that my painting Spray Noszel wants to emphasize, and that is my father’s belief that: “Creation teaches us that nothing is duplicated. God makes everything different. Everything has individuality and originality. Consequently we cannot say for sure that a substance which is harmful for some, would also be harmful for others, especially when the substance is actually demanded or desired, and the circumstances and/or conditions are different.” (From The Forsaken Fountain, Henry Boston, copyright 1996)
Spray Noszel absolutely lives up to my father’s beliefs about creation. After I painted it, I took it to him and held it up asking “Do you like it?” He nodded his head ‘yes’. I sat with him after that and held his hand, and now and then he would cry out and clutch his upper chest area. Yes, I am sure that hard, plastic spray nozzle was causing him pain passing through his esophagus but not nearly as much anguish and pain as the church’s lack of involvement in what my father devoted the last 35 years of his life to.
People of God - hear his cry.
*Not sure I agree 100% with Stamper and LEAP on the licensing factor. Afterall, it’s the ‘licensed’ Sativex that is prohibitively expensive. I mean really, should a person have to have a license to grow a plant? I can agree with licensing for commercial production and sales, but I don’t need a license to grow sage and parsley, and don’t see why I should need one to grow cannibas or coca.
** These are figures quoted respectively by Norm Stamper of LEAP (U.S.) and Jody Patterson (CA), executive director of PEERS, at the Voices of Substance public debate, in Victoria on Friday, June 2.
