South Okanagan

Mike Kelly is is coming out of the closet, so to speak, and he's hoping other seniors will follow. His life includes heavy scars from Vietnam

"Vietnam, no question about it, changed everything about me.  I sought through my stuff."

It wasn't all a mess for Kelly, once a sports fisherman, a Gold miner, a businessmen until his health began to fail when he was in his 50's, today, he's 66.

First to go was his mental-health, chronic depression because of the war, the doctors tried morphine. But he couldn't function. So he turned to medical marijuana, his salvation.

"I'm going to be dead, I'd probably be dead by now," says Kelly.

After thinking long and hard about it Kelly wants to come clean, about using marijuana.  He's speaking out, but he says he's not alone.

"The older people who do it, you don't even known they do it."

He says unlike pills there is an unrelenting stigma attached to marijuana.

"I think people of my generation, it's been beaten in them on how terrible marijuana is."

Stigma or not Kelly has turned to marijuana again this time to deal with a killer, a brain tumour.

"The doctor calls me at night and I am scared to see him, because he says I have three months to live."

Marijuana helps to slowdown his racing mind, so he can sleep at night.

"It stops my mind from thinking, if I'm going to die."

Maybe the marijuana is working, it was three years ago that Kelly was told, he only had three months to live.