CANADIAN COMPASSION

Canada has become the world's first country to allow the use of medical
marijuana. Terminally ill patients in Canada are now permitted to grow
their own cannabis, buy it from the government or have a friend licensed to
grow it for them.

Canadian Health Minister Allan Rock was right to call the move "a
compassionate measure." The fact that the United States still continues to
demonize marijuana and deny that it has any medicinal value is a shameful
travesty, especially to patients lying on their death beds. For people with
no hope, denying them a small measure of herbal relief is simply cruel, and
devoid of any compassion.

The Canadian law is not a broad-based promotion of marijuana as some would
think. The new law states anyone with a terminal illness expected to live
less than a year, who has tried other legal forms of treatment will be
allowed to use medical marijuana with the procurement of a doctor's note.

Kids may be able to get fake IDs, but the chances of a child faking a
terminal illness in order to score some pot from their family's doctor is
extremely unlikely. There is a highly-utilized black market that caters to
such children.

The debate over the use of medical marijuana has been distorted by critics
more interested in squashing any remnants of the '60s than addressing the
medical needs of people with no chance at survival.

We are content with letting our sick go to seedy underground sources for
relief from pain and suffering. We let drug dealers determine the quality,
purity and availability of a drug many feel will allow them to live out
their final days in relative comfort.

Hopefully, Canada's brave step forward will encourage the United States to
reconsider its primitive understanding of medical care and to accept the
fact that total prohibition is a bankrupt concept. Since Reefer Madness
Americans have been hell-bent on portraying cannabis in the worst-possible
light. The U.S. Department of Justice remains mired in decades-old thinking
and continues to churn along in the same, tired old ruts of criminalization
and crusading.

This isn't about a war on drugs. This about human decency and the right to
live without pain and suffering. The government has already acknowledged
the beneficial effects of marijuana when it allowed patients to be treated
with Marinol, a synthetic, pill-form of THC. But opponents are fond of
parroting the tired, old line of there not being any significant research
on the effects of smoked cannabis.

That there is no research on this subject should be an embarrassment to a
society that prides itself on an undying faith in science that leads us to
accept the inevitability of missile testing and biotechnology, but not
simple pain relief for our sickest citizens.

As on many other global issues, the United States is increasingly out of
synch with other industrialized nations. While Ottawa gave $3.7 million to
grow federally-sanctioned pot last December, the United States stands guard
at the border, hoping to uncover a few packages of plants headed towards
American smokers. Even the stodgy conservative British news magazine The
Economist devoted a cover story last week calling for the legalization of
drugs, noting that the war on drugs is racist and doomed to failure.

But perhaps a full-scale legalization might be too far, too fast. For now,
the United States. would do well to follow the example set by our northern
neighbors and allow the terminally ill to smoke pot. It's the humane thing
to do and would go far in getting the American Medical Association to
change their reactionary anti-marijuana stance.

Maybe then, when we've decided to let dying Americans medicate themselves,
can we start a real debate about the shameful way we treat our sick and
elderly in this country.