A JOINT VENTURE

Legal Marijuana Users Are Urging The Feds To Loosen Regulations On
Pot

PEMBROKE -- Under blinding lights behind a tightly drawn curtain, the
medicinal pot garden grows.

Delicately tending to his healthy, magical crop, Robert Brown brushes
his hand lovingly across the green leafy branches sprouting from
square sponge pots. He checks the various technical gadgets to make
sure the climate and conditions are just so.

This basement operation in Brown's rural home near Pembroke is not a
simple one. It is an intricate system that employs tracking hydroponic
lamps, special timers, thermometers, water pumps and oscillating fans.

"This could take up a good part of your living room if you were living
in a small apartment," he smiles.

Brown, who has Health Canada's permission to legally grow and smoke
marijuana to ease the chronic pain and nausea from cancer and
hepatitis C, has been working on this indoor garden for six months
now.

Harvest time is near -- about three weeks away, when small hairs start
falling off buds and about 60% are brownish and no longer producing
flowers.

Then the crop will be cut, dried and cured.

LEGAL RIGHT

While Brown has the legal right to cultivate marijuana, this table is
still considered illegal because there are too many plants. In the
bright "mother room," he has 10 larger plants for cloning; in the
adjacent "flowering room" there are 105 plants, standing 10-12 inches
tall.

There are different varieties and hybrids, each producing its own
medicinal, sedative or energizing effects.

According to federal government exemption rules, Brown is permitted
only three mature plants and four immature ones at any given time;
this crop is more than 10 times the legal limit.

This regulation to limit the possession amount is one of the major
beefs Brown has with the draft regulations for possessing and
producing marijuana for medicinal purposes released by Health Canada
this month. The restriction is so unreasonable, he says, he is willing
to break the rules and risk arrest.

Brown and friend Rick Reimer, his former defence lawyer, are sharing
the costs of this growing operation, which is worth about $5,000 with
proper equipment and seeds, not counting the street value of the crop
itself. Monthly hydro bills are about $300.

Brown rarely leaves his home for fear of being robbed. He has recently
received a string of unsettling, threatening phone calls.

Reimer, who also carries an exemption under the Controlled Substances
Act because he suffers from multiple sclerosis, says keeping pot
illegal allows an underground criminal element to flourish.

He believes Canada would benefit from the broad decriminalization of
pot, but he takes one step at a time.

For now, Reimer is taking aim at the proposed regulations for
medicinal purposes, which he condemns as riddled with flaws.

"The only restriction should be that there is no trafficking," he
says.

He objects to a proposed change in the exemption process that would
require a doctor to file the application on behalf of the patient.

Many physicians are still uneasy about the illegality and stigma of
marijuana, he reasons, and most are too busy to fill out time-
consuming forms.

REGULATIONS

He is also critical of the regulations which unnecessarily set up
hurdles that make access inconvenient and costly.

The formula used for figuring the permitted number of plants forces
people to grow expensively indoors, and a possession cap does not
allow for growing or buying a large supply at once, Reimer says.

"It's like forcing you to buy your laundry soap one load at a time,"
he said. "Or it's forcing you to become a criminal."

Brown, who consumes about 6 kg of marijuana each year, describes
himself as "less radical" than Reimer; his fight is focused more
narrowly on finding "reasonable, sensible" rules for possession and
cultivation for medicinal marijuana consumers.

He has done battle with Health Canada, including staging a one-man
protest on the frozen grounds of Parliament Hill to push for his own
exemption. Now he is willing to work with the government to craft
sound regulations.

The proposed rules are now in the public consultation period, which
ends May 7. Roslyn Tremblay, a spokeswoman for Health Canada, says
feedback from exemptees, physicians and other interested parties is
already coming in and will be reviewed and incorporated into the
revised, final regulation package expected in late July.

With time running out, Brown and Reimer are urging all Canadians --
whether they be for or against legalizing marijuana -- to give their
input before the deadline.

"If we don't, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves," Reimer says,
drawing heavily on a joint.