ILLUSION OF ACCESS

It is only thanks to favourable decisions by a handful of committed
lawyers and sympathetic judges that Canada boasts even the anaemic
national medical cannabis program it has today.

The slow march toward establishing the rights of the sick to access
therapeutic pot began in 1999 when a superior court judge recognized
Ontario resident Jim Wakeford's right to grow and possess cannabis to
treat symptoms of his HIV/AIDS without fear of legal recourse by the
state. In response to that ruling, Health Canada declared it would
henceforth allow clients meeting its vague criteria to receive an
exemption to Section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA).

In 2000, the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled the Section 56 exemptions
unconstitutional in the case of Terry Parker when it was revealed
there was no regulatory oversight and that discretion for who could,
or could not, receive a Section 56 exemption rested entirely with the
Canadian Minister of Health.

Philippe Lucas writes in the January 2008 issue of Harm Reduction
Journal, "As a result of these legal challenges the constitutional
validity of Canada's drug control program regulations is now legally
dependent on the existence of a working federal medical cannabis
program." [Emphasis added by Monday.]

Today, that program is the Marihuana Medical Access Division, built
from the ashes of the Office of Cannabis Medical Access.

However, in January 2003 the MMAD was found unconstitutional by
Ontario Superior Court Justice Sidney Lederman, who accused the
federal government of providing what he called the "illusion of
access." Lederman's ruling required Heath Canada to supply authorized
clients a regular and legal supply of medical cannabis.

"Laws which put seriously ill, vulnerable people in a position where
they have to deal with the criminal underworld to obtain medicine
they have been authorized to take, violate the constitutional right
to security of the person," Justice Lederman said in his ruling.

In October that same year, the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled five
MMAR sections constitutionally invalid.

In January 2008, Federal Justice Barry Strayer ruled it
unconstitutional that licensed growers should be bound to grow for
only one client. This ruling opens the way for licensed growers to
begin supplying cannabis to multiple clients.

"In my view it is not tenable for the government to, consistently
with the rights established in other courts for qualified medical
users to have reasonable access to marijuana, to force them either to
buy from the government contractor, grow their own or be limited to
the unnecessarily restrictive system of designated producers," wrote Strayer.

Currently the Vancouver Island Compassion Society is in B.C. Supreme
Court following a 2004 raid on its Metchosin production facility to
challenge the constitutionally of the MMAD on the grounds the federal
branch unnecessarily restricts access to the program, supplies an
inadequate source of cannabis and imposes arbitrary limitations on
production and distribution.