MALICIOUS MARKUP ON MEDICINAL MARIJUANA

The anti-marijuana crowd will be latching on to a new study published
in last week's edition of the prestigious British medical journal The
Lancet, which suggests that even occasional pot use could raise the
risk of psychosis.

Based on a meta-analysis of 35 previous studies, researchers
determined that pot-smokers were 41 per cent more likely to develop a
psychotic illness than persons who had never used the drug, and
contend that governments should now work to dispel the misconception
that marijuana is a benign drug.

Yikes! Sounds scary if you're a pot-smoker - which 16 per cent of
Canadians reportedly are - but alarmism needs to be tempered by the
fact that the overall risk for all marijuana smokers remains very
low, a point the study's authors concede.

They also acknowledge that they can't prove marijuana itself
increases the risk of psychosis. It may be that persons inclined to
smoke marijuana are just likely to have those certain personality
traits that predispose them to developing psychosis.

The Associated Press reported that two of the study's authors were
invited to sit as experts on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of
Drugs Cannabis Review in 2005, and that several also reported being
paid to attend corporate-sponsored meetings related to marijuana, one
receiving consulting fees from companies that make anti-psychotic medications.

Big pharmaceutical interests are notoriously hostile to legalization
of marijuana for medical purposes, since it is believed by many to be
a (potentially at least) cheap, non-patentable, and effective
substitute for a variety of proprietary drugs.

It's more than a little disingenuous to be sowing fear and doubt
about what is acknowledged to be a remote possibility of increased
mental health risk, when the damaging side-effect risk of so many
prescription pharmaceuticals is so much greater and more severe than
anything that's ever been associated with pot, especially when
marijuana has the potential to be a safer replacement for some of those drugs.

Indeed, just last month, the State of New Mexico enacted a new
medical marijuana law that not only protects medical marijuana users
from prosecution, as 11 other states do, but requires the state to
oversee a production and distribution system for the drug, which is
exactly the sort of thing big pharmabiz interests and their
fellow-travellers are afraid of.

Unfortunately, Stephen Harper's Conservative government is in the
camp hostile to medical marijuana.

The previous Liberal government was bad enough on this file, only
grudgingly agreeing to set up a supply infrastructure for medical
weed after being obliged to by a 2003 Supreme Court ruling.

But the Harperistas have been quietly doing what they can to
undermine medical marijuana use, not least by pricing
government-grown pot at street-dealer levels that will prove a major
hardship to many seriously ill patients who need the pot.

Last fall, the Tories also cut $4 million in funding from medical
marijuana research, effectively killing the program, a move that
borders on malicious ideological spitefulness.

The Canadian Press reports that Health Canada now adds a punishing
1,500 per cent markup on what they pay for certified medical
marijuana in bulk from the $328.75 per kilogram paid to the official
supplier, Prairie Plant Systems Inc., reselling it in 30-gram bags to
licensed users for $150 a pop, plus GST. That works out to $5,000 per kilogram.

According to the Canadian Press report, 1,742 patients are authorized
by Health Canada to possess dried marijuana as a medication.

The perverseness of this amounts to willful ignorance at best, with
people suffering from horrible illnesses like MS or cancer being
arbitrarily denied access to a natural substance that, at the barest
minimum, would ease their distress, and which is safer in terms of
side-effects than vast numbers of standard prescription pharmaceuticals.

A 150-pound person would reportedly have to chain-smoke about 900
marijuana cigarettes in order to induce a lethal dose. In 20-odd
years of researching medical marijuana, I have never encountered a
single report of a death caused by marijuana poisoning. Literally
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of legal prescription pharmaceuticals in
wide distribution can't boast likewise.

The government's grudging, peevish compliance with the court ruling
that they supply legal pot to licensed patients is sadistic and
cruel. People struggling to get through the day with painful,
debilitating illnesses shouldn't have to battle the government and
pay criminal drug-dealer prices for access to a medicine that provides relief.

Study after study indicates that cannabis is effective for pain
relief in cases of chronic pain, depression, neuropathy, persistent
nausea and weight loss.

The studies also show that marijuana is subjectively perceived, by an
overwhelming majority of users, as providing relief superior to that
of other medications.

I'm willing to wager that most would happily accept a remotely
increased risk of developing psychosis for some immediate relief.