MAILING MEDICINAL MARIJUANA

The government's bumbling approach to medicinal marijuana would be
funny, if it weren't for the fact that real people are suffering in
real ways as a result of it.

Consider Michel Aube, a Brockville man afflicted with chronic back
pain due to soft tissue damage in the vertebrae. There are two ways to
control his pain: cannabis (the active ingredient in marijuana), or
the much more powerful and potentially dangerous drug, morphine.
Health Canada, fortunately, has given Mr. Aube a special licence to
use marijuana for medicinal purposes.

But what the government gives with one hand, it takes away with the
other. Health Canada may have licensed Mr. Aube to use marijuana, but
Canada Post refuses to deliver the drug from his B.C. supplier, who is
a licensed grower. Canada Post says it will not deliver mail that
contains controlled substances. Health Canada says that, on the
contrary, Canada Post is allowed to deliver medicinal marijuana.

Meantime, Michel Aube is forced to take morphine, the side effects of
which are dramatic weight loss, constant lethargy and disrupted sleep.
"It's killing me," he says. His only option is to buy cannabis from an
unauthorized supplier closer to home, in other words, a drug dealer --
in which case his pain might be relieved but at the cost of a criminal
record.

All of which makes Mr. Aube another victim of the "war" on drugs.