HEALTH CANADA'S REEFER MADNESS

If you thought the gun registry was a mess, you should try buying pot from
the federal government.

Philippe Lucas, a 32-year-old hepatitis C sufferer from Victoria, is one of
about 550 Canadians licensed to use medicinal marijuana. To be approved, he
had to get two specialists to back the recommendation of his family doctor.
It took him eight months to get an appointment with just one specialist,
and that's in Victoria. If you live in Milk River, good luck.

Then, to acquire his government-approved pot, he had to swear an oath
before a lawyer that he would only buy from Health Canada, making the
government his monopoly supplier.

It took up to three weeks for the pot to arrive, which was sent to his
family doctor, from whom he picked it up. His family doctor doesn't like
receiving pot, for reasons of office security and because the doctor
doesn't like being a marijuana middleman.

When Lucas finally got his first batch of approved government grass several
weeks ago, it was of such poor quality he sent it back. At a cost of $190
an ounce, it was full of stems and twigs and had a next-to-nothing buzz
factor due to the low THC level mandated by the feds. "It reminded me of
shwaggy Mexican brick weed," he said.

Lucas, director of Canadians for Safe Access, a patient's right advocacy
group for legal pot users, had the stuff tested against pot supplied by the
Vancouver Island Compassion Society.

In addition to looking and smelling bad, the government pot was found to be
of inferior quality and, he says, potentially unsafe, with high levels of
lead and arsenic.

The government-approved pot is grown in an abandoned mine in Flin Flon by
Prairie Plant Systems under a $5.5-million contract. Prairie Plant Systems
is a private company founded in 1988 to develop improved strains of
saskatoon berries, which, as everyone knows, make for great pies and jams.

Prairie Plant Systems expanded its research to other fruit-bearing plants
and to developing plant-based pharmaceuticals at its biosecure underground
facility in Flin Flon.

Brent Zettl, the company's president, refutes Lucas's findings and said he
could grow better pot if the government let him.

"We can make a product here as good as, or better than, anything grown
anywhere in the country. If Health Canada wants a more potent strain, all
they have to do is ask," he said last week.

Zettl is probably very good at what he does, and therein lies the problem
of the federal government being in the business of growing pot. There are
plenty of old hippies out there who know more about growing marijuana than
bureaucrats in Ottawa, and they're doing it at no cost to the taxpayer. As
with any product, the consumer knows best, and legal consumers of medicinal
pot are rejecting the government weed.

"With this stuff, I have to smoke half a joint to get the same result. And
you can tell they've ground up a lot of stem and leaf in with the buds. But
what can I do? I don't want to buy from criminals," said Jari Dvorak, an
HIV patient from Toronto, one of several approved pot users who have panned
the Health Canada pot.

Does it not make more sense to turn medicinal cannabis cultivation over to
the real pot-growing experts, test it independently for safety, and get the
government out of the pot business?

Anne McLellan should either leave pot growing to Canada's non-profit
compassion societies or let Prairie Plant Systems grow pot that users
actually want.

As a taxpayer, I'm angry that my tax dollars are going up in smoke,
supplying overpriced skunkweed to patients who have a right to a product
that is both beneficial and esthetically pleasing.

Sick and dying people deserve no less.