POT PROGRAM COULD END, MCLELLAN SAYS

Minister of Health Questions Approval of Medicinal Marijuana Before
Clinical Trials: Scientific Proof Sought

The federal government would likely scrap its controversial medical
marijuana program if trials about to get underway conclude the drug
has no therapeutic benefit, Anne McLellan, the federal Minister of
Health, suggested yesterday.

Ms. McLellan also offered veiled criticism of Allan Rock, her
predecessor in the job, for approving the limited use of marijuana for
medicinal purposes before finding out if it had any scientifically
proven value.

She was asked what would happen if the trials to be conducted by the
Canadian Institutes of Health Research and others found that marijuana
did not benefit patients, or that any benefits were offset by harmful
side-effects.

"As far as I'm concerned, we are a department of health. You work on
the basis of approving products, therapies, drugs that have a
medicinal benefit," she replied during a meeting with the National
Post's editorial board.

"If it doesn't have a medicinal benefit, I don't know why the
department of health would approve it as such."

The medical marijuana program, approved under Mr. Rock's watch,
currently provides exemptions from marijuana possession laws to about
500 people suffering conditions ranging from AIDS to glaucoma.

Many swear that the drug provides relief from symptoms that no other
medicine offers.

Eric Nash, a licensed medical marijuana grower and part of the
stakeholders' committee that advises Health Canada, said yesterday
that Ms. McLellan's comments about the future of the program do not
mean much.

"That [completing the trials] will take several years and she may not
even be health minister down the road," he said.

"In the meantime, the courts are setting the agenda.... Basically, it
really doesn't matter what she says.

"It really is a moot point."

He said he and his wife grow pot for multiple sclerosis sufferers and
it seems to have a "huge" benefit for them.

Regulators should approach marijuana like a natural remedy and not
base its legitimacy on a battery of trials as they would with a
prescription drug, Mr. Nash said.

A number of court rulings have backed demands of the chronically or
terminally ill for legal access to marijuana. One judgment led to an
announcement by Ms. McLellan last week that the government would,
temporarily at least, supply pot and pot seeds to medical marijuana
users through their doctors.

But the minister's lukewarm endorsement of the new service and details
of the plan left advocates of the drug largely unhappy.

Ms. McLellan stressed yesterday that there is no definitive evidence
of marijuana's benefits, and that her department is not in the
business of approving products whose benefit has not been proven.

She said Mr. Rock introduced the program out of compassion. She was
asked if approving medical marijuana first, then setting up trials,
was turning the process around backward.

"That would be up to you to determine," she said.

"I believe that as a department of health, it is important for us not
to approve products, devices, therapies without requiring the
necessary clinical trials that are, I think, more or less a given ...
in this country."