WHY IS OTTAWA SO AFRAID OF POT?

Politicians Are Again Letting The Courts Decide -- Even When Marijuana Is
Used To Ease Pain

The federal government proposes to remove the risk of criminal
penalties for people possessing up to 15 grams of pot. It's prepared
to try making marijuana available to people who need it for medical
purposes.

But you can tell that the government's heart isn't in it.

It's obvious that Health Minister Anne McLellan still thinks marijuana is
an evil drug.

She can't even call it pot. She refers to it as "product" -- "It was
never the intention of us to sell product," she insisted Wednesday as if
she'd been asked about weapons of mass destruction.

She had been forced by the courts to announce that people who are
deemed to need marijuana for medicinal purposes may buy seeds or dried weed
from the government.

The Ontario Superior Court had given McLellan until Wednesday to come
up with regulations for distributing medical marijuana, or the 500
permits issued to approved users on a trial basis would become invalid.

Without a legal way to get their supply, medical users would be left
having to grow the drug themselves. But by buying the seeds to grow, they
could be liable for charges of trafficking.

McLellan obviously regards the selling of seeds and dried weed a
stop-gap measure.

The federal government is appealing the Ontario decision that forced
her to make Wednesday's announcement, and she's still skeptical about the
very basis of the medical access program.

"There have been no studies anywhere in the world that have been able to
confirm medicinal benefit," she says.

Not in Canada there aren't, thanks to McLellan's own department.

In March, Health Canada cut off funds for a community research
initiative in Toronto that was studying whether smoking pot can
alleviate nausea and weight loss affecting many AIDS victims.

In the four years since it was announced by McLellan's predecessor,
Allan Rock, the medical marijuana program has spent about $10 million
without providing a gram of marijuana to a single sick person.

Another medical marijuana research program, at the McGill University
Pain Centre, is so sensitive that neither Health Canada officials or
university spokesman will even say whether it has been started.

And then there's the absurdity of the government's own grow operation, deep
down in an abandoned mine shaft at Flin Flon, Man.

Anxious to ensure that government-grown drugs meet the kinds of
specifications that everything else government does must meet, it has
released none of it.

The quality of the weed is too variable, apparently -- maybe a little
sunlight might have helped -- and the government is afraid of being held
liable for any dangerous side effects its drug might have.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officers in B.C. are torching bushels of
the best B.C. Bud, a product, as McLellan would call it, unsurpassed in
quality anywhere in the world.

It's time the health minister had a talk with B.C. Supreme Court
Justice Mary Southin.

She's not a doctor, and she, too, once thought marijuana was a
dangerous drug.

But she has read up on the scientific studies that McLellan apparently
has been unable to find, and has come to the conclusion that pot's no more
harmful than alcohol.

If that's the case, she's said, it's not of sufficient national
concern for the federal government to move into provincial
jurisdiction in order to proscribe it.

The day may come when the courts declare Ottawa has no business trying to
restrict marijuana possession.

But until that happens, the government should speed up its
decriminalization bill when Parliament resumes this fall, and
recognize that even if marijuana doesn't have proven medical benefits, it
makes a lot of patients feel a little less pain.