RASPBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

OTTAWA - The 2002 cannabis crop is almost ready to be harvested in regions
of Canada not ravaged by drought, floods or police raids.

It's hidden among trees or ripening amid clumps of raspberry bushes, which
allegedly give off a similar infrared signature to fool the drug detection
scanners in search-and-seize police helicopters.

The downside of using raspberries for cannabis cover, of course, is that it
prevents the landowner from offering a U-pick service to the public. But the
payoff from a successful marijuana harvest can be lucrative enough to let
the berry crop drop and rot in the field.

Anthony, not his real name naturally, grows his marijuana under the trees of
his Central Ontario property. He plants in the spring using a full bag of
tri-mix soil per plant, carefully watering them every other day and pruning
them regularly. He periodically gives them a blast of pepper spray to keep
the bugs away and ensure, ironically, his product is chemical-free, at least
on the outside.

When we were teens in the early '70s, he was selling one-ounce bags for $40
and had a reputation for dealing some very high-flying stuff. Now he's a
medical practitioner, of sorts, offering $230 ounces of grass to a waiting
list of cancer, MS and AIDS victims in east side Toronto.

He grows potent product -- "compared to what we had as a kid, this will
knock you on your ass and there's even better product out there," he marvels
- -- that can send a sick person's suffering up in smoke in three deep drags.

"I've had customers whose body was in full tremors, quaking uncontrollably
with back spasms," Anthony says. "I give them half a joint and the tremors
abate and even the back spasms ease. It's amazing to watch."

While Anthony's no angel, having smoked more recreational dope than any
pothead can possibly remember, he had visions of growing the stuff legally
for sick people one day. But that day's delayed thanks to pot pooper Health
Minister Anne McLellan's musings this week.

McLellan has decided, subject to a sudden damage control flip-flop, that
legal medicinal marijuana is reefer madness and that former health minister
Allan Rock was on a bad trip when he planted a government crop at the bottom
of a Flin Flon mineshaft last year for distribution to the suffering.

First, she determined his $6-million pot planting blossomed into faulty
flora and ordered the crop destroyed. Now the whole idea of providing more
chronically or terminally ill Canadians with relief via marijuana has been
put on hold by McLellan until there has been a Supreme Court ruling or what
will undoubtedly become a protracted clinical trial, which may or may not
get started any time soon.

Ironically, while McLellan's getting uptight about dope for the dying, her
colleague Justice Minister Martin Cauchon is musing about decriminalizing
mere possession of cannabis for the public.

His moderate views are likely to resonate in a Senate committee report on
illegal drugs due out later this year and may echo in a Commons committee
probe of non-medicinal drugs as well.

This sets up the inconsistent optics of having a justice minister making it
less hazardous for the public to buy grass while the health minister makes
it more difficult for the very sick to access a safe, reliable, effective
supply.

McLellan raised her concerns with doctors on Monday, who had expressed legal
and medical reservations about marijuana as a prescribed treatment.

After all, the list of medical hazards from smoking marijuana include slower
reaction times, impaired motor co-ordination, increased heart rates and
dilated blood vessels. And the difference between that and a six-pack of
beers while smoking a pack of ciggies is ... what exactly?

Clinical trials are not required for the medicinal relief that's being
talked about here or for the 800 pain sufferers given a licence by the feds
to possess a stash of illegal drug.

That marijuana, a relatively benign drug by comparison to powerful
alternative drug therapies, offers quick relief from chronic pain, nausea
and poor appetites is beyond dispute. That the 45,000 pot possession charges
laid per year waste billions of dollars and thousands of police man-hours is
a fact acknowledged by stretched forces. That marijuana leads to harder
drugs is an argument few open-minded governments believe anymore.

So if Anne McLellan feels "discomfort" with the notion of government
assisting the ailing with marijuana, aw, poor baby.

Let her experience the personal agony of those waiting for its medicinal
relief and I'd bet her dopey reticence would quickly go up in smoke.