WITH SUPPLY DRY, PATIENTS TURN TO STREET SOURCES

'We're Not Criminals'

A police raid of the largest medicinal drug network in Toronto has left
some 1,200 people looking to illicit sources to buy the marijuana they use
to control pain.

They learned yesterday they will no longer be able to buy marijuana, used
as a palliative for a number of terminal illnesses -- including cancer,
AIDS/HIV, hepatitis, arthritis and spinal injuries -- at the Toronto
Compassion Centre.

The club, which started supplying patients in 1998, was ordered shut
yesterday by a Toronto judge after police confiscated "large quantities" of
marijuana and hashish from the group's Bathurst Street headquarters.

Steven Bacon, a 48-year-old club member suffering from Hepatitis C and a
spinal fusion of three vertebrae in his neck, said yesterday he has been
unsuccessful in his attempts to grow pot and is angered by the closure.

"I'm so frustrated after almost three years of failed attempts to grow my
own marijuana. Now the only source available to us has been taken down. For
the life of me, I can't understand why they would do this," he said.

"Growing equipment is in the thousands of dollars. I'm on a disability of
$900 per month, in a position that I can barely afford any medicine at all.
We're not criminals. We're sick people who need medicine. There is a need
for these compassion clubs to keep us out of the underground and organized
crime units. Who else is going to have that kind of marijuana?"

The crackdown has also forced organizations modelled after the Toronto
Compassion Centre to resort to clandestine tactics to provide marijuana to
their terminally ill clients, regardless of whether or not the clients have
been authorized by Health Canada to possess the drug.