HANDS UP IF YOU PUFF LOOPHOLES ABOUND

Our federal health department has given about 300 people permission to
smoke marijuana as medical treatment. But a survey for the health
department, made public over the weekend, reveals that fully one million
Canadians now say they smoke the stuff "for medical reasons."

If we surmise that a lot of these people are too busy watching M*A*S*H
reruns to follow the news, we may concede that many of the medical
marijuana million didn't see a little story last week that pointed that
smoking marijuana - for any reason - is in fact medically quite bad for you.

Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada (PSFC), one of our leading anti-tobacco
vigilante groups, reminded us all that marijuana is packed with
carcinogens, and has more tar than tobacco. Even for people already gravely
ill, they say, doctors willing to prescribe the stuff must ask themselves
some serious ethical questions.

Meanwhile, the group that provides doctors' insurance and the Canadian
Medical Association have both recently issued warnings of their own. The
CMA and the Canadian Medical Malpractice Association have warned the
country's 56,000 physicians that lawsuits loom over any MD who prescribes
marijuana without plenty of data - is it really good for pain from this
patient's particular ailment? Better than "regular" drugs? In what dosage?

Eager To Skate Around

(At the scientific level, there's contradictory evidence about marijuana as
a pain-killer; other drugs do at least as well in many cases, some studies
say. It's hard to imagine any other drug being rushed into the marketplace
while so many scientific doubts linger.)

These two stories taken together - the poll and the PSFC warning - should
embarrass all those who were so eager to skate around the marijuana laws.

That group would include the legal-dope activists who claimed to be
concerned with the pain of a few people who have terminal or at least
severe illnesses. No doubt compassion was one motive, but it certainly
proved to be a magnificent Trojan horse for the wider legalization
campaign, didn't it?

And that group would also include Allan Rock, who was the health minister
who championed this medical loophole, and was happy to have his picture
snapped in a little forest of leafy green plants down a mine in Flin Flon,
Man., where the government was growing its own stash. Rock's eagerness to
"compromise" on this issue carried a tell-tale whiff of political ambition.

So Rock and the activists used each other to poke a little ventilation hole
in the law. And now the smoke is just pouring through.

This country probably should relax the law on marijuana, not by legalizing
it but by making simple possession less than a criminal offence. And we
need a full, serious debate on that issue.

A Truly Hopeless Mess

But we certainly don't need this sort of back-door legalization.

Very few marijuana permits have been issued, largely because Rock's rules
are a bureaucratic minefield of unequal justice, comparable only to gun
control as a truly hopeless mess: Some people are allowed to smoke
marijuana, provided they grow it themselves. Others are allowed to buy it,
but only from authorized sellers, who may not have enough supply. . . .

This shambles appears to be the result of bureaucrats trying to judge each
case individually, a slow, imprecise process that leads only to
inefficiency and inequality. No wonder people just assume the law says it's
OK to smoke up if you say it's medical.

It's tempting to say, in fact, that where the private sector makes
marijuana available on every street corner at "popular prices," the
bureaucrats are creating a labyrinth of permission certificates, exemption
documents and tables of guidelines. Of course the bikers are bad guys, but
at least the only paper they want to see for their product is money.

People with grave medical conditions need compassion, attention and
state-of-the-art medication. They do not need to be pawns in someone's game.

And laws need to be wise and clear, and they must be carefully and fairly
enforced. The current marijuana laws are just the opposite.