DRUG APPROVAL IS GOING TO POT

Last fall, Grant Krieger of Calgary went to court to fight a charge
of cultivating marijuana. He told the judge that pot alleviated his
symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Judge Darlene Acton was sympathetic,
and then some. She threw out the charge, said it violated Krieger's
security rights under the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms and
gave Parliament 12 months to amend drug legislation so that sick
people could get medicinal cannabis.

It's because of the Acton judgment and others like it since 1997 that
Canada this week has become the first country in the world to allow
people to possess marijuana for medicinal purposes. The new
regulations, which took effect Monday, allow sick and dying people to
take marijuana for pain or symptom relief, provided they can get one
doctor (in some cases, two are required) to prescribe it after
attesting that other remedies have been ineffective.

The government is to begin supplying pot to those who qualify this
fall, when the first crop is harvested at the new marijuana
plantation in Flin Flon, Man., which it chose as its official
supplier.

Doctors' organizations don't like the new regulations, and for good
reason. The alleged medicinal benefits of marijuana have never been
subjected to analysis in clinical trial. The way the drug process
works in Canada, testing precedes approval, not the other way around.
When you have courts forcing legislators to approve drugs that
haven't been tested yet, something's wrong.

"We're being asked to be gatekeepers for a product that hasn't gone
through any rigorous testing," says Peter Barrett, president of the
Canadian Medical Association.

If marijuana, heretofore a recreational drug, is to be rebranded as a
medicinal herb, then assertions of its therapeutic value have to
substantiated by clinical trial first. Until then, the Quebec College
of Physicians and Surgeons is quite properly threatening fines and
temporary license suspensions for any Quebec doctor who prescribes
marijuana before a recognized mainstream research group examines its
medical benefits, side-effects and, above all, its interaction with
other drugs. Just such a major study on the effectiveness of
marijuana as a pain-relief medication is to begin in January at the
Montreal General Hospital.

Anecdotal evidence suggests marijuana might well have medicinal
value. If clinical trials corroborate these claims, fine. If they
don't, then the flurry of recent pot-as-medicine defences in Canadian
courts starts to look more like rearguard lobbying for eventual
decriminalization.

There's considerable sympathy in Canada for the idea of
decriminalization of possession, including at this newspaper, but
that's a parallel issue. Police rarely bust people any more for
possession, yet the prohibition of possession is still there on the
statute books. The contradiction reflects the fact that Canadians
aren't really sure what to think about marijuana any more. You know
your country is confused when your central government approves the
drug for use without bothering to study it properly first.