CANADA QUIETLY LOOKS AT TESTING MARIJUANA

TORONTO - Canada is quietly investigating the possibility of testing a
marijuana inhaler being developed by a British company that would help
ease the pain of suffering patients but stop short of making them high.

Britain's GW Pharmaceuticals has been testing vaporised marijuana,
heated and inhaled through a nebulizer -- similar to the inhalers used
by asthma sufferers -- to relieve pain in chronically ill patients.

"Certainly we are looking at what is going on in the international
community,'' Bonnie Fox-McCintyre, spokeswoman for Canada's health
minister, told Reuters. "But I think it would be too fine a point to
say we're already negotiating.''

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Thursday that the
government has begun talks with the company to test the product in its
own clinical trials.

In March, Health Minister Allan Rock ordered clinical trials for the
medical use of marijuana and to determine how to grant safe access to
the drug. Last week, Rock expressed a preference for growing a supply
of the drug in Canada.

If the trials prove marijuana helps relieve pain, the government is
expected to allow its use.

"It's not that there's some strange marijuana somewhere that doesn't
have a psychoactive effect,'' Mark Rogerson, spokesman for GW
Pharmaceuticals, told Reuters from London on Thursday. "It's just that
the dosage required to relieve the pain would be much less than what
is required to make you high,.''

"I've seen reports that (the Canadian government) has invited us to
negotiations, but I can't comment on that,'' Rogerson said.

The drug's painkilling capabilities are believed to prevent epileptic
seizures, and relieve pain for multiple sclerosis and cancer patients.

"There's about 4,000 years, give or take, of anecdotal evidence,''
Rogerson said.

The company is trying to deliver the drug through an inhaler to avoid
the harmful action of smoking and hopes to have a product on the
market within five years. Tests have already been conducted on healthy
volunteers and, within two weeks, trials in Britain will begin on
multiple sclerosis patients.

GW Pharmaceuticals clones marijuana in a greenhouse to ensure a secure
a constant supply of the drug, something Canada has considered.