A POTTED ROCK

"What luck for rulers that men do not think." Hitler said it, but
Health Minister Allan Rock might have been quietly hymning the words
to himself as he tried to justify his government's hitherto fruitless
search for a source of "medicinal quality" marijuana.

The high-grade pot is required for clinical trials aimed at measuring
the drug's therapeutic qualities.

Where to get the vital raw material? Might it be British Columbia,
where a clement climate and native industry have come together to
produce a $3-billion to $6-billion underground economy based on the
appeal of "B.C. Bud?" Described as the "champagne of marijuana," the
B.C. pot -- the result of 30 years of illicit breeding experiments --
is so potent that U.S. gourmets are reputedly willing to pay ten times
more for it than the once recherche marijuanas of Mexico.

If you said yes to purchasing B.C. Bud, you clearly don't comprehend
the mind of a politician. Buying a substance of which we are
apparently a world leader in producing is too simple. Better is
pretzel-shaped reasoning that argues: Because growing pot is illegal
in Canada, let's just pretend it isn't grown in Canada.

"Acceptable sources of drugs not approved in Canada may be found in
countries where they have been approved," Mr. Rock has written about
the situation.

And, true to his pledge, his ministry has been sounding out people as
far away as England as to whether we can buy high-grade pot from them.

This approach, of course, should guarantee that we buy marijuana at
the highest conceivable price. And given the fact that the greatest
medical benefit in taking pot is believed to be linked with the
highest levels of the chemical that makes people high, if we are
really lucky, we can be buying a British plant grown from seeds first
bred in British Columbia.

Now if this sounds like the Scots searching for a source of medicinal
Scotch in Morocco, and the French looking for a robust Burgandy in
Sweden, you may be on to something.

The government's position is so obtuse that one's advice for what to
do sounds like a simpleton's suggestion. Mr. Rock, put out a contract
on medical marijuana to tender. Guarantee that bidders won't be
prosecuted, then watch what a good source of medicinal-quality, cheap,
home-grown drug comes rolling in.

And, oh yes, while you're at it, you might just decriminalize Canada's
world-famous marijuana in the first place. If you find it politically
dicey to announce that in a straight-forward way, why not simply
redefine legalization as a "nation-wide experiment designed to measure
the long-term effect of the non-medical use of the drug?"