DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH WAITING FOR IT TO BE LEGALIZED

While there is every reason to believe that Allan Rock's Health Canada
researchers will confirm the therapeutic benefits of smoked marijuana,
there is also good reason to doubt that they will approve the
medicinal use of the drug.

After all, science -- much less public health -- has never been the
driving force in Canada's drug control strategy.

No less than 10 government-commissioned studies of the health effects
of smoked marijuana -- dating from 1893 to 1995, including a 1997
World Health Organization report -- have come to an essentially
identical conclusion: Weighed in the balance with other legal drugs,
there is no compelling public health reason to prohibit marijuana.

With the exception of the first, the India Hemp Drugs Commission of
1893/94, all these studies have since vanished without a trace --
their recommendations, suppressed, denounced or ignored.

Marijuana prohibition persists for ideological reasons: First, because
it perpetuates the interests of a powerful and deeply entrenched
law-enforcement establishment; second, because governments and moral
elites have, since 1923, painted themselves into a corner about the
real consequences of marijuana use; and third, because -- marijuana
having such a wide spectrum of therapeutic benefits -- the global
pharmaceutical industry will not take kindly to the regulation for
medicinal purposes of a drug that can be grown in anyone's basement.

Scientific proof of the therapeutic efficacy of marijuana will hardly
be sufficient to overturn 70-odd years of lies, distortions and sheer
economic interest.

If the issue could be settled on the basis of science or public
health, Canada would have decriminalized it in the early 1970s upon
the recommendation of the Le Dain Commission Report.

Canadians should not expect the well-funded and prestigious
prohibition interests to simply go away once Health Canada confirms
what researchers have known for decades and users have known for millennia.

Craig Jones
Instructor Law and Security Administrator
Loyalist College Belleville