CANADA TO GIVE MEDICAL MARIJUANA CLINICAL TRIALS

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Health Minister Allan Rock said Wednesday he had
ordered officials to develop clinical trials for the medical use of
marijuana and to determine how to grant safe access to the drug.

Rock said this was not the first step toward the legalization of marijuana,
but an opposition member of parliament, physician Grant Hill, immediately
questioned whether it would not lead to more than pain relief.

Rock, a Liberal, told reporters, "There are Canadians who are suffering from
terminal illnesses who are in pain or suffering from difficult symptoms who
believe that smoking medical marijuana can help with those symptoms."

The debate echoed that in the United States, where voters in seven states
and the District of Columbia have approved the medical use of marijuana but
have been blocked by the federal government.

Many lobbying groups in Canada have pushed for the medical use of marijuana
or for its full legalization, but opponents argue that the drug causes harm
and is a steppingstone to harder drugs.

Hill, the health spokesman for Canada's opposition Reform Party, said he
could accept clinical trials but added, "It's quite controversial because it
could lead to other things."

"As a medical doctor, I treated young people who were habituated to
marijuana, whose marks had suffered, whose lives were wrecked," he said.

Rock, who belongs to the left-leaning wing of the ruling Liberal Party,
spent his formative years in the long-haired, smoke-wreathed 1960s. In 1969
he arranged for former Beatle John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, to attend
a peace conference in Ottawa.

Asked if he had smoked marijuana, the prime ministerial aspirant smiled
broadly, and he refused to answer the question when pressed later.

"It has nothing to do with legalizing marijuana," Rock said, adding that he
wanted to develop scientific evidence to determine whether anecdotal
evidence of marijuana's benefits could be backed up.

"What I've asked officials to do is to develop a plan that will include
clinical trials of medical marijuana and also deal with some of the
difficult aspects of this complex question, including criteria and access to
a safe supply of this medical -- or what would be a medical -- drug," he
said.

Last March, Rock lifted a 60-year-old ban on the commercial cultivation of
hemp, a non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana.