POT CLUB STUNG BY LEGAL CONFUSION

I'm confused.

Not dazed and confused. Just confused.

The source of my confusion is the decision by the Guelph Police
Service to bust the Medical Cannabis Club of Guelph last week, which
led to trafficking charges against four staff, including founder Rade
Kovacevic.

Part of my confusion may be because the message from Canadian
officials on marijuana use is as mixed as a 1988 cassette tape. (Note
to readers: a long, long time ago, music came in a strange format
called a cassette tape and teenagers would create eclectic mixes of
their favourite songs, which, consequently, is illegal).

In the eyes of Health Canada, marijuana can be a therapeutic drug
with real medical benefits for some users. You can obtain a
physician's prescription for it - more than 4,000 Canadians have -
and the government even contracts a company in Saskatchewan to grow
marijuana for it. Hundreds more have federal licenses to grow their
own pot with seeds from that company.

In the eyes of many police forces, however, marijuana is still a
street drug to be pursued for criminal charges, no different from
crack-cocaine or heroin. And that contradiction seems to have fixed a
target squarely on the Medical Cannabis Club of Guelph.

While some of the club's members had Health Canada prescriptions for
marijuana to treat ailments from multiple sclerosis to cancer to
Hepatitis C, many did not. But to get a membership, everyone needed a
form filled out by their physician, explaining their symptoms and
their illness, according to the founder.

In the eyes of the law, selling pot to members without a Health
Canada prescription is illegal. What I struggle to understand is why
targeting those buyers, whose use was condoned by a physician, was a
priority for police, when there's a much larger, arguably more
dangerous underground drug trade in this city.

The club has been selling marijuana to the ill in Guelph for more
than three years. Why did police consent to it operating in the city
for all that time, out in the open, if it viewed the club's business
as criminal?

But regardless of who's buying the stuff, the cannabis club offered a
safe, transparent alternative to the typical source of marijuana -
the black market, with all its connections to organized crime. The
club has a downtown office. It maintains hours of operations. It has
a website. It has an owner, Kovacevic, who doesn't hide what he does.

And maybe that's the problem. Was Kovacevic too out in the open for
police's tastes? In February 2009, he and his partners started a
second business, Guelph Compassion Centre and Research Institute, in
a 2,000-square-foot industrial space where they were growing about
100 marijuana plants under high-pressure sodium lights.

Kovacevic gave interviews to the press, posed for photos, and talked
about the club as if it were some kind of independent pharmacy. In
January, the club moved to a larger, more open Baker Street address.
Business was good.

In fact, it was so good the club was carrying $10,000 in cash and
more than 20 kilograms of inventory when police swooped in. Maybe
investigators felt that's too big of an operation to tolerate anymore.

The club also hired an employee, Scott Gilbert, who had been on the
police's radar before. In 2007, he was investigated after he exposed
a loophole in the Municipal Elections Act by casting five spoiled
ballots at different polls. Oh, and he's also a communist. Yes, it's
true! He ran as a candidate for the Communist Party of Canada in the
2006 federal election.

Maybe the Medical Cannabis Club of Guelph simply became too much of
an irritant for police to ignore. Here was a club growing and selling
marijuana, which may or may not be illegal, which may or may not
provide a medical benefit to its users, right under their noses.

Perhaps police just said enough's enough, let the courts figure this one out.