MEDICAL POT ADVOCATES HOPING TO OPEN STOREFRONT IN DUNCAN

Help is coming for Cowichanians wishing to ford a swamp of government
paperwork and legally obtain medical marijuana.

A local group, represented by Mill Bay lawyer Kirk Tousaw, aims to
open the storefront Medical Cannabis Access Centre in the Duncan
Garage, possibly by month's end.

The opening date is pending finalization of the centre's business
plan, plus city permits and more.

The idea, said social-justice advocate Tousaw, is to educate valley
patients about their rights under Canada's federal medical-marijuana
program.

Staff will help folks complete the necessary federal forms, then refer
them to local doctors who could prescribe pot.

But even with a physician's support, getting a government licence to
gain and possess medical marijuana can take some eight months,
explained Tousaw.

"Medical marijuana is legal, but almost no one can get a licence to
use it."

That bureaucratic morass pushes many patients to buy illegal weed from
dope dealers, a situation centre founders want to prevent.

"To get this relatively safe, benign substance you have to go through
a tortuous process," Tousaw said.

"We need not criminalize people for their choice of
medicine."

It's unknown how many valley patients hold licences, and how many buy
street cannabis for various legitimate conditions.

However, there are 6,000-some legal medical cannabis users in the
country, he said.

The feds' haywire pot program frustrates many patients in need of
medical weed, signaled Tousaw, due to government suspicion healthy
folks simply want recreational reefer.

"Uptake in the federal program has been low. It's appalling.

"The program only exists because the courts ordered it," Tousaw said
of Ottawa's medical-marijuana system created in 2000.

"The supply piece also remains a problem."

Duncan's access centre will not be involved in finding or supplying
medical weed, he stressed.

"If you can legally possess it, you can grow it yourself but that's
not possible for challenged people, for example."

Local legal, organic growers, Eric Nash and Wendy Little, supply
licensed patients with legal medical cannabis.

Legal growers are currently restricted to two patients, Tousaw
said.

Nash and Little grow cannabis cloned in various TCH levels tailored to
a patient's particular malady.

THC is the active ingredient in medical cannabis that can be smoked,
taken as tea, or eaten perhaps in cookies.

Nash and Little are fighting to have the feds' client ceiling
lifted.

Legal patients' other option is buying medical marijuana at $150 an
ounce from a federal grow-op located somewhere in Saskatchewan, Tousaw
said.

"The program's currently a Byzantine nightmare," he summed.