PROTEST GOES UP IN SMOKE

Decriminalize Pot, Say Advocates

NIAGARA FALLS -- They came, they smoked, they marched and they smoked
some more.

Hundreds of marijuana users flooded into a parkette in Niagara Falls
where Highway 420 meets Victoria Avenue during the Hwy. 420 Cannabis
Rally Saturday, carrying signs and calling on Prime Minister Stephen
Harper to legalize marijuana.

The throng also brought joints, pipes and bongs and were using them
in public despite Niagara Regional Police cruisers frequently passing
by. When the crowd left the parkette, they marched to Clifton Hill
waving their flags and signs for passers-by to see.

Smoking marijuana is illegal in Canada except for about one million
people who are given exemptions to use it for medicinal purposes.
Alison Myrden, a Burlington resident and a member of Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition, is a medicinal user to keep her chronic
progressive multiple sclerosis at bay. She said at the rally she is
suppose to take 32 pills and 2,000 milligrams of morphine a day and
should be wheelchair-bound but has cut about 20 pills out because of
using marijuana.

"I'm on my feet because I smoke," said Myrden, adding she's had to
take her daily doses of pills for 15 years. "I don't want to do that
anymore. I'd rather smoke and eliminate two-thirds of my pills."

Marco Rendal, the publisher and editor of Treating Yourself, a
magazine dedicated to medicinal use marijuana, is a Toronto resident
with irriitable bowel syndrome.

He said the issue should not be in the political realm and the
negativity surrounding the issue is what led him to putting out his
magazine, to promote medical use.

"The reason I'm here is to educate and promote respectable and
responsible use of marijuana."