CITY COUNCILLOR ADVOCATES CHANGE TO MARIJUANA LAWS

A Grand Forks city councillor is not happy about a recent letter from
the mayors of the township and city of Langley to Health Canada
concerning legal grow-ops.

In early March, Peter Fassbender (City of Langley) and Rick Green
(Township of Langley) wrote the federal government asking it to cancel
licences for legal marijuana growing and Coun. Joy Davies is concerned
that it could have negative consequences.

The letter, if supported by government, will affect peoples lives to
the point where people will die, she says.

Davies - who is licensed to grow and uses medical marijuana to help
with her fibromyalgia, which leads to chronic pain - says that
problems arise due to the fact that information isn't widely shared
between Health Canada and various city councils, law enforcement or
doctors.

Sometimes, this leads to raids on people that are legally entitled to
grow.

"As soon as a patient discusses marijuana for medical use with a
doctor and the doctor says yes and signs the application, that person
is legally able to get marijuana for medical purposes and that's not
(made) known," explains Davies.

Because the government has not licensed the source of the marijuana,
these federally licensed people, or people under a doctor's care,
become criminals in the eyes of the law for using marijuana as a
medicine.

The city councillor says that while it is wonderful to have marijuana
available legally for medical purposes, there has never been a system
put in place that allows the patient to access their medicine.

There are many strains of marijuana, Davies says, each either treating
disease symptoms or delaying and sometimes stopping disease
progression altogether, and when people have to deal with the black
market to purchase marijuana, they don't know what they're getting.

You could end up with problems and issues around chemicals that
they're growing with, she explains. Health Canada does provide one
strain that it uses taxpayer dollars to grow and charges the person $5
a gram, but it is so weak it has no benefit to any medical patient.

The strain is also irradiated, ostensibly to eliminate any biological
impurities in the government-grown marijuana, which is a potential
health concern as there have been no long-term studies completed on
smoking irradiated material.

She says that letters from places like Langley, that want to abolish
licenses, don't solve the crime problems associated with marijuana.

"What they're trying to do is stop the crime problem and we understand
those issues, we have issues ourselves (in Grand Forks) but by
attacking vulnerable, sick people, does not fix the issue in any way,"
explains Davies.

While there is a 24-hour, toll-free phone number available that police
can use to determine whether someone can legally grow, not all
officers use the number, which can lead to problems for licence-
holders.

You end up with seven squad cars in front of a totally legal home and
all of a sudden the whole neighbourhood knows what's going on, Davies
says with concern.

People began to make assumptions and they know where a grow-op is
because of this, which can lead to the grower being robbed and
violated.

At the same time, Davies did say that Grand Forks RCMP are respectful
of people that are legally licensed to grow medical marijuana and did
use the toll-free number, unlike other jurisdictions.

She said that the issue of transferring authority regarding marijuana
laws from federal to local was brought up at the Union of B.C.
Municipalities (UBCM) and says that it is no longer a Grand Forks
issue for her as an elected official, it's a provincial one, which is
why she is working on the issue.

"The letter from Langley just takes the easiest targets in the world
and hurts them and their information is not factual. They didn't even
look at the numbers, from what I could read, on the Health Canada
website," Davies said.

"I wanted our people in the community to understand that the
information on that letter is not accurate," she said.

We'll talk to Coun. Davies about a recent Ontario Superior Court
decision regarding marijuana in a future issue.