MARIJUANA GROWER WORRIED FOR FUTURE OF MEDICINAL POT

Nanaimo Man Says 'Everything Is Being Slowly Taken Away From Us' By Tories

Gregory Twyman wonders about the future of medicinal marijuana in
Canada. Twyman has a licence from Health Canada to grow up to 75
plants. Nanaimo's Gregory Twyman wonders about the future of
medicinal marijuana in Canada.

Twyman has a licence from Health Canada to grow up to 75 pot plants
to help deal with a variety of illnesses he has been diagnosed with;
including arthritis and an inflammation of his prostate and urinary glands.

He said that without medicinal marijuana, which he eats in cookies
and brownies rather than smoking it, he would have to take about 24
pharmaceutical pills a day, which is hard on his liver, kidneys and
other organs.

Twyman, who has grown pot legally for almost six years, said
officials at Health Canada had been proactive and positive in the
early years of Canada's medicinal marijuana program, and had worked
to make the system effective and efficient for licensed pot smokers
that had acknowledged medical conditions.

He said that began to change shortly after Stephen Harper and his
Conservatives took power in 2006, but he acknowledges that there's
more to the problem.

Twyman said the government has cut staff at Health Canada and
dramatically increased the amount of bureaucracy people have to go
through to attain licences to legally smoke and/or grow the controversial herb.

Calls to Health Canada and Nanaimo-Alberni MP James Lunney were not
returned by press time.

Everything we had is slowly being taken away from us," Twyman said Tuesday.

If medicinal marijuana users can't legally get it from the government
and are no longer able to grow their own, they will have to break the
law and grow their plants or they will be forced to buy it from
criminals on the streets."

Unlike many pot advocates who call for the immediate
decriminalization of marijuana, Twyman said a lot more research
should be conducted on the drug before any decisions are made on the
future of pot in Canada.

There are 67 active components to pot and we only know about 12 of
them so far," he said.

The government hasn't done enough research into pot to be so negative
about it."

Twyman is also critical of Marc Emery, the self-described Canadian
prince of pot, and his campaign for legalization. Emery is serving a
five-year sentence in a United States federal prison for selling
cannabis seeds.

Emery's strategy was to bombard Health Canada with thousands of
applications to grow pot in the medicinal marijuana program in an
effort to have the government just legalize it, but it backfired,"
Twyman said. "The system became so jammed up with new applications
that it has harmed all of us who rely on the program to allow us to
have healthier and happier lives. It now takes about a month to have
a phone call returned from Health Canada when it used to take about a day."