MARIJUANA: ONE STONED DECISION AFTER ANOTHER

In 2001, Ottawa made a dumb decision to allow qualified patients to
smoke medical marijuana. Today, 10,000 Canadians have licences to
inhale, and 3,400 of your fellow citizens can grow their own pot legally.

Well, some grow it legally. Others use their government licences to
traffic in an illegal drug or "controlled substance" - which seems to be
a very Canadian sort of paradox.

Earlier this month, police in Maple Ridge, B.C., paid a visit to a gent
with a licence to grow 220 marijuana plants - and found 1,400 instead.

Must have been a math error.

In British Columbia, the problem seems to be that the medical marijuana
business is being hijacked by entrepreneurs who grow too much of it. In
Nova Scotia, we have the opposite problem: At least one woman on welfare
has claimed that she just can't afford to grow enough pot.

Talk about regional stereotypes: On the West Coast, they have
transformed medical marijuana into a growth industry. On this coast,
which I am starting to think is the madder one, the legal version of the
sweet weed is seen as an opportunity to squeeze more money out of
government.

Cue the victim.

This week, CBC News reported that a Nova Scotia woman wanted the
provincial Department of Community Services to subsidize her grow-op.
She and her partner have a Health Canada licence to cultivate 25 plants,
but are too poor to grow more than six.

The Income Assistance Appeals Panel agreed with the complainants - and
ruled that the province of Nova Scotia should pay the couple $2,500 in
one-time costs and $400 a year for supplies.

The weird thing about the ruling is that it makes sense, or at least it
does in a country whose national government thinks it's OK that citizens
grow their own toxic drugs.

If government decides that "qualified" patients can grow pot, inside a
nation which holds that equitable, affordable access to medical care is
a basic principle, it follows that taxpayers should subsidize the
grow-ops of patients who can't afford to harvest enough weed for their
own needs.

The appeals panel ruling is not the issue, then.

What this story really shows is how one off-kilter government decision -
to legalize grow-your-own pot - begets another and another and another.

No wonder the nation's docs, as represented by the Canadian Medical
Association, have been bewildered by the pot policy for a decade now.

To begin with, you can't control the potency, quality or toxicity of
home-grown drugs. In addition, as the CMA argues, there is "scant
evidence" that the "herbal form" of marijuana does anyone any good.

That's not to say pot can't help you make it through the night. It's
just that no science has proven this to be the case.

From the CMA's perspective, this puts docs at risk of liability. As the
association says in one report, "physicians should not be put in the
untenable position of gatekeepers for a proposed medical intervention
that had not undergone established regulatory review processes as
required for all other prescription medicines."

Forget the doctors for a minute - the real issue is that Canada's policy
puts patients in peril.

It's one thing for the noble libertarians among us to decide they're
going to smoke marijuana or bake hashish oil into magic cookies.

It's quite another for government to tell pharmaceutical companies to
put all new medicines through a series of exhaustive, expensive clinical
trials on the off chance that they might pass regulatory muster, while
telling a select group of Canadians to grow their own marijuana in the
kitchen and smoke it at home. (Patient, heal thyself.)

Today, it appears that Ottawa might finally be coming down from its
decade-long pot high.

One news report suggests that the federal government will take grow-ops
out of the hands of patients, and hand the job off to licensed private
operators - presumably under controlled conditions. (Where do I apply?)

Controlling the active agent in marijuana - delta-9-tetrahydro-
cannabinol or THC - would be a start. Heck, next thing you know, our
government may even figure out if marijuana actually works as advertised.