BE COMPASSIONATE

Once again a Canadian court has spoken up and said it's time for the
federal government to stop choking off supplies of medical marijuana
to the more than 2,000 users it licenses. And once again, the
government is expected to seek every conceivable obstacle, use every
possible loophole and exhaust every avenue of appeal that might help
delay the adoption of a logical, humane medical marijuana policy.

Until last week, licensed users had three options for obtaining the
drug lawfully: buy the much-criticized weed from the federally
contracted factory in Flin Flon, Man., master the art of cultivating
it themselves or designate a personal grower. But no grower was
allowed to provide pot to more than one patient. This rule was
intentionally designed to prevent the creation of California-style
"compassion clubs" or backyard patient collectives.

In other words, the law recognized the usefulness of medical
marijuana as a natural means of reducing pain and nausea in sufferers
of cancer, multiple sclerosis or AIDS -- but if those sufferers were
not content to buy from the government, they were denied the most
cost-effective method of obtaining it themselves. Compassion clubs
offer benefit beyond the mere operation of economies of scale: they
allow patients to regulate the content and quality of their own
medication, and they naturally evolve other social features, allowing
the severely ill to make new friends, share health advice, and
comfort one another. After years of experience in other countries,
members have access to a global body of expertise in meeting the
myriad of logistics and security problems involved in growing,
storing, travelling with and consuming medical marijuana.

It is no wonder that judges continue to horsewhip elected officials
and civil servants for standing in the way of these organizations,
many of which have already been operating on Canadian soil but
outside its law. In a decision issued last Thursday, federal court
deputy judge Barry Strayer ruled that Health Canada's insistence on a
one-to-one ratio between growers and patients is unreasonable. "In my
view," Strayer wrote, "it is not tenable for the government,
consistently with the right established in other courts for qualified
medical users to have reasonable access to marijuana, to force them
either to buy from the government contractor, grow their own or be
limited to the unnecessarily restrictive system of designated producers."

Who could disagree without disclosing contempt for the most
fundamental human liberties? Conventional reasons for opposing the
legalization of marijuana vary in nuance. Some are plainly
ridiculous: if pot were really a "gateway drug," then there must be
an awful lot of closet junkies amongst the 10 million-plus Canadians
who have tried it at least once. Some stem from a misunderstanding of
scientific evidence: note, for instance, how frantically armchair
drug warriors go spelunking in the medical literature for links
between marijuana and psychosis, abusing both common sense and the
idea of statistical correlation. (The rate of tobacco use among
schizophrenics is in the neighbourhood of 70% to 90%. Does this mean
that cigarettes cause mental illness? On the contrary -- the best
educated guess is that schizophrenics who smoke are, subconsciously
or otherwise, self-medicating.) And some have at least a partial
grounding in reality: there are certainly good reasons to inhibit the
usage and prestige of marijuana among adolescents, who face enough
challenges in maintaining their motivation and attention in school
without getting high.

What the good and bad arguments against marijuana have in common is
that they have little or nothing to do with the situation of the
seriously or terminally ill. A cancer patient who can't hold down a
meal because of chemotherapy, and who finds that marijuana restores
appetite better than any prescription drug, will be justly infuriated
upon hearing that his wellbeing must be sacrificed in order to "send
the right message" to 12-year-olds. And knowing that he will be
eligible to consume morphine by the truckload if he gets sicker, he
can only regard talk of "gateway drugs" as a sadistic irony.

Medical marijuana users are perfectly happy -- indeed, desperately
eager -- to have legal compassion clubs and cultivation cooperatives
regulated up the proverbial wazoo by Health Canada. They will go
along with almost any reasonable scheme the government is able to
devise to protect the interests of public order. But one suspects
that the real problem is an optical one. Both Liberal and
Conservative governments have succeeded in whipping up wrath against
marijuana "grow-ops," blaming them for violence and electricity
thefts as if those things were not already crimes unto themselves.

But a compassion club is nothing but a grow-op that complies with the
law, pays its bills, lives openly in the community and causes no harm
to anybody. And once you concede that such a thing can exist, and
others demonstrate it, the whole semantic game of drug prohibition
becomes harder for the government to play.