POT BUST HURTS AILING CITY RESIDENT

It's not easy to feel sorry for people who have lost their access to
illegal drugs.

When police busted up a crack house in my neighbourhood a little while
ago, I shed not one tear for all the moonstruck nuts who would have to
find somewhere else to trade their ill-gotten cash for brain-crushing
substances.

But Bob LeDuc is another story.

The local self-employed guitar teacher uses marijuana to combat the
crippling effects of psoriasis, irritable bowel syndrome and temporal
lobe epilepsy. Without the drug, which he calls "medicine," LeDuc is
prone to complex epileptic seizures. These seizures, often in the dead
of night when the level of THC in his blood drops off, bring with them
loss of awareness and impairment of memory.

In the past he has awakened with a dislocated shoulder, broken blood
vessels in his finger, cuts on his head and other injuries, all blamed
on night seizures.

When LeDuc, 55, needs to fill a prescription, he heads to his very
exclusive pharmacy, about an hour away close to the border of
Wellington and Grey counties. The pharmacy was located in a growing
room at the sprawling Dundalk-area home of his friend and fellow
medical marijuana-user Marco Renda.

The pharmacy was located there.

On Wednesday, police officers swooped down on Renda's rural home after
a month-long investigation into marijuana allegedly being shipped out
of Canada to pot users in the United States and the United Kingdom.
During a search of the home, officers came across the growing room in
which 109 marijuana plants were nearing harvest age.

Seventy-eight of the plants were Renda's, which he is permitted to
grow thanks to a Health Canada designation that exempts him from
sections of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

The remaining 31 plants -- determined to be the number of plants by
which Renda was exceeding his exemption -- were chopped down and taken
away by police. Those were Bob LeDuc's plants.

In 1999, LeDuc became one of the first two dozen Canadians granted a
Health Canada exemption allowing him to legally possess and use
marijuana. His exemption, renewed annually, was later changed to also
allow him to produce marijuana, and designated Renda's home as LeDuc's
growing site.

Until last October.

When LeDuc received his current exemption card, the growing site had
been changed to his own address, where he has never grown marijuana.

He called Health Canada to alert them to the mistake, but they never
sent a corrected card.

So he called again. And again.

"I eventually gave up," LeDuc told a Mercury reporter this week. "I
thought it must not be a big deal."

He is now agonizing over that decision.

Without proof, the remaining 31 plants were being grown illegally.
Police seized them and charged Renda with production of a controlled
substance.

"I feel responsible for that charge because I didn't do everything I
should have to get the problem corrected," LeDuc told me yesterday.
"It's become my full-time job to get that charge dropped."

The production charge is among the least of Renda's problems. Police
and the courts take a dim view of sending marijuana outside of the
country, and will no doubt come down hard on Renda for those
allegations.

Renda, 45, who has battled hepatitis C for more than two decades, has
slid seamlessly from the role of sickly marijuana user into that of
medical marijuana crusader -- and in the process drawing more than his
share of attention both positive and negative.

"My neck is on the line here," Renda told me in October 2002 when I
was invited to attend a "harvest party" with several Health Canada
exemptees at his home. "I've got to have compassion and help out my
fellow human beings. I don't care if it's legal or not."

At the time Renda was on the radar screen of local drug cops, but was
not actually facing any charges.

This week, minutes after being released on bail with a pile of charges
against him, Renda made it clear a night in jail has not deterred him.

"They're not going to stop me," he scoffed, sitting in the courthouse
corridor waiting to sign his bail order . "If someone presents medical
evidence that marijuana helps them I will do what I can to help them."