MAN SHOULD GET ACCESS TO POT IN JAIL

To the editor:

I was appalled to learn that Michael Patriquen was incarcerated for six
years while being denied safe, legal, affordable access to his medication
while behind bars (Patriquen Gets Six Years, Weed Pulled, The Daily News,
Sept.11).

Everyone is entitled to have access to their medication. All other forms of
medication are readily made available to prisoners. Furthermore, not only
one, but three physicians, two of them being pain-management specialists,
concurred that medicinal marijuana is what works best to treat Patriquen's
chronic pain. Prescribed "legal poisons" miserably failed this man. Health
Canada approved Patriquen's application to possess and grow medicinal
marijuana. It is no small task to pass Health Canada's rigorous regulatory
regime to receive a federal exemption.

If Corrections Canada and Health Canada aren't prepared to offer Patriquen
the proper medical treatment he requires, then he should be placed on house
arrest. At home, he will have access to his medication without being
subject to unaffordable jailhouse prices of $50 a gram (keep in mind that
his current prescription is for five grams of ingested marijuana daily).
Nor will he be exposed to the questionable dispensing techniques of
jailhouse marijuana (for smuggling purposes, insert in rectum prior to
dispensing).

What abhorrent treatment of a diagnosed chronic-pain sufferer. I thought
that torture was an archaic concept. Apparently not!

Debbie Stultz-Giffin

Federal medical marijuana exemption holder

Bridgetown