OTTAWA BACK-PEDALLING ON POT, CRITICS BELIEVE

Official Denies Open Distribution Was Planned

A federal official says the government never had any intention of providing
chronically ill Canadians with medical marijuana grown for Health Canada,
despite promises from former health minister Allan Rock that it would be
available for "medical" use.

The government planned all along to use the drug only in clinical trials,
said Cindy Cripps-Prawak, director of Health Canada's cannabis medical
access program.

Cripps-Prawak's statements are contained in a transcript of an out-of-court
cross-examination conducted in preparation for a two-day hearing scheduled
to begin tomorrow.

Ten Canadians are asking the Ontario Superior Court to order Health Canada
to provide them with the marijuana, grown in Manitoba, and to strike down
federal regulations as unconstitutional surrounding the distribution of the
drug.

Alan Young, a Toronto lawyer and professor who cross-examined
Cripps-Prawak, said in an interview it's unclear whether the government has
radically changed its policy regarding distributing marijuana to
chronically ill people or whether it was deceiving Canadians all along.

The evidence in the case seems to indicate that Health Canada was on the
verge of having a network for distributing the plant, he said, adding that
federal officials were considering making it available through a special
access program for unapproved drugs.

But Cripps-Prawak said the only purpose behind the operation was "valid
scientific research." Late last year, the federal government drafted, but
never sent, a letter to Canadians granted federal exemptions to use medical
marijuana. In it, Health Canada said it would limit just how free it could
be in distributing the pot.

"Unlike an illegal or illicit grow operation, we are attempting to meet
stringent standards for the production of a pharmaceutical product,"
Cripps-Prawak said under questioning on June 27. "This is not like growing
tomatoes."

During her cross-examination, Cripps-Prawak suggested there was a
misunderstanding about what the federal government meant by "medical" use.

While it's become clear that some medical marijuana users took that to mean
ready access to the government supply, what Health Canada meant by
"medical" purposes was that the drug would be available through "open label
clinical trials," she said.

Open label trials differ from regular clinical trials because patients know
for sure they are getting the drug, not a placebo, and are being monitored
by their family physicians.

Young said not one government document ever talked about open-label trials.

Cripps-Prawak admitted that she couldn't point to a specific document where
open-label trials had been mentioned and said the references to medical use
had been vague. "But I don't believe it has ever been the intent of this
particular department ... to make marijuana freely available to the
exempted Canadians without the context of some sort of monitoring and
research," she said.