GOVERNMENT POT PROJECT GOES BUST

VICTORIA - If ever there was proof that government shouldn't be in
business, the spectacular failure of the federal medical marijuana
grow program is it.

The stuff the feds have been growing inside an abandoned copper mine
near Flin Flon, Manitoba, couldn't give you a buzz if you smoked your
brains out.

Last year, then Health Minister Allan Rock announced a new program to
provide chronic pain sufferers and terminally ill patients with the
right to legally smoke marijuana.

The issue had been forced by an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that
told Ottawa to either change its regulations for the medical use of
marijuana or the court would strike down the country's illicit drug
laws. Do something or get off the pot, you might say.

So what does Ottawa do? Create a massive bureaucracy, load it up with
tons of red tape, find a location more suited to the storage of
nuclear waste than the growth of pot, look for seeds and start
growing the stuff.

Turns out the seeds they got from police raids on grow-ops around the
country didn't do the trick. The first crop that was to have been
ready for distribution several months ago consisted of about 185
different varieties. It was declared useless.

All the government had to do was send someone up to Tofino, where
some of the world's most potent pot is grown, to get a supply of
seeds. An alternative would have been to place on order with High
Times Magazine. You can actually order the seeds on the Net. Any
strain your heart desires - Big Bud, Northern Light, Dutch Passion.

B.C. marijuana is known to pot smokers the world over as the best
there is. Yet, our government can't get a decent crop to head off
court action that might strike down any law forbidding the growth,
distribution and possession of marijuana.

The easiest way out for the government would have been to allow
Victoria-Esquimalt MP Keith Martin's private members bill proceed to
the Commons for debate and approval. Martin's bill called for the
decriminalization of marijuana.

But common sense is not what the Liberal-dominated Commons is known
for, so the Liberals killed the bill, throwing two years of work on
the trash heap.

A law that can't be or isn't enforced is a bad law and should be
scrapped. The law prohibiting possession of marijuana is a bad law
because it isn't enforced anymore. Like a police officer said
recently it is damned near impossible to get busted for possession of
pot in Vancouver.

Smoking is more tightly regulated these days than the possession of
pot, and tobacco smokers are subject to greater harassment than pot
smokers.

The marijuana issue was originally brought to a head by Terry Parker,
whose court case forced the government into growing marijuana in the
first place. Parker went back to court recently because he was unable
to get what the court said he was entitled to and received a personal
exemption.

Meanwhile, because Ottawa is still sitting on the pot, some 255
users have been licenced to grow marijuana, and 164 of them are
permitted to smoke what they grow. Seems the private sector is way
ahead of the public one.

Also, people who want marijuana for medical purposes can easily get
their hands on it, provided they get a certificate from their doctor.
With that certificate, they can buy pot in certain stores, at least
in Vancouver and Victoria. The process is not legal, but police lose
no sleep over it and the courts wouldn't either.

And while Ottawa tries in vain to produce a decent crop of pot in its
Flin Flon bunker and the war on smokers heats up, liquor laws are
being relaxed all over the country because there's big money for the
government in the sale of alcohol.

Yet nobody's ever become violent from smoking pot, the cult film
classic Reefer Madness notwithstanding, while a great deal of human
misery can be attributed to alcohol.

It all doesn't make much sense, but that's government for you. Of the
three products in question, booze, tobacco and pot, two are widely
considered dangerous to our health. The government makes fortunes on
the sale of both those products, but leaves the users of one alone,
while declaring open season on users of the other.

Marijuana, on the other hand, widely regarded as harmless and not
contributing a cent to government revenues, is illegal, but Ottawa is
trying to grow it.

Makes the Madhatter's Tea party look like a philosophers' convention.