Pubdate: Wed, 02 Nov 2011
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2011 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html
Website: http://www.montrealgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmjcn.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal - Canada)

OTTAWA SHOULD CLEAR THE AIR OVER MEDICAL MARIJUANA

One of the witnesses heard during Ontario Superior Court hearings on 
rules governing the use of medical marijuana, a 55-yearold sufferer 
of multiple sclerosis, testified that when she asked her doctor to 
approve her application to use marijuana to relieve her chronic pain, 
the doctor put her hands over her ears and went, "La, la, la, la. I 
can't hear you."

This pretty well encapsulates the federal government's response to 
chronic-pain sufferers and medical professionals who are clamouring 
for a clearer policy on medical marijuana.

The government proposes to remove Health Canada as the ultimate 
arbiter in approving or rejecting applications to possess marijuana 
for medical use, and instead leave it up to doctors to decide whether 
their patients should be licensed to do so. While this might appear 
to be a liberalization, it is widely being rejected by doctors, who 
rightly assert that a responsibility that should pertain to Health 
Canada is being off-loaded on them without appropriate research 
having been conducted on the medicinal properties of marijuana.

Marijuana was legalized for medical use a decade ago, but shortly 
after the Conservative government came to power in 2006 it abruptly 
terminated an accompanying medical-marijuana research program set up 
to clinically determine its safety and proper use. Such research 
would have allowed doctors to properly determine who should be 
prescribed marijuana and, as it were, weed out those who simply want 
to use it for recreational purposes.

As the president of the Canadian Medical Association has said, the 
proposed policy, in the absence of necessary research, would leave 
doctors with the responsibility of prescribing and monitoring an 
inadequately tested drug, thereby leaving themselves open to doing 
harm to patients and subject to legal action. As a result, many 
doctors are refusing to grant patients in chronic pain permission to 
legally use marijuana, even though the patients have determined 
through experimentation on their own that it alleviates their suffering.

At the same time, many people with a legitimate medical reason to use 
marijuana are resorting to black-market sources and are thus left 
liable to arrest and prosecution for possession of an illegal substance.

The government's rationalization for its position is that clinical 
research on marijuana would best be undertaken by the private sector. 
But such research has been disdained by pharmaceutical companies 
because there is no money in it for them, since anyone can grow 
marijuana. The real reason, one suspects, is ideological, that the 
government is playing to the anti-drug constituency in the same 
spirit that it tried to shut down Vancouver's Insite safe injection 
site for intravenous-drug addicts.

That misguided initiative was recently repelled by a Supreme Court of 
Canada ruling, after the federal government had appealed lower-court 
verdicts that were in Insite's favour. Similarly, an Ontario Superior 
Court judge ruled this spring that the federal medical-marijuana 
program is unconstitutional because in its present form it denies 
adequate access to marijuana for people whose chronic pain it alleviates.

The federal government is appealing that ruling as well. In doing so 
it risks having existing criminal laws against marijuana possession 
and cultivation thrown out into the bargain - something the Ontario 
court ruling would have done had it not been appealed.

To forestall that, the government should immediately revive and fund 
the marijuana-research program in the interest of coming up with some 
solid scientific answers on the drug's ability to alleviate pain. 
Doctors should not have to be the gatekeepers for the dispensation of 
an inadequately tested drug whose non-medical use is illegal.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom