Pubdate: Mon, 15 Jun 2015
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2015 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Page: A10

HOW THE (POT) COOKIE CRUMBLES

There's this great natural pain remedy you can legally buy in Canada.
It's called salicylic acid. One source is willow bark. You boil the
bark into a tea and drink it, as the ancient Greeks did. If you want,
you can also source salicylic acid from castoreum, an anal secretion
of the North American beaver, as was often done in the 18th century.

Alternately, if you like things a little more modern, you can ingest
it in a modified pill form. You know it as Aspirin.

The point is, the government lets Canadians take salicylic acid in
various forms because it recognizes that it is a valued medicinal
ingredient. The government also reluctantly lets Canadians use
marijuana because the courts have ruled that it is a legitimate
treatment for some medical conditions.

But for arbitrary reasons, the Harper government decided the only way
anyone could legally take legal medical marijuana was the old way - by
drying and smoking it. Extracting the active ingredient and putting it
in a lotion, a pill or some other edible form, like a cookie, was
illegal and could result in a prison sentence.

That anomaly has now been rectified by the Supreme Court of Canada. It
ruled last week that the Harper government's restrictions on medical
marijuana violated the right "to life, liberty and security of the
person."

Those are big words in defence of a pot cookie. But the court is
right. The government's aversion to alternative forms of medical
marijuana comes in spite of Health Canada findings that the oral
ingestion of pot can "be appropriate or beneficial for certain
conditions," as the court noted. As well, it's well known that smoking
pot, like smoking tobacco, presents its own health risks.

Furthermore, Ottawa has never shown that limiting medical pot's intake
to the bong has a justifiable legal goal, such as curbing the drug's
diversion into the illegal market.

Health Minister Rona Ambrose said she was "outraged" by the decision
because it "normalizes a drug where there is no clear clinical
evidence that it is, quote-unquote, a medicine."

But the law already says that pot is a legal medicine. It makes no
sense to have a rule that legalizes a drug - while threatening someone
with jail unless they use it in its most archaic form.
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MAP posted-by: Matt