PLEAS FOR MEDICAL MARIJUANA UNHEARD, USERS SAY

When the 55-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis asked her doctor
to sign her Health Canada declaration for medical marijuana, the
neurologist put her hands over her ears. "La, la, la, la," she sang,
"I can't hear you."

As a result, the woman is left to hide her illegal use of pot to
control her pain, which she says on most days ranks nine on a scale
of 10. If she's out shopping and a major pain attack hits, she says
she'll drive her wheelchair to the alley behind the mall, and smoke
behind a trash bin.

A man in his 60s with Lyme disease struggles just to breathe and
move. Before he started using marijuana, he sometimes slept 20 hours
a day. He says marijuana works "like a miracle." It allows him to
function. But his doctor refuses to sign his declaration, forcing him
to buy it off the black market. He says he lives daily with the fear
of being caught.

These people were among nearly two dozen patient witnesses whose
evidence was used in an Ontario Superior Court case this year in
which Canada's medicinal marijuana access program was ruled
constitutionally invalid - a ruling Ottawa is appealing.

Justice Donald Taliano said the regulations are so profoundly flawed
that legal access to marijuana is "practically unattainable for those
who desperately need it." Twenty three patients from Vancouver to
Charlottetown, who served as witnesses in court, were collectively
denied by 113 doctors.

Every one of them suffers from serious, debilitating and painful
conditions. All have been prescribed opioids by their doctors, but
the drugs either don't work or cause intolerable side effects.

All had asked for help getting a licence to use marijuana. Most of
the doctors refused.

Their affidavits have been sealed to protect their personal
information. But in a copy of the ruling, in which the patient
witnesses are identified by initials only, Taliano describes people
with bodies ravaged by MS, arthritis, trauma, cancer, Crohn's,
degenerative-disc disease and other conditions so painful some people
have difficulty putting one foot in front of the other, such as a
55-year-old woman who suffered injuries to her spine when she was
struck by a drunk driver, to a man from Prince George, B.C., who
suffers debilitating back and shoulder pain and has to travel 950
kilometres to a compassion club in Vancouver to get marijuana.

Others include a woman from Lethbridge, who suffers from inflammatory
arthritis and chronic vertigo attacks that can last three days.

Unlike the 29 drugs she's been prescribed by doctors, marijuana helps
lessen the attacks without the "zombie"-like side effects of
prescription drugs. Yet 26 doctors have refused her request for
medicinal marijuana.

Nearly 50 doctors have denied Dave Douglas.

The Vancouver man accidentally drank bleach when he was four years
old, severely damaging his stomach. He uses marijuana to ease the
intense nausea and cramping that's impossible to get under control if
it starts up, as well as epilepsy. He doesn't smoke marijuana. He
uses a vaporizing device, or he eats it or drinks it in tea.

In an interview, he said he's heard "every excuse in the book" for
doctors refusing to sign his declaration. He said he's nearly $10,000
in debt from buying drugs on the street. His credit cards are maxed
out; his health is getting worse. "And I still don't have access to
the medication," he says.

"I trusted doctors to have my health in mind over anything else. They
seem to be more worried about the political and legal ramifications
of me having cannabis than actually feeling better."

In Montreal's West Island, a 70-year-old woman reaches for her pipe
when the pain becomes unbearable - when it feels as though her bones
are crumbling and splintering with every step or as if her back might
split into two. She takes two to three puffs at a time. The drug
relaxes her muscles and the brutal spasms of pain from her
osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia.

"The pain is all over my body, completely, from my neck down to my
toes," she says.

Her entire body hurts. She's been using cannabis, legally, for six
years - one ounce a month - but she said she still fears one day
losing access to the only thing that helps.

"If I couldn't take the cannabis, it would be like, I don't want to
live," she says. "It would be too much."

But the Canadian Medical Association says that would put unfair
pressure on doctors, making them gatekeepers to a largely untested
and unregulated substance they know little to nothing about.

The association says the drug hasn't gone through the normal
regulatory review process, and that licensing bodies have told
doctors anyone choosing to sign a medical declaration under the
current regulations should proceed with caution.

Keith Fagin has been consuming cannabis for 40 years for pain. The
Calgary man, who is active in the medicinal marijuana movement, has
helped people get a Health Canada exemption, but he refuses to apply
for one himself, "because it is unconstitutional."

Fagin has suffered from constant, unrelenting pain in his left hip
since he was hit by a car when he was seven years old. Then, in 1991,
he was struck by a forklift in an industrial accident. The impact
smashed his left arm and aggravated his hip. He lives with a constant
painful burning, tingling sensation and numbness in the arm. He uses
marijuana for his pain, tumble-drying buds to knock the trichomes
off. Trichomes contain tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active
ingredient in cannabis.

Fagin puts it in capsules that he swallows. He sometimes uses a
vaporizer. It doesn't kill the pain, but it reduces it. He's still up
and down throughout the night, because of the pain, he says.

Fagin says even people with legal access to medicinal marijuana hide
their use because of the stigma. "If you try to consume your cannabis
in public, you're frowned upon. You're a dirty old hippie. All that
reefer-madness nonsense comes into play."

In his judgment, Taliano said doctors are being asked to endorse a
largely untested and unapproved drug, without the safeguards that
would be provided in a clinical trial, for example. He said no steps
were taken by the government to get doctors to buy into the program
before the regulations were implemented.

But it is the "ill-conceived legislation itself" not doctors, he
said, that has led to an oppressive situation, where marijuana is
denied to those who need it "and are otherwise entitled to have it."