HEALTH CANADA NEEDED OUR POT PROS

My favourite line in the Tao Te Ching opens verse 60: "Leading the country
is like cooking a small fish."

Delicate business as anyone with culinary skill knows. It requires heat,
but it must be applied most judiciously. An initial blast to sear the skin
and lock in the juices. Then the fish must be removed from the grill while
still underdone so the residual heat trapped inside finishes the cooking in
the time it takes to be slid onto a plate and presented to the diner. It is
a job for an artist or a master of the tao. Not the kind of work to be left
to some hockey goon or Health Canada bureaucrat.

I mention this because the feds have flat-out burnt the small fish of
supplying medical marijuana to the ailing, through the doomed six
million-dollar monopoly granted to Prairie Plant Systems.

Witness the venomous "I told you so's" from the betrayed cannabis community
spewing all over Health Canada's lame pronouncements that their first crop
grown from a mixed bag of stolen seeds in a Manitoba mine has yielded the
bunk they were told it would. Beneath their apologetic smiles lies the
simple fact of theft. Their excuse that because the DEA refused to hand
over any of their standardized strains the only "legal" source was
confiscated seed from police busts is beyond bogus.

A quick internet search would have turned up not only a host of seed
vendors offering superior strains but sites critiquing the vendors!

And yet witness the government confounded, the government that can do
anything, as they point out when bending us over a police cruiser.

Witness B.C. Senator Pat Carney recognizing the obvious: B.C. has already
got functioning medical growing, diagnosing and distribution networks. And
functioning very well in spite of punitive action by the law of the land
which could certainly find better things to do with their time than
interfering with one of the benevolent engines of the economy.

Oh yeah, and lest we forget: Witness the sick and needy callously told to
wait it out or cruise the black markets and risk arrest. That is unless
they've got the chutzpah to negotiate the reams of Health Canada paperwork
and get medical specialists to sign letters of recommendation on a subject
they know dick about and get growing. Spare me from idiots!

Do I consult a doctor when I'm trying to choose between Sleepytime and
Chamomille in the tea section? Why would I call a pill-pusher when I'm
trying to choose between a sativa or an indica? I talk to an expert,
preferably the organic farmer who lovingly nurtured the plant from seed to
nicely cured bud. If I can't get to them I go to the buyers who get the
best because they know it rubs their customers the right way.

And because cannabis is non-toxic, unlike so many pharmaceuticals, if you
don't get the relief you seek from one strain it's easy enough to try
another-provided, of course, a trustworthy merchant can lay out his or her
wares and do business without fear of the ERT swinging through the plate
glass and shooting Rover.

Does the system need more regulation than that? Witness Jim Wakeford, the
first medical exemptee who still spends his dying days exhaustively trying
to retrieve his stash and equipment from the courts. His crime: attempting
to put into action his supposed rights and help others.

Is it any wonder why so few have trusted their personal specs to this posse
of seeming incompetents?

So witness a government that has mastered the technique of marching in
place. And ask yourself: What kind of idiot pretends to sagely listen to
all the expert advice then ignores it? Answer: a saboteur.

Health Canada has burned the fish and now it's trying to convince us it
will get it right next time. Problem is, I never go back to restaurants
that burn the food.