'CHILL, MAN,' WON'T WORK FOR POT USERS

By MARK BONOKOSKI, QMI Agency

For Giff, once a well-known Toronto publicist and now retired to the
country life, keeping his sexual orientation on the "down low" was
never a concern.

He was already "out" when being "out" was deemed courageous.

When the Toronto cops launched Operation Soap in February 1981, and
notoriously raided four gay bathhouses and arrested 300 men - then
the largest mass arrest in Canada since the 1970 October Crisis - it
was not alarming that Giff was one of the found-ins hauled off to a
holding cell.

Mass protests and rallies ensued to protest the raids.

Giff remembers phoning Sun co-founder Doug Creighton once his bail
was posted and asking if the Toronto Sun, then perceived by the
Village People crowd as heterosexually evangelistic, planned on
publishing the names of those arrested.

Creighton laughed and said no. Too many names, he said.

It is no mystery, therefore, how Giff contracted HIV, and no surprise
when he was one of the first to seek out a medical marijuana
application in 1999 so the dope he smoked to combat the nausea of his
HIV drugs would be legal - much like 4,000 Canadians use that same
certificate today to insulate against chronic pain, reaction to
cancer treatments and MS symptoms.

At the beginning, however, it did not go well.

A shocking call in 2000 from Health Canada notified him that he,
along with at least 128 other Canadians across the country, had their
privacy violated when their confidential health information was
leaked to an unnamed journalist as a result of their application for
medicinal marijuana.

Giff complained to the federal Privacy Commission, got an apology
from Health Canada, and waited for his name to appear in headlines.

But it never did, for reasons still unknown.

Flash forward to the present.

When his local doctor packed up his practice for another town, Giff
needed his replacement to fill out all the re-application forms
demanded by Health Canada's Office of Cannibis Medical

Access or his ticket to smoke would no longer be valid and Giff,
technically, could be arrested for illegal possession and cultivation
of the pot plants he has been licenced to smoke and grow for a decade.

Without it, Giff 's a nauseous mess.

So, since getting the certificate renewed was vital, Giff applied
under his new doctor's signature back in July.

It is now January's end. And it just arrived.

"Consider yourself lucky," a woman in the cannibis office had told
him weeks ago. "We have people still waiting from as far back as
March. You're only July."

This, said Giff, was supposed to make him feel better.

As Giff noted, it took him less time to get his firearms acquisition
permit, which must be vetted by the RCMP, and less time to get his
passport and health card renewed.

And it is not as if the medical marijuana application form is an
onerous document that would take months to ponder. It is all of four pages.

A fortnight ago, a spokesman for Health Canada told Sun Media the
department has streamlined its process and is now hitting its eight-
to 10-week processing target.

Giff wonders what they were smoking up until then.

- - Bonokoski is Sun Media's National Editorial Writer