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.