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Health Canada needs to butt out
By Hempology | June 24, 2007
Winnipeg Free Press
23 Jun 2007
Tom Oleson
EVIDENCE OF ‘REEFER MADNESS’ ABOUNDS
‘THE one great principle of the… law,” wrote Charles Dickens in Bleak House, “is to make business for itself.” That’s a thought worth worrying if you are trying, as I am, to understand federal government’s position on the medical and recreational use of marijuana.
Not that I have any particular personal interest in the issue — those days are gone — but it is something that profoundly affects the lives of a lot of people.
As is well known, marijuana, the killer weed, causes “reefer madness” in those who have any contact with it. Bureaucrats and politicians appear to be particularly prone to this malady and if they had any sense they would stay away from the weed, but they don’t and so they don’t. The reason seems obvious — they are simply mad. It is pretty hard, in fact, to reasonably account for Canada’s marijuana laws and the way they are enforced without this explanation of reefer madness.
It is legal in this country for people to use marijuana for medicinal purposes, but they have to get a licence from the government and a prescription from a doctor to do it. The last part is not really a problem, but the first part is like something of Kafka in the way it can play out.
Usually doctors, in consultation with their patients, decide what dosage of a medicine a patient needs, but when it comes to medical marijuana, a bureaucrat in Ottawa can make that decision. This week, a news story told of two patients — one suffering from severe arthritis and degenerative disc disease; the other from multiple sclerosis — whose doctors were contacted by Health Canada and told to reduce the amount of marijuana they prescribe to them.
The most charitable explanation of such behaviour is that Health Canada’s clerks have been over-zealous in the testing of their own product. The more realistic one is that this is just one more outrageous interference in personal lives by a blunder-prone bureaucracy that has bungled the medical marijuana file from the beginning.
The marijuana the government grows is inferior in quality to the stuff available on the streets, inferior even to what the patients can grow themselves, and Ottawa charges users 1,500 per cent more than it pays it supplier for the pot it gives them. Your neighbourhood street can give you a better deal on both counts.
That, in fact, might be what the government wants. Certainly the medical marijuana program seems designed to drive Canada’s chronic pain sufferers into the more welcoming arms of their local street dealers out of sheer desperation.
In fact, drumming up business for drug dealers and biker gangs appears to be the sole purpose of this country’s criminal marijuana laws. That, and to make a misery of the lives of otherwise ordinary and law-abiding people.
I spent an afternoon at the law courts the other day, as I sometimes do. On that afternoon I went to Court Room 301, which is, apparently, on certain days dedicated to dealing with cases involving drugs, most commonly, at least on that afternoon, marijuana.
Talk about a bleak house. Sitting there was a bit like watching a play by Samuel Becket, with the same sorry scene being acted out over and over again. On the one side was a bored prosecutor, on the other a changing array of bored defence attorneys. In the centre was a judge, and in front of him appeared a parade of young men and women facing similar charges and suffering similar fates.
The simple possession of marijuana is still a criminal offence in Canada, although hardly anyone goes to jail for it anymore. Even so, judging by Court Romm 301, it makes a lot of business for the law.
The police, I suspect, don’t really go looking for people with small amounts of marijuana anymore, but when they find it the course of their business, they don’t have much choice but to lay the charges, wasting their time on paperwork and processing, time that they know they could be better spent pursuing real criminals, keeping the city safe from real threats.
The Crown wastes more time and money trying to give criminal records to young people — some of them are hardly more than children — and defence lawyers pick up their meagre legal aid fees, another public expense.
It’s a dull, sad parade in Court Room 301. Those who are accused usually plead guilty unless their cases are remanded, as they often are, to play the scene again in a few weeks. The defence pleads for leniency. The prosecutor sternly agrees. The judge is diligent in making sure the villain in front of him understands the process and the consequences. Then it is all resolved, almost always with a conditional sentence or a discharge.
Then it starts all over again, with a new victim appearing. And they are victims, these kids, victims of an archaic law that hardly anyone believes is useful anymore but that politicians refuse to change. Like reverse images of old hippies, when it comes to the marijuana laws our lawmakers hang on to the old because they are afraid to grab on to the new.
At a time when the justice system is too overloaded to deal expeditiously with real criminals, they waste the time of the police and the courts and the Crown persecuting people whose offence is no more serious and probably less harmful than drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette. To go back to Dickens, the law in this case truly is “a ass — a idiot.”
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