Pubdate: Mon, 22 Sep 2003
Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB)
Copyright: 2003 Calgary Herald
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66
Author: Robert Remington

HEALTH CANADA'S REEFER MADNESS

If you thought the gun registry was a mess, you should try buying pot from 
the federal government.

Philippe Lucas, a 32-year-old hepatitis C sufferer from Victoria, is one of 
about 550 Canadians licensed to use medicinal marijuana. To be approved, he 
had to get two specialists to back the recommendation of his family doctor. 
It took him eight months to get an appointment with just one specialist, 
and that's in Victoria. If you live in Milk River, good luck.

Then, to acquire his government-approved pot, he had to swear an oath 
before a lawyer that he would only buy from Health Canada, making the 
government his monopoly supplier.

It took up to three weeks for the pot to arrive, which was sent to his 
family doctor, from whom he picked it up. His family doctor doesn't like 
receiving pot, for reasons of office security and because the doctor 
doesn't like being a marijuana middleman.

When Lucas finally got his first batch of approved government grass several 
weeks ago, it was of such poor quality he sent it back. At a cost of $190 
an ounce, it was full of stems and twigs and had a next-to-nothing buzz 
factor due to the low THC level mandated by the feds. "It reminded me of 
shwaggy Mexican brick weed," he said.

Lucas, director of Canadians for Safe Access, a patient's right advocacy 
group for legal pot users, had the stuff tested against pot supplied by the 
Vancouver Island Compassion Society.

In addition to looking and smelling bad, the government pot was found to be 
of inferior quality and, he says, potentially unsafe, with high levels of 
lead and arsenic.

The government-approved pot is grown in an abandoned mine in Flin Flon by 
Prairie Plant Systems under a $5.5-million contract. Prairie Plant Systems 
is a private company founded in 1988 to develop improved strains of 
saskatoon berries, which, as everyone knows, make for great pies and jams.

Prairie Plant Systems expanded its research to other fruit-bearing plants 
and to developing plant-based pharmaceuticals at its biosecure underground 
facility in Flin Flon.

Brent Zettl, the company's president, refutes Lucas's findings and said he 
could grow better pot if the government let him.

"We can make a product here as good as, or better than, anything grown 
anywhere in the country. If Health Canada wants a more potent strain, all 
they have to do is ask," he said last week.

Zettl is probably very good at what he does, and therein lies the problem 
of the federal government being in the business of growing pot. There are 
plenty of old hippies out there who know more about growing marijuana than 
bureaucrats in Ottawa, and they're doing it at no cost to the taxpayer. As 
with any product, the consumer knows best, and legal consumers of medicinal 
pot are rejecting the government weed.

"With this stuff, I have to smoke half a joint to get the same result. And 
you can tell they've ground up a lot of stem and leaf in with the buds. But 
what can I do? I don't want to buy from criminals," said Jari Dvorak, an 
HIV patient from Toronto, one of several approved pot users who have panned 
the Health Canada pot.

Does it not make more sense to turn medicinal cannabis cultivation over to 
the real pot-growing experts, test it independently for safety, and get the 
government out of the pot business?

Anne McLellan should either leave pot growing to Canada's non-profit 
compassion societies or let Prairie Plant Systems grow pot that users 
actually want.

As a taxpayer, I'm angry that my tax dollars are going up in smoke, 
supplying overpriced skunkweed to patients who have a right to a product 
that is both beneficial and esthetically pleasing.

Sick and dying people deserve no less.