Pubdate: Fri, 18 Sep 2015
Source: StarPhoenix, The (CN SN)
Copyright: 2015 The StarPhoenix
Contact: http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/400
Author: Lucas Richert
Note: Richert teaches in the department of history at the University 
of Saskatchewan.
Page: A13

POT PROBLEMS HAVE FAMILIAR RING

In the award-winning 2013 movie, Dallas Buyers Club, we are exposed 
to heroic patient activism during the AIDS crisis in the United States.

Based on the true story of AIDS-stricken Ron Woodroof, a 
hard-partying Texas tradesman, the film shows a strikingly thin 
Matthew McConaughey battle his sickness and the legal authorities in Texas.

Woodroof, who's unhappy with his illegally purchased AIDS medicine, 
and on the edge of death, seeks out alternative and experimental 
drugs from a doctor in Mexico. Then Ron, being the savvy entrepreneur 
that he is, quickly establishes a club (a dispensary) to sell his 
unregulated, sometimes dangerous, imported medicines.

In doing so, he operates outside the law and is forced to confront 
the existing power structure of drug regulation.

At one point in the film, Ron storms a town-hall meeting of citizens, 
drug company leaders and regulators, and starts fingerpointing. 
"People are dying. And you-all up there are afraid that we're gonna 
find an alternative without you."

Saskatoon's current struggle with illegal marijuana dispensaries has 
many parallels.

Mark Hauk, who operates Saskatoon's first medical marijuana 
dispensary, is one of 13 pot club owners across Canada who has 
recently received a notice from Health Canada that warns of possible 
RCMP raids.

These stores and clubs are illegal because they procure and sell 
their products outside the federal medical-marijuana system, which 
was overhauled and expanded last year to allow industrial-scale 
production of pot products that are mailed directly to licensed patients.

While this system was certainly upgraded through the Harper 
government's Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulation, there are 
still areas for improvement.

The Globe and Mail quotes criminology professor Neil Boyd at Simon 
Fraser saying: "It is really quite bizarre that they're using a 
mail-order system for marijuana as medicine; that's not the way 
medicine is usually dispensed. Medicine is usually dispensed through 
a visit to a physician and through a pharmacy."

Canadian physicians have shown their reluctance to be the sole 
gatekeepers of medical marijuana and remain opposed to the smoking of 
marijuana, although new Supreme Court decisions have recently 
legalized the use of medical marijuana in other forms besides dried.

Hauk believes that he offers an important face-to-face service to 
help "sick people in our community get access to the medicine to 
which they are lawfully entitled: people who have had access to their 
medicine blocked and are suffering needlessly, often with significant pain."

Like Woodroof, Hauk is confronting the power structure of drug 
regulation, including licensed producers in the province. And he 
strongly denies that he is catering to recreational users or "stoners."

The pushback has come from national and local law enforcement as well 
as the Canadian Medical Cannabis Industry Association. Prairie Plant 
Systems is a member of this trade association and is Saskatchewan's 
only licensed provider of medical marijuana under the revamped federal system.

Brent Zettl, the company's president, said he takes issue with 
dispensaries such as the one in Saskatoon.

"If we were having a discussion on whether or not to open up a 
dispensary for fentanyl or unknown sources of Oxy-Contin, we wouldn't 
be having this debate," he noted in a Star-Phoenix story.

On this, Zettl is undoubtedly correct, but only to an extent. 
Comparing medical marijuana to fentanyl is a false equivalence. 
Nunchuks and nuclear bombs are both weapons, but they are definitely 
not the same.

For now, it's a wait and see game. Local law enforcement officials, 
including Police Chief Clive Weighill, are "working with Health 
Canada and the federal prosecutions on this," whereas Hauk has argued 
that threats won't close his pot club. The outcome of the federal 
election will also have a profound on Hauk's business in years ahead.

Hauk is essentially playing the role of McConaughey in his own 
Saskatoon Buyers Club. And this sequel acts as a reminder about the 
complexity of drug regulation in modern Canadian society, as well as 
the ways in which everyday citizens can both run afoul of the drug 
regulation system and potentially influence it.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom