June 1, 1999

From The Globe and Mail -- Canada’s National Newspaper
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." Hitler said it, but Health Minister Allan Rock might have been quietly hymning the words to himself as he tried to justify his government’s hitherto fruitless search for a source of "medicinal quality" marijuana.

See
In Canada Only the Government Has Difficulty Getting Marijuana.
However, "Canadians who want to take part in a clinical trial
will find application forms on Health Canada’s Web Site"

The high-grade pot is required for clinical trials aimed at measuring the drug’s therapeutic qualities.

Where to get the vital raw material? Might it be British Columbia, where a clement climate and native industry have come together to produce a $3-billion to $6-billion underground economy based on the appeal of "B.C. Bud?" Described as the "champagne of marijuana," the B.C. pot—the result of 30 years of illicit breeding experiments— is so potent that U.S. gourmets are reputedly willing to pay ten times more for it than the once recherche marijuanas of Mexico.

If you said yes to purchasing B.C. Bud, you clearly don’t comprehend the mind of a politician. Buying a substance of which we are apparently a world leader in producing is too simple. Better is pretzel-shaped reasoning that argues: Because growing pot is illegal in Canada, let’s just pretend it isn’t grown in Canada.

"Acceptable sources of drugs not approved in Canada may be found in countries where they have been approved," Mr. Rock has written about the situation.

And, true to his pledge, his ministry has been sounding out people as far away as England as to whether we can buy high-grade pot from them.

This approach, of course, should guarantee that we buy marijuana at the highest conceivable price. And given the fact that the greatest medical benefit in taking pot is believed to be linked with the highest levels of the chemical that makes people high, if we are really lucky, we can be buying a British plant grown from seeds first bred in British Columbia.

Now if this sounds like the Scots searching for a source of medicinal Scotch in Morocco, and the French looking for a robust Burgandy in Sweden, you may be on to something.

The government’s position is so obtuse that one’s advice for what to do sounds like a simpleton’s suggestion. Mr. Rock, put out a contract on medical marijuana to tender. Guarantee that bidders won’t be prosecuted, then watch what a good source of medicinal-quality, cheap, home-grown drug comes rolling in.

And, oh yes, while you’re at it, you might just decriminalize Canada’s world-famous marijuana in the first place. If you find it politically dicey to announce that in a straight-forward way, why not simply redefine legalization as a "nation-wide experiment designed to measure the long-term effect of the non-medical use of the drug?"