Canadians for Safe Access Denounce Health Canada Interim Cannabis Distribution Plan as Unworkable

July 9, 2003 - The medicinal cannabis distribution scheme introduced this week by Health Canada is completely unworkable and was announced in bad faith, according to Canadians for Safe Access, a medicinal cannabis patients-rights organization. The plan - implemented this week as a result of an Ontario court decision - may be short lived, as Health Canada is appealing the decision before the end of the month. Health Minister McLellan has made it clear that if the government wins its appeal the distribution of cannabis may come to an abrupt halt.

The interim proposal, which calls for physicians to distribute the Health Canada cannabis to patients enrolled in the federal government medical marijuana program, was also met with criticism from Canadian Medical Association. The CMA have expressed serious liability concerns for doctors distributing cannabis and have recommended that physicians not participate in the distribution scheme at all, effectively rendering the plan unworkable.

At a press conference in Ottawa organized by the CSA this week, acting Director Philippe Lucas expressed concerns over the decision to have physicians distribute the government cannabis; "compassion societies are currently helping more people and producing more cannabis research than the expensive and much-maligned Health Canada program; by any standard they are the better candidates for successful the distribution or therapeutic cannabis". He further commented that it was "baffling" to hear Health Minister McLellan call for further research into medical marijuana when her department had just cancelled the funding for a Toronto HIV/AIDS and smoked cannabis clinical study, effectively terminating one of only two federally approved medical marijuana research proposals currently under way in Canada.

Minister McLellan when on to state that there is no research anywhere in the world that attests to the safety and effectiveness of medicinal cannabis. However, just last month the International Cannabinoid Research Society (www.cannabinoidsociety.org) held its yearly conference in Cornwall, Ontario. Amongst the hundreds of studies presented at the 4 day conference was research attesting to the therapeutic benefits of cannabis in treating nausea, spasticity, hyper-emesis, chronic pain, and even cancer, stroke, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

An exhaustive body of international research suggests that cannabis is one of the safest and most effective therapeutic agents known to man; if Anne McLellan and the staff at the Office of Cannabis Medical Access are unaware of these findings, perhaps its time for them to leave the distribution of cannabis to those who best understand this benign herb: Canada's compassion societies and the tens of thousands of medical users and cultivators throughout the country.

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