Jonathan Kay National Post
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
In an inconspicuous Toronto storefront shoehorned into a row of grubby take-out restaurants, a group of activists, AIDS victims and chemo cases are methodically sapping Ottawa's will to enforce its idiotic marijuana laws. It's one thing to put people in jail for smoking a substance less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. It's another to imprison them for buying medicine.
About half of Canadians support legalizing marijuana. But that option is too radical for the feds' taste. So last month, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon floated a halfway-house measure known as "decriminalization": Get caught with pot for personal consumption and you'd merely pay a fine. But Cauchon is way behind the curve. The real movers are people like Neev (first names only, for obvious reasons), founder of Toronto's Cannabis As Living Medicine, known to its members as CALM.
The idea of "medicinal marijuana" was once seen as a scam made up by potheads. But that's changed in recent years, as blue-ribbon studies have found that marijuana provides effective relief from a range of serious conditions -- especially the severe nausea and appetite loss associated with chemotherapy and AIDS wasting syndrome. A watershed came three years ago, when Richard Brookhiser, Senior Editor of the ultra-conservative National Review, wrote in The New York Times that he used pot to battle testicular cancer.
At CALM, you can meet people suffering from every ailment under the sun. Last Sunday, I talked with Dan, who has Crohn's disease in his duodenum. After he eats, a wave of acid sometimes washes over the damaged organ, and the pain is intense. Marijuana, the mild-mannered 20-something tells me, has been his miracle drug. With a joint at the ready, he can even brave the odd slice of pizza.
Then there's Kathy, who came all the way from her home in Kitchener, Ont., to buy a few grams of "California Orange." Several years ago, Kathy had her large bowel removed. To get through the agony that accompanies digestion, she started pumping about 10 vials of doctor-prescribed morphine into her veins every day. But when she's got good weed, she can get by on a fifth of that. "It's changed my life," she told me. "I can wake up, smoke half a joint, have some toast and start the day without my head in the toilet."
Like several hundred other sick Canadians, Kathy's been awarded the legal right to smoke marijuana by federal health officials. But she's caught in a Catch-22: There is still no legal pot source in Canada -- which means, despite her right to possess and consume, she still breaks the law every time she buys it. So does CALM by selling it to her.
Which brings us to a key question. CALM's location isn't exactly a closely guarded secret. Whatever the future holds, marijuana is still illegal, and there's a lot of it on the club's premises. Why don't the police raid CALM, seize the stash, and shut the place down?
When I put the question to Neev, he grins. "OK. What happens after we're arrested?" he asks. "Then you've got this very public trial and a few very sick members of CALM [on the stand] talking about how effective medicinal marijuana is. When this kind of educational process goes before a judge" -- he cites recent examples from Alberta and British Columbia -- "they almost always rule in our favour and criticize the prosecution for bugging medicinal users. Why would a [Crown attorney] want to go through that? Why would the cops?"
Despite the mounting evidence from researchers, many conservatives still react hysterically to any suggestion that marijuana has medicinal value. They see prescription pot as the thin edge of the wedge: Once we let cancer and glaucoma patients smoke it, the theory goes, the stuff will be halfway legitimate, and the government won't be able to say no to anyone.
They're right -- thank God. It's impossible to meet people like Kathy and Dan, and still beat your chest about the dangers of pot. It's not just the sight of sick people getting good medicine you observe at CALM; it's the total absence of any of the pathologies we're taught to associate with drug use. Marijuana isn't addictive like nicotine or cocaine -- which means people rarely steal for it. It doesn't make you start fights or drive 90 MPH, like alcohol. And it doesn't kill you or turn you into a street hooker, like the heroin junkies who patrol my Cabbagetown neighbourhood.
In other words, it doesn't matter what the police do. They can close CALM down and create a new class of pot martyrs, or they can stand back and let Canada see the normal, non-threatening face of marijuana. Either way, it's only a matter of time before Canada's dumbest law is history. And when that happy day comes, Neev and his crew will deserve much of the credit.
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