Smoking Up, Doping Up

"The old system had its problems, there's no question about it. But on April , there's going to be a marijuana shortage, and there will be a significant percentage of the market that's going to have to resort to other remedies and break the law in order to obtain medicine."
Medical marijuana advocate-insider

"The 2001 Medical Marijuana Access Regulations [was] never intended to permit such widespread, large-scale production."
Compliance and enforcement activities can be carried out to the benefit [of] individual users and the general public [through large-scale commercial operations]."
Jeannine Ritchot, former director, medical marijuana regulatory reform, Health Canada

Canada's federal program for medical marijuana availability had resulted in some unintended consequences, and it's not likely that those who set up the program realized a future of "exponential growth" in the production and sale of medical marijuana. With more people being given the officially recognized medical-need status required to use it and the loosey-goosey permits to legally grow it for their personal use.

There have been very serious criminal issues of violent home invasions, homicides, and drug dealing non-stop in residential neighbourhoods according to Health Canada's own documents now being made public. Those MMAR regulations have been inadequate to the task at hand and additionally have been the source of general security dysfunction. A replacement Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations legislation becomes effective on April 1.

The new regulations are meant to eliminate the prevailing situation permitting unsafe and unrestricted marijuana production throughout the country in tens of thousands of private dwellings, with all their attendant problems. From April 1 the 37,000 authorized medical marijuana users will be required to buy their product from a small number of regulated commercial grow operations throughout the country.

Cultivation privately for individual marijuana use or purchase will no longer prevail. Critics feel this will lead to cannabis shortages and to higher prices for whatever is available. Users claim this will violate their constitutional rights, and five plaintiffs are bringing a court case on line, filing a suit against the government in federal court.

To date, eight commercial growers have been licensed, with another dozen to follow. As opposed to the almost 30,000 Canadians that had been authorized last year as pot growers, most living in British Columbia.

Health Canada estimates that over three million medical marijuana plants had been cultivated last year, with an estimated production of up to 190,000 kilograms of pot. Far more, obviously, than authorized users would require. And it would most certainly have found a market, illegal and extremely remunerative.

And the number of authorized users increased 470% over a three year period, 2010 to 2013. The former director of Health Canada's medical marijuana regulatory reform referred to "thousands of pieces of correspondence, unsolicited letters from homeowners" that Health Canada had received in complaints over the years, representing "the unintended consequences of the MMAR."

She quoted from a few of those letters: "He has become a very aggressive neighbour. We live in constant fear of what he might do to us and our properties. Some of the neighbours had to install surveillance cameras on their houses because they are afraid of what [the licensed grower] and his 'friends' will do. We live in a very stressful environment."

Another wrote describing the activities of their new neighbours: "They started an indoor marijuana grow-op. This is no small operation. They are known cocaine and ecstasy dealers also. The RCMP busted them for a large quantity of marijuana and cash two years ago. They have never quit growing it because they got a doctor's prescription for medical marijuana and started growing twice as much while they were waiting to go to court ... We have this drug factory in a normally great neighbourhood with kids and families."

Another letter received by Health Canada was from a B.C. district utilities office, which described that "demands for electricity from exceedingly large marijuana grow operations, some licensed and some not, have caused power outages that have left legitimate businesses without the ability to function."

Clearly situations that screamed out for a solution. And in this new system there is hope that some of these dysfunctional situations -- if not most of them -- will be ameliorated. That it is critical that some protocol be established that will be far more functional, practical and regulated is beyond dispute.
Particularly given the established fact that the door has been opened to increasing prescription and use of medical marijuana.