There’s a reason patients call it “Hellth Canada,” and it’s not because they’re doing a hell of a job.
Health Canada has been running Canada’s medical marijuana program from the beginning, and they’re really bad at it!
Here’s the top 6 ways they’ve been screwing up.
#6 They can’t decide how to spell marijuana
Cannabis is a plant with many names, but most people call it
marijuana and they spell it with a J. They use this word because back in
the 20's, when White Supremacists where writing Canada’s first
anti-cannabis laws, they gave it a funny, foreign-sounding new name, so
that people wouldn’t know what plant they were really talking about.
It worked great! Even the government people didn’t know what they
were doing. The same year Parliament banned “marihuana”, they also
passed The Hemp Bounty Act to encourage more cannabis cultivation in the
Prairies!
But now Health Canada seems confused by their own linguistic
invention. They can’t decide to stick to their own tradition of spelling
it with an H, or go with the newfangled spelling and use a J.
This dilemma has proved too much for Health Canada, who seem to have given up and just use both, apparently at random.
On Health Canada’s own main medical cannabis website it’s almost
evenly balanced, with 9 marijuanas and 10 marihuanas on the same page.
If Health Canada can’t even figure out how to spell the word marijuana, how the heck can they be trusted to run the program?
#5 Their information is dangerously unclear and out of date
So maybe I’m just being petty about the spelling thing. Who cares how
they spell marijuana, as long as their information is all up to date,
right?
And as the government agency in charge of the medical marijuana
program, Health Canada must be the go-to source for accurate info,
right?
Sadly, this is not the case. Health Canada is one of the worst
sources for information about their own program, especially for changes
that they don’t like.
Go check out their medical marijuana webpage. Or better yet, don’t bother, it’s a confusing inaccurate mess.
Imagine you’re a police officer, looking to find out more about who
you’re supposed to be busting in regards to medical marijuana.
You’d
heard something about a court decision and weren’t sure whether you
should be going after home medical gardeners after April 1.
So you go to the Health Canada site and click on “Information for Law
Enforcement.” There you find out that patients are “required to destroy
all plants and dried marihuana by April 1, 2014.”
Seems clear enough. No mention of any injunctions, or court cases at
all. Just a big green light for a medical grower round up. Go get ‘em
boys!
The only mention of the injunction, which basically changes
everything and is the one thing people will be wanting to know about, is
a single text link from the main page, with the innocuous words
“Marihuana Medical Access Regulations update.“
Click on that and you get taken to a vaguely worded page that sort of
explains the injunction, but not really and not very clearly.
The next “latest update” on their page is one telling patients they
must destroy their marijuana on April 1.
That doesn’t apply anymore, but
hey, why bother deleting or changing it? It’s not like they’re toying
with people’s lives or anything.
So basically, the most important change that people will be wanting
to know about is almost completely ignored on Health Canada’s website.
Great job team!
#4 They won’t call it a prescription
Even though it’s a medicine and your doctor needs to fill out a form
before you can buy it, Health Canada insists that you’re not actually
getting a “prescription” for marijuana.
Why won’t they call it a prescription? The only reason seems purely
vindictive, because making marijuana into a special category of “needing
a doctor’s permission but it’s not a prescription” just costs patients a
lot more money.
Doctors aren’t allowed to charge extra to write a prescription, but
they can legally demand an arbitrary fee to fill out paperwork like a
medical marijuana access form. Since they aren’t “prescribing” it,
doctors can and do charge a few hundred bucks for patients who need
access to cannabis medicine.
Marijuana’s non-prescription status also allows for another kind of money
grab. Prescription drugs are exempt from GST, but Health Canada made
sure to charge tax on every shipment of their crappy government weed,
and they’ve spent a lot of money in court fighting to ensure that
medical marijuana users must pay GST as well.
Why does Health Canada want to ensure that patients pay 5% more for
their marijuana when it clearly fits into the prescription category? My
extensive research points to one conclusion: they’re jerks.
#3They’re ridiculously slow with paperwork
Health Canada is notorious for taking a very long time to process any
marijuana-related documents. Under the original program, patients often
spent months in legal limbo, waiting for Health Canada to approve their
doctor’s paperwork. Sometimes patients would wait for weeks, only to
find that a nameless bureaucrat had lost their form, or that they needed
to make a minor change and then resubmit.
On top of all that, Health Canada also forced patients to renew their
documentation every year, creating an endless cycle of paperwork, just
in case their AIDS or epilepsy got better and they no longer needed to
use cannabis.
Now Health Canada has gotten itself out of that mess, and patients
with a doctor’s note will be able to connect directly to the Licensed
Producers. Great! And how many of the 400 Licensed Producer applications
have been approved so far? Oh, uh… a dozen?
Health Canada signed off on the first one at the end of October, and
now’s there’s twelve approved producers. So at that rate Health Canada
will have gone through their backlog of 400 applications in about 15
years!
Want to get a license to grow medical marijuana in Canada? Put in
your application now, maybe it’ll be ready for your toddler to use by
the time they’ve grown up.
#2: They wanted patients to destroy their medicine
Health Canada knew there was no way that the dozen newly-licensed
producers could possibly have enough cannabis ready to supply the 40,000
registered patients, so they graciously granted growers a six-month
extension to help ease the transition.
Hahaha no, of course they didn’t do that! In fact, Health Canada
doubled down, demanding that patients not only had to dismantle their
home gardens by April 1, but they also had to destroy all their
remaining homegrown medicine as well.
If the injunction hadn’t succeeded, then patients would have been
forced to mix their bud with kitty litter and put it on the curb!
Shutting down the home cannabis gardens is bad enough, but what possible
reason is there to make patients throw away their supply of dried bud?
Since patients are growing enough to last them until their next
harvest, for most of them this would have meant throwing away 3-4 months
of perfectly good medicine. What a waste of time and money!
But never fear, because if you were really desperate to use the
cannabis you grew for yourself, Health Canada did offer one legal
solution. Just sell your freshly harvested buds to a Licensed Producer,
let them dry and trim it, and then buy them all back again!
Believe it or not, that’s totally legal, and Licensed Producers have
indeed been buying up fresh buds from patients and their Designated
Growers for resale. They only had until April 1 to complete their
purchases, so the 400 potential licensees waiting to have their
applications approved couldn’t get in on this unique opportunity.
Of course, as a patient trying to buy your medicine back you’d need
to pay extra to cover the price mark-up, and also pay for the shipping,
and of course you could only order back 150g at a time. But aside from that, it’s easy-peasy! And perfectly logical, at least according to Health Canada.
Wait a minute, wasn’t the whole reason Health Canada wanted to stop
home cultivation because they thought some patients and growers might be
selling
their bud at a profit? So the solution was to encourage them to sell it
all for a profit? I’m getting dizzy, and it’s not because of the joint I
just smoked.
#1 They fight everything in court
The only reason we have a medical marijuana program in Canada is
because patients went to court against Health Canada back in 1998, and
won. Health Canada has spent millions of dollars since then, fighting
against medical marijuana access every single step of the way, only to
lose over and over again.
Yet even when they lose in court, Health Canada still refuses to
comply. Here’s one example of their extreme dickishness. Under the
original program, Health Canada arbitrarily decided that Designated
Growers could only grow for one patient at a time. The courts ruled that
was an unnecessary and unconstitutional restriction, and struck out the
limit. Health Canada responded by setting the new limit to two patients
per grower. Take that you ungrateful sick people!
In fact, Health Canada is so bad at complying with court decisions
that back in 2003 they broke pot prohibition, and accidentally legalized
it for everyone!
A judge ruled that Health Canada had messed up so bad
that the only way to ensure patients had access to medical marijuana was
to strike down all the marijuana laws. So they did, and pot was legal
all across Canada for several months. Marc Emery went around doing bong
hits in front of police stations to prove it!
Actually, the kind of incompetence that results in legalization for
everyone is something I can get behind, but then the courts elbowed
their way back in and “fixed” Health Canada’s med-pot rules themselves,
which was the only way they could get the genie back in the bottle and
reinstate all those lovely prohibition laws which Canadians had missed
so much.
If all that’s not enough, here’s another, more recent example. Not
only is Health Canada still fighting in court to keep patients from
growing their own cannabis medicine, they’re also battling to stop
patients from even making their own cannabis tea or cookies!
Health Canada has already limited the Licensed Producers to only
selling dried, smokable buds. But if a patient chooses to cook that
legal bud with some butter, then strain out the plant matter and spread that infused canna-butter on toast, Health Canada says they have
committed a criminal offence!
Like always, they’re willing to spend your
tax dollars to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court if they have
to.
If Health Canada spent as much time and money
on researching medical marijuana and creating a properly-run system as
they have on court battles against patients, then we’d all be a lot
better off. But unless you’ve just taken a big bong-hit, I wouldn’t hold
your breath.
After the Prohibition Era, from 1920-1933,
which declared alcohol to be illegal, marijuana was used for
recreational purposes. 
