Canada To Snuff Out Medical Marijuana Production In Homes

Canadians who use medicinal marijuana will soon be prohibited from growing their weed at home. And because pharmacies are refusing to carry it, and HealthCanada is shutting down its underground pot farm that had been an alternative supply, in a few months the only legal way to obtain medicinal marijuana in Canada may be mail order.

Citing concerns for public safety, federal Minister for Health Leona Aglukkaq announced new rules for medical marijuana on June 7, 2013. She stated that "unintended consequences for public health, safety and security" had arisen from the numbers of Canadians--just 30,000--who had obtained lawful prescriptions for its use. But thousands of Canadians who had invested in equipment for growing their own legal marijuana supply could soon find that their investment has no lawful use.

Marijuana Not Always Illegal in Canada

As in the United States, Canada had legal marijuana for much of its history. The drive to make marijuana illegal in Canada had its origins with the demands of the Asiatic Exclusion League, an anti-Asian group in San Francisco and Vancouver that made various racial claims against Americans and  Canadians of Chinese origin, including claims regarding "opium dens."

The use of opium for other than medical purposes was made illegal in Canada by the Opium Act of 1908, although the use of "white drugs," referring to both the color of the drugs and the color of the people who used them, remained lawful. Then through the efforts of a Maclean's writer who wrote under the pen name Jenny Canuck, marijuana was first added to a "confidential list" of potentially dangerous drugs and then banned altogether after the publication of her book The Black Candle, which stated that marijuana was dangerously addictive and that the only ways out of marijuana addiction were insanity or death. Canadian federal regulators decried her "creative license" with facts, but by 1937 made marijuana illegal. Nonetheless, before the 1960's, drug arrests for marijuana in Canada were quite rare and never as common as in the United States.

After Decades of Prohibition, Legalization of Medicinal Use

For the next forty years, Canadian authorities treated the growing and sale of marijuana as criminal activity, reserving especially harsh punishments for persons found guilty of organizing the distribution and sale of pot with others. Even as late as 2008, individual Canadians were prohibited for growing pot "for more than one person," that is, for anyone's use other than their own, and then only with approval of a physician licensed in Canada. In 2008, however, a famous Federal Court case resulted in a rule that medical marijuana could be grown:

1. By a medical user,
2. By a person designated as a grower by a medical user, or
3. By a licensed dealer of marijuana.

These new rules allowed Canadians to grow pot for health maintenance uses for themselves, for friends, or, with a license, for others. The health service also contracted with Prairie Plant Systems to run anunderground marijuana farm in an abandoned zinc mine near the northern Manitoba town of Flin-Flon using marijuana seeds confiscated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in drug raids. Due to economic uncertainties, this farm was shut down in 2009. But in 2013, the situation for Canadians who use medical marijuana changed yet again.

Why the Canadian Government Says It Is Shutting Down Private Production of Medical Marijuana

There is little doubt that the treatment of medical marijuana users in Canada is quite different from their treatment in most of the United States. In April of 2013, for example, university student Lisa Korkman, studying at SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary, announced a public campaign to force the university to build her a "marijuana room" where she could use medical marijuana hourly, even during classes.

In 2012, Greenline Academy operated a series of sold-out training classes for want-to-be medical marijuana entrepreneurs on the legalities of selling marijuana in Canada and cold-climate growing techniques. And although just 500 Canadians had prescriptions for medical marijuana by the end of 2001, the first year medical pot was legal in the country, over 60 times as many had licenses by the beginning of 2013.

Not every Canadian is in favor of the growing of medical marijuana. Some have concerns on the lines of "there goes the neighborhood." Home pot growing is feared to lower property values, invite burglary and organized crime, and to expose neighborhood children to issues their parents are not ready to discuss. And municipalities across Canada found difficulties reconciling the rights of their citizens to medical marijuana with zoning ordinances that keep drugs away from minors and jails.

So the federal government decided that the solution to these issues was to ban home pot growing entirely. The Ministry of Health would have no objection to the sale of medical marijuana by pharmacies, but the pharmacies do not want to expose themselves to crime, especially burglary. And while a high-profile Canadian Appeals Court ruling found that there was only "anecdotal" evidence that Canadian doctors made it very difficult to get a prescription for pot, and that a lower court could not determine a medical necessity for marijuana absent a doctor's recommendation.

What does this mean for Canadians who use medical marijuana?

At the very least any further investment in facilities to grow your own pot seems like a bad idea. It may even be necessary to throw away growing materials you already have.

And it is highly unlikely you will be able to pop down to the local pharmacy to get your prescription weed. For a variety of reasons, they don't want to carry it.

So what is a medicinal pot smoker to do? Ironically, as once the answer for American marijuana refugees was to go north, the answer for Canadians may be to go south, but only to the US states of Washington (which is adjacent to British Columbia and Alberta) or Colorado, where there is no local or state enforcement of marijuana laws. Be forewarned, however, that the US federal government still prohibits the use of pot, and any scheme to take pot home for your personal use and especially to sell it to others is perilous. Aside from this option, it may be necessary to wait for changes in the government or changes in law.