Health Canada changing pot rules

The Conservative government wants to change the rules governing medical marijuana. The Tories will scrap the current system, in which medical marijuana users can get a licence to grow their own, and replace it with a $1.3 billion free market system beginning Tuesday.

Scot Urquhart has details on how the system will work, and how it`s being received initially.

Although 150 companies have applied to Health Canada to become licenced growers of medical marijuana, only one, Cannimed Limited of Sasktoon, has been approved. The new system will see the RCMP do background checks on prospective growers; who will then be licenced and inspected by Health Canada.

The growers will then produce a range of medical marijuana products to serve the current market of nearly 40,000 licenced users here in Canada. And that number is expected to swell to more than 400,000 users within the next decade. There have been a number of complaints and court actions under the current system, where many users say their legal access to medical marijuana has been restricted or denied, either by the government, or by law enforcement agencies. But not everyone is convinced that the new system will be much better. One man who applied to be a licenced grower, Chuck Rifici, says he’s having a hard time trying to convert an abandoned chocolate factory in Smith’s Falls into a grow facility: “This is not a typical medicine. It hasn’t followed the usual path, so people have to find out how to put the round peg in the square hole and make it work.”

And NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair says the Conservatives are actually trying to restrict access rather than make it easier for users to obtain medical marijuana: “Medical marijuana, lets not make any bones about it, the Conservatives have never been in favour. So what they’re trying to do is make it increasingly difficult bureaucratically to make it extremely difficult in fact to have access to it. And, by the way, it is proven that there can be very good medical uses for it and that’s why highly trained medical practioners are prescribed.

The price of medical marijuana may also become an issue. The Conservatives say it will be priced at whatever rate the market will bear. Advocates say that will make it too expensive, for those on disability pensions, who need the medicine.