If Health Canada is right about one thing, it’s that, “The way individuals access cannabis for medical purposes is changing.”
But patients don’t have to follow through on whatever the government decides.
The failure of the MMPR is living proof.
What will become of the new Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR), and why are there no dispensaries?
Health Canada said the ACMPR was a quick response to the Federal Court. As if written in haste, with no time to consider all the options.
Or perhaps Health Canada wants us to move along, nothing to see here, folks. The ACMPR is short-term and temporary. There are indictors the federal government will uproot everything and start over with their 2017 legalization.
But there is no starting over.
There already exists a robust division of labour in British Columbia.
A peaceful nexus of farmers, vendors, extraction crews, and all the rest — a craft BC Bud market the government has no business expropriating.
Justin Trudeau is following in his dad’s footsteps with a National Cannabis Program.
Despite strict licenses from Ottawa, now made stricter by the fact plant sizes are getting minimized, there is a market order of farmers and dispensaries in this country.
Regulatory rules don’t prevent markets from forming and government bureaucrats should respect the decisions of sovereign consumers.
Protecting grown adults from themselves by condemning the patient choice as “unsafe” and “untested” (while also threatening laboratories that permit cannabis testing) is nanny-statism, pure and simple.
A robust BC farmers market? Health Canada just didn’t have time to examine the issue. Like any good group of bureaucrats, they’re pawning the decision off to the Legalization Task Farce.
Meanwhile, under the illusion that this is all temporary so you don’t sue, the only legal source of cannabis are the Harper-era licensed producers (LPs).
Even though patients can now grow their own (no thanks to democracy), all seeds and starting materials must come from the LPs.
And how much can a patient grow of these lower-quality LP genetics? (Or perhaps LPs will sell the strains patients first sold to them under duress, when Health Canada threatened to shut down 28,000 gardens.)
There are new regulations coming Aug. 24, but so far the formula appears to mirror the five-plant per gram indoor and two-plant per gram outdoor provisions of the MMAR.
There doesn’t seem to be a maximum dosage, and therefore theoretically no cap on plants, but Canada’s health care system is strictly controlled in other ways.
A doctor prescribing a high dosage, giving the potential for one patient to legally grow hundreds of plants, may feel the heat from one of the colleges or institutions he or she belong to.
Pressured and under professional scrutiny to cease and desist, health care practitioners can always be swayed by threats of revoked licences.
The new regulations continue to limit the BC Bud free market and protect the vested interests of the MMPR.
Health Canada sees the injunction as short-term. They would like to see every patient registered with the ACMPR.
The injunction-protected patients are okay, right now, but only by the decree of the Federal Court. If they wish to make any changes to their license, they too must apply with the ACMPR.