John Conroy said it himself that the new medical regulations will likely cap the number of plants patients are allowed to grow.
The days of growing over 100 plants for yourself are over, and I doubt the designated grower program will return. The licensed producers are, after all, the designated growers.
Will Health Canada limit plants to six like in Colorado? Or will it be two? One in vegetative state with the other in flower?
The MMPR may be dead in the water, but swimming beside it, alive and healthy, is the MMJPR.
Whether or not this is the name of Health Canada’s medical cannabis regulations, this is the acronym the Ottawa-based Canadian National Medical Marijuana Association is promoting (The CNMMA is the LP-response to the grassroots, BC Bud-based Cannabis Growers of Canada).
If you take a gander at MMJPR.ca, you’ll find not only a list of LPs and those pending approval, but “medical marijuana clinics.”
These clinics are aimed to replace dispensaries. Right now, thanks to unconstitutional MMPR regulations, the LPs can only send their product through the mail. The clinics are a way for patients to get a doctor’s prescription and register with an LP.
Unlike dispensaries and compassion clubs, these clinics are fully legal and properly registered. In less than six months, all Health Canada has to do is change some Harper-era rules and make it legal for these clinics to supply LP cannabis directly.
Meanwhile, city councils will continue to regulate dispensaries out of business, with police raiding the remaining, and therefore destroying the craft cannabis that has defined BC Bud and supplied patients with quality medicine, years before the corporate LPs forced their way onto the scene.
The drug war isn’t over, it’s only the propaganda tactics that are changing.
This has been clear as day from the beginning.
It’s right on the Liberal Party website, before they even formed government, the Liberals pledged to, “remove marijuana consumption and incidental possession from the Criminal Code, and create new, stronger laws to punish more severely those who provide it to minors, those who operate a motor vehicle while under its influence, and those who sell it outside of the new regulatory framework.” [emphasis mine]
This is exactly what Colorado did to manipulate their statistics where it looks like cannabis charges have gone down. In reality, people in Colorado and the other legal states are still facing prison for pot.
In Canada, the MMJPR will replace the MMAR/MMPR, and in its place will be excessive plant limitations for patients and a continuation of the LPs as the exclusive commercial growers.
To remedy the dispensary “problem,” clinics will set up (there are already a couple in Vancouver) and overtake the original businesses and non-profits, but not based on competition in a free-and-fair marketplace, but through government coercion.
Because if you don’t supply LP weed and have openly flaunted prohibition laws, then you are “outside of the new regulatory framework” and susceptible to police busts and prison-time.
Does that sound like legalization to you? Is this what patients fought for in Allard?