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Are we marching dangerously over a marijuana cliff?
Perceptions by Gerry Warner
On April 1 this year the rules for prescribing medical marijuana across Canada are going to change and that’s no joke depending on your point of view. After April Fools Day, the only thing between you and toking up will be your friendly family physician because Health Canada is getting out of approving medical marijuana usage and simply licensing the producers.
After April 1, it will be up to a doctor to decide whether you can legally purchase marijuana from a licensed producer and roll yourself a joint. So the profession, whose highest ideal according to the Hippocratic Oath is to “do no harm,” will be in the uncomfortable position of having to say yea or nay to whether you can legally draw pot into your lungs in order to cure what ails you. Or just to get high.
Understandably, the nation’s doctors are approaching their new responsibility with some foreboding. At its general council in 2003, the Canadian Medical Association passed two motions recommending the CMA “strongly oppose the use of marijuana for medical reasons in the absence of supporting scientific evidence” and recommended “physicians not participate in the dispensing of medical marijuana under the existing Medical Marijuana Access Regulations.”
In a June 2012 CMA survey, Canada’s physicians made it clear they were extremely wary about becoming “marijuana gatekeepers” for the nation. Some 83 per cent of the survey’s respondents “agreed that information on potential risks and benefits of marijuana would be useful or very useful.”
In other words, our very own doctors in this country are saying they don’t have enough scientific information to make a proper medical decision on marijuana use.
Yet, despite this, politicians are entrusting them with this very decision. Does this sound like good public policy to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.
I remember being at the UBCM convention two years ago when the atmosphere in the room was positively giddy as delegates overwhelmingly approved a resolution to legalize recreational marijuana use. I tried to make it to the microphone to participate in the debate but didn’t make it. The point I wanted to make was simply this. Undoubtedly the greatest public health achievement of the last generation has been the dramatic reduction in smoking Canada-wide and world-wide for that matter. The public smoking rate in B.C. has fallen to 14.3 per cent, the lowest rate in Canada. What an achievement! Who would have thought that possible a generation ago? Yet today, the same generation responsible for that dramatic achievement is marching forward with trumpets blaring to embrace pot smoking!
Cigarettes bad; pot good. It sounds like something out of George Orwell’s classic “Animal Farm.” And it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.
Now before some of you start looking for a bucket to tar and feather me, let me make a few additional points. I’ve never smoked cigarettes, but like many of the 60’s generation I tried pot. Indeed, I smoked pot sporadically through my university years until one morning in 1970 I woke up in a grungy youth hostel in Amsterdam and saw what looked like nicotine stains on my fingers. I almost fainted! I’ve never smoked pot, or anything else, since.
Despite this, I’m not an anti-smoking Nazi and have great empathy for people with a nicotine dependency and what they go through trying to quit including watching my own parents suffer. But let’s get real here. Drawing smoke – any smoke – into your lungs is not healthy. Why do you think millions of Chinese wear respirators on the street? Why do we deplore smog? Given this, why are so many marching forward like lemmings to a cliff to embrace a marijuana culture? Sure there may be some medical benefits to marijuana, but even our doctors aren’t sure of that.
Should they then be forced to prescribe Mary Jane when they don’t even know what they’re prescribing and have serious doubts about its health benefits and fears it may actually harm their patients?
Surely it’s time for a serious rethink of this piece of public policy folly?
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist who is now a City of Cranbrook councillor. His views are his own.
