My Medical Marihuana License is
Useless!
My
previous post re how things have changed ended with the conclusion and
statement that Medical Marijuana is doomed. Its utility and efficiency
have always been substandard and now the program is impotent.
My License
to Possess does nothing for me now except give me the privilege of avoiding the
equivalent of a Parking Ticket for illegal possession of illegal pot. I won’t
renew it.
The Ottawa Grand Pooh-Bah’s decisions re Regulatory reform or even
Legalization of Marijuana have no effect on one simple reality. The only way in
future for Licensees to get an affordable supply of Medical Marijuana is to
grow it themselves. That is a simple economic reality. Having established the
legality of a right to grow by any means, the decisions whether Medical
Marijuana can be affordably grown, now falls into the lap of local Municipal
Politicians who basically have never had to deal with Marijuana growth and are
totally uninformed about any cost to a Licensed Grower.
The one single
mistake that doomed the Marihuana Medical
Access Program was that the Nabobs only considered the cost to Ottawa and not to the customer. Typically they haven’t learned a
damn thing in over ten years of screw-ups in the discharge of the Program with
violations of the Charter, Supreme Court defeats, and a glaring record of
administrative errors and inefficiency in Application Processing. The new set
of proposed changes to the Marihuana
Medical Access Regulations reflects the same ignorance of reality. The privatization
of the supply chain that they propose or even Legalization of Marijuana is
inevitably going to raise the price of pot from its current level.
At the
inception of the Marihuana Medical Access
Program they granted Prairie Plant Products a no-bid contract to for a
Single strain of pot and set the price to buy it at $5/gram + taxes. No
consideration of whether the client base could afford that price was given and
they lost money hand over fist. Considering that the purchasing capacity of the
program rested with a mostly sick, old, disabled, unemployable bunch of paupers,
failure was unavoidable. I have no idea what the poverty level was in 2001, but
in 10 years nothing has changed.
A small
allowance for pot is about 2 grams/day and a monthly dosage will still cost $350+taxes
+++ from Health Canada.
The "poverty line" for a single
person living in a major city in 2007 was $21,666 or $1805/month (before
tax) as defined by Statistics Canada. We now have 5 more years of inflation and financial
crises to consider and the "poverty line" has risen to ???.
The majority of all
Licensees are single individuals’ dependant on fixed pension income from the
Government. Licensees are all sick and either retired or disabled, or one of
the very few still able to earn an income. i.e.
These single
individuals have only OAS and CPP as income and in the best possible income is
available only to a retired recipient who is collecting maximum OAS of $537.97
and is so physically destroyed by illness to qualify for the maximum CPP
Disability of $1,153.37. These fortunate individuals qualify for $1691.34/month
before tax and almost make it to the poverty line: Almost but not quite.
The only way a Licensee
can obtain a supply at anywhere near an affordable level is via the Personal
and Designated Growth options. The Government seems determined to eliminate
these and this is my attempt to defuse their plans.
Several
weeks ago I thought that that I would find out how easy it was to go to a
municipality and find out how to meet their requirements for Legal growth. I
composed a letter to the Mayors of Canada and sent it to the 36 mayors of all the major
municipalities in the Country. It included the following statement and question:
To quote
myself:
PAY ATTENTION. THIS IS MY PROBLEM
WITH ALL OF YOU
I have a problem related to the
current by-law structure in every municipality in Canada. You
mayors are in control of that level of government and I want you to answer one
simple question regarding your by-law structure.
To my knowledge there is no way to present my grow
op for inspection to any of you, be in complete code compliance and, if I pass,
get it approved.
I want to keep my Designated Grower.
I want to get him legal, in compliance with Code, and free from an anxiety
attack every time the door gets rapped. There is no way to do so. I would like
to go to city hall ask for an inspection of a grow op located at xxx address.
No way! Inspection is no problem, the facility will pass code but at this point
there is no way to ask for approval because the Swat team will have destroyed
my crop by the time I get home, the fine already written and handcuffs waiting.
Nobody in my circle trusts City Hall, Les, or the cops and there is no reason
to do so after the way you currently deal with us.
Mayor Watts, and every mayor copied:
How can I get permission for my
Federally Licensed, Provincially permitted growth of Medical Marijuana to take
place in your municipality?
The
response was sparse and about as expected: 12 responses that either tried to
help or were paranoid about answering. The best and most surprising response
was from the City of Surrey who not only provided an actual Application to get a Pot
license and the relevant by-laws.
Take a
peek at them both. They are listed in the pages on the right side of this one
and an examination will show the kind of prejudice and errors in reasoning that
Licensees get as common practice.
Having
now established just what we are dealing with as the opposition to be overcome
I will conclude this post.
If I’ve
got your curiosity aroused, come back and take a peek in a week. My next post
will be my criticism of both of the Surrey Application and Bylaw. There is a lot of error and bad
thinking to be overcome. Stay tuned!
TheSmeeGoanGuy
