Marihuana Medical is Lost

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