Today, June 11, 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada which is the highest court in the land, ruled that cannabis when legally prescribed by a Canadian physician can be administered by whatever route and by whatever formulation is appropriate in the circumstances.
This, on the surface, seems rather silly since many Canadian patients make brownies and cookies to ingest their medicine and of course many more use the same to get high.
That old law requiring inhalation rendered the brownie consumer a criminal! Most legitimate medical cannabis consumers use a vaporiser as far safer option but there will always be hard core cigarette smokers who insist on inhaling burning plants and carbon monoxide despite the obvious.
The Supreme Court saw what was obvious and rejected by the Harper government could not or simply would not see. The current government did everything in it’s power to limit the opportunities to exploit the medicinal potential in cannabis.
The conservative rant( largely aped by the Canadian Medical Association) was “no evidence” when evidence from around the world and in peer-reviewed journals, and respected ones, is really quite abundant. Now much of the evidence is offshore. Why is this the case?
First the Canadian Medical Association and the Harper Government are fundamentally against cannabis in any form for any use. The upshot is that the evidence is so prevalent and the pressure so great these conservative philosophers have been require to grudgingly give some ground.
A far more progressive group, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, initially refused to accredit even teaching programs about medicinal cannabis in the dried form. They have since changed their position and produced a good document of Preliminary Guidance for medicinal cannabis prescribers to use as a guideline. Now clearly that document is far too conservative for radical marihuana fanatics who, like the prohibitionists, are unwilling to let facts get in way of a strong opinion.
In the final analysis for those with an open mind and a clear conscience only legalisation to legalise cannabis will permit high quality research and fair marketing.
Why do I say such a thing? Marihuana is illegal in Canada and the United States, In America cannabis is classified with heroin and LSD as high-risk with no possible medicinal value. Just try for a moment to imagine how incredibly difficult it would be to get institutional approval and government sanction for research! Then from the other corner of their bureaucratic mouths come the Holy words-“THERE IS NO EVIDENCE”! It is like killing your parents and suing for an orphan’s pension!
Let me describe a case in point. One of the best studies, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal,from a group in Montreal headed by Dr. Mark Ware show efficacy of 9.4% inhaled(vaporiser) in treating a very severe form of nerve pain in subjects naïve to marihuana(never used marihuana before). There was also significant improvement is sleep quality(the primary endpoint in the study was pain, however). There is an interesting sidebar to this study which illustrates the need for legalisation in some form. The three cannabis concentrations had THC levels of 2.5, 6.0 and 9.4% delta-9 THC and were available from the then only legal cannabis producer in Canada, the Harper government, which was good. However, the placebo(a cannabis strain with zero percent THC, yet still legally classed as a level one drug and highly illegal technically was grown in the United States. It took Dr. Ware and his team several years to bypass the legal hurdles preventing the import of this illegal cannabis with no THC. This should convince you why legalisation is important if not, necessary.
Cannbabis research will not be possible in Canada on an even par with other medicinal products unless there is some form of legalisation. No university or public agency will easily support research on an illegal substance where their participation may be used against them.