http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion1/stories/010801/5018811.html
Wednesday 1 August 2001
If Canada's new medical marijuana
system looks like a rushed job, that's because it is. It was forced on
the federal government a year ago by the Ontario Court of Appeal, which
gave Ottawa one year to change its laws to provide for the use of marijuana
for medical purposes.
The government made the court's July
31 deadline, but much work remains to be done, and many questions remain.
Patients are currently left to their
own devices to find the drug. They can either grow their own, once they
have the government's permission, or get it from someone who has a federal
licence to grow marijuana. Eventually Ottawa means to have a supply of
medical marijuana, available the way other prescription drugs are, but
that's a long way off.
Doctors in particular have been put
in a difficult spot. The legal route to marijuana requires a sufferer to
get a written declaration from a doctor -- a family physician, if the patient
is dying, and a specialist for chronic conditions.
The doctor is obliged to state that
other conventional treatments of the patient's symptoms haven't worked
or won't work. He or she must also state the daily dosage recommended and
the length of treatment.
How is a doctor to do that? Marijuana
is not an approved drug in any country in the world. Scientific studies
on medical use of the drug are few, and inconclusive.
While patients give powerful anecdotal
evidence of its effectiveness, our whole medical system is built not on
anecdotal evidence but on objective scientific tests. When physicians write
prescriptions and advise on dosages, they base their advice on scientific
evidence; that's what makes them different from dispensers of holistic
remedies.
The federal regulations say marijuana
will be available to people with a terminal illness, to those suffering
from multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, cancer, AIDS, epilepsy and
severe arthritis, and to anyone whose case is supported by two medical
specialists. That's a lot of people, a lot of symptoms.
Clinical trials on use of marijuana
have barely started in this country. Until some of those trials are completed,
the Alberta Medical Association is correct -- doctors should think twice
before endorsing medical marijuana for their patients.
That will be frustrating for sufferers
seeking relief from their symptoms. When one is in pain, the necessity
of properly testing a well-known drug like marijuana may not be obvious.
For their sake, one can only hope
that new research into the value of medical marijuana gets under way sooner
rather than later.
© 2001 CanWest Interactive
The Edmonton Journal