MEDICAL-POT PROPONENTS BLOWING SMOKE

With the despotic dopes running Vancouver City Hall expected Wednesday to approve their wholly improper “licensing” of so-called “medical-marijuana” shops, the release Tuesday of the most comprehensive study yet into pot’s effectiveness as medicine couldn’t come at a better time — or be more deliciously ironic for critics of the plan.

With the exception of “moderate-quality” evidence that pot controls pain and spasticity in people with multiple sclerosis, the meta-analysis of 79 studies involving more than 6,000 patients published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that there is little evidence that marijuana is effective for a host of ailments pot proponents often claim it can treat.

Those included “nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, weight gain in HIV infection, sleep disorders and Tourette syndrome.” You may as well take a sugar tablet.

The report also found that using marijuana caused a host of adverse events, including “dizziness, dry mouth, nausea, fatigue, somnolence, euphoria, vomiting, disorientation, drowsiness, confusion, loss of balance and hallucination.”

Another study published in JAMA Tuesday found that the amount of active ingredient claimed in medical marijuana bought in U.S. stores and tested by scientists was seldom accurate, at times less than promised, at other times greater, making dosing the drug virtually impossible.

An editorial accompanying the research by two psychiatrists at Yale University’s medical school, Dr. Deepak Cyril D’Souza and Dr. Mohini Ranganathan, said that the political push to legitimize medical marijuana was advancing quicker than legitimate research into whether it is effective and safe.

“Perhaps it is time to place the horse back in front of the cart,” the good doctors wrote, calling on governments to support proper research to find out if marijuana should be used to treat illness.

They also raised cautions identical to ones found in the study released last week by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse concerning the potential serious effects of marijuana use on the developing brains of young people, in particular its links to schizophrenia.

All of this makes Vancouver City Hall’s rush to license pot shops seem rash and irresponsible.

City manager Penny Ballem, who is reportedly the architect of the licensing scheme, is a medical doctor. It is shocking that she would move ahead with a plan to legitimize marijuana as a medicine knowing full well that she and others at city hall are abandoning evidence-based decisionmaking.

It’s also bizarre that city hall officials do not appear to be heeding the professional standards and guidelines of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., relating to marijuana. That document notes that “few reliable published studies are available on the medical benefits of marijuana” and that “physicians are advised that they should not prescribe any substance for their patients without knowing the risks, benefits, potential complications and drug interactions associated with the use of that agent.”

The college also warns B.C. doctors that “the only legal source of marijuana for medical purposes is that provided by a licensed producer” — not the 94 gang-linked illegal pot shops city hall would legitimize through its licensing scheme.

It’s no surprise that Vancouver is the only major city in Canada to take such a permissive attitude to pot shops — Vision Vancouver counts those with liberal views on pot among its supporters. The only thing stronger than the smell of pot in the city is the stench of politics.

Then again, Mayor Gregor Robertson and his team have always had a special hubris in shoving themselves into areas of government that are the jurisdiction of Victoria and Ottawa. The issues surrounding marijuana, medical or otherwise, are within the domain of the federal government through the Criminal Code and Health Canada, which has the expertise, unlike Vancouver City Hall, to regulate drugs.

City hall has no business regulating, and profiting from, medicalmarijuana shops, which everyone knows are primarily a scam for people who like to get high, but it will.