Medical pot fine in any form, top court says
Ruling opens door for marijuana in baking, teas, oils and balms
The Harper government’s power struggle with the Supreme Court of Canada continued Thursday, as the health minister angrily denounced a ruling legalizing pot brownies and other methods of consuming medical marijuana.
“Frankly, I’m outraged by the Supreme Court,” Health Minister Rona Ambrose told reporters in Ottawa after the high court said patients now can use cannabis tea, brownies, chocolate bars, hash, balms, creams, lotions, tinctures, infused oils and salves.
Ambrose maintained that cannabis didn’t become therapeutic “because judges deemed it so.”
“Judges, not medical experts, judges have decided something is a medicine,” she said.
Thursday’s decision was a 7-0 ruling, and the court made a point of attributing it to the entire court — something the justices do when they want to underline a finding. It was the latest in a series of high court rulings rebuking the Harper government’s tough-on-crime agenda, including unanimously rejecting the ban on providing doctor-assisted death to mentally competent patients.
Until now, federal regulations stipulated that authorized users of physician-prescribed cannabis could consume only dried marijuana. But limiting medical marijuana use to dried pot “limits life, liberty and security of the person” in two ways, the court said.
First, the prohibition on possession of cannabis in forms other than dried pot places a person at risk of imprisonment when they wouldn’t face the same threat if they possessed dried marijuana buds. It also exposes people with a legitimate need for marijuana to other potential medical ailments, it stated. “It subjects the person to the risk of cancer and bronchial infections associated with smoking dry marijuana and precludes the possibility of choosing a more effective treatment.”
There is no connection between the prohibition on non-dried forms of marijuana and the health of the patients who qualify for legal access, the court said. “It is therefore difficult to understand why allowing patients to transform dried marijuana into baking oil would put them at greater risk than permitting them to smoke or vaporize dried marijuana,” the justices added.
“Moreover, the Crown provided no evidence to suggest that it would … Finally, the evidence established no connection between the impugned restriction and attempts to curb the diversion of marijuana into the illegal market. We are left with a total disconnect between the limit on liberty and security of the person imposed by the prohibition and its object.”
There is no legal supply of cannabis derivatives — and the landmark decision will trigger a sea-change in the direction of the medical cannabis industry in Canada away from smoking by allowing a broad range of new products.
The decision also has resonance for this fall’s election — the Liberals are in favour of loosening restrictions, while the Conservatives are not.
Thedecisionstemmedfrom the 2009 arrest of Owen Smith, head baker for the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club.
He was charged after police found hundreds of pot cookies and cannabis-infused olive and grapeseed oils in his Victoria apartment. He was acquitted at trial and won an appeal.
The lower court decision had given Ottawa a year to fix the law, but the Supreme Court court did not suspend its declaration Thursday.
Such a suspension would leave patients without lawful medical treatment and the law and law enforcement in limbo, the judges said.