Pot-vaping rules still need tweaking
Re Finally getting it right, Editorial March 11 The Ontario government has made a serious error in proposing new rules that would prohibit patients from using vapourized medical marijuana in a wide range of indoor and outdoor spaces. The proposed regulations would treat medical marijuana vapour as equivalent to tobacco smoke. This is both unfair to patients and scientifically incorrect.
Increasingly, patients with advanced illnesses such as cancer, HIV/AIDS and multiple sclerosis are experiencing significant relief of otherwise intolerable and intractable suffering through the use of medical marijuana. Such patients would otherwise continue to suffer unjustly despite the use of high-dose opioids that carry much higher overall costs and risks to both patients and society.
Vapourized medical marijuana is not burned and thus does not create smoke. Vapourizer devices, one of which is approved by Health Canada as a Class 2 medical device, apply low-level heat to the herbal marijuana material to release the active pharmaceutical ingredients — the cannabinoids.
When using vapourizer devices, patients exhale only a small amount of vapour that does not contain the harmful particulate products of combustion found in tobacco smoke. Moreover, even if the vapour is released in proximity to bystanders, the minute amounts of cannabinoids (THC and CBD) are in the range of parts per million and thus unlikely to cause untoward “second-hand” effects to adults.
It is not acceptable for government to interfere with patients’ use of the medicine they are prescribed by their physician for these purposes, particularly when the mode of delivery is through a vapourization device. For the benefit of patients suffering from severe pain and polysymptom distress, the Ontario government should go back to the drawing board and develop a more informed set of regulations that take science and patients’ interests into account. Dr. Vincent Maida, palliative medicine consultant, Toronto