This one in particular is interesting, a Saskatchewan woman who has a chronic back condition has had a previous license to grow and use marijuana. Her physician retired, and her license lapsed while she was trying to get a whole new set of paperwork completed. If you read the regulations, you do have to renew once a year, and it does require that you have a medical practitioner re-evaluate your situation annually. No problem, unless of course you live in a province where physicians are few and far between, and you need to obtain marijuana.
The RCMP on August 6, 2009 bust into her house, seized all of her growing equipment, and charged her. Now out of my own interest I decided to take a peek at some of the rules and commentary on the Health Canada website, one interesting thing is this in their Question and Answer section on Amendments to Marihuana Medical Access Regulations:
Q10. Why is Health Canada taking away my option to decide whether information about me can be shared with police?
A10. Amending the Regulations will enable Canadian law enforcement to access limited information to prevent unnecessary law enforcement action. Your files will be kept by Health Canada, not shared, and information on your medical condition will not be released.
Information will be provided only in the context of a law enforcement activity, for example, if you are stopped in your car and marihuana is found in your possession or if the police visit your home in connection with a break and enter and discover marihuana. Police want to be able to limit the risks to the public by being able to distinguish between persons who are acting within the law and those engaged in illegal activities related to marihuana.
The information provided to law enforcement will be limited to the details found on your photo ID card, for example, name, address, date of birth, date of expiry, amount of marihuana you can possess and, if applicable, number of plants.
So they make it sound as if by some reason the police are investigating something OTHER than your marihuana use (such as a break and enter, or a traffic violation), they will give out the information that the police request. Of course they also put that nice statement in there about how they want the police to limit risk to the public, so they can determine whether they are a criminal. Much head scratching at this point.
So then I take a look at the real amendment, and some commentary on another Canadian .gov site:
providing explicit authority for the Minister of Health to communicate limited
authorization and licence information to Canadian police in response to a specific request
received from Canadian police in the context of an investigation under the Controlled
Drugs and Substances Act or the MMAR;
Wait a second here, so now they're saying that the police can obtain this information specifically under the context of an investigation. So which is it? Is the amendment there to help "protect the public" in circumstantial instances (such as the aforementioned break and enter, etc.) or is it a way for the police to monitor licensed medical users under the contextual guise of an investigation?
I also wonder, did the police know that this woman in Yorkton was a licensed marijuana grower and just kept on checking for a license expiry until they could make an arrest?
Kind of a chicken and the egg problem really: was the investigation opened BEFORE they determined that the license had expired, or was the investigation opened AFTER they called Health Canada?
Great Job Mounties! Way to keep another "criminal" off the streets, we really should thank you since at least in this case you didn't knee her in the back repeatedly (see Fredericton Mountie Assault video above). And it goes without saying that we're all grateful the tasers didn't come out.
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