[420 Girl]

The quasi-legal status of Victoria’s compassion clubs may have come a step closer to resolution this week after a British Columbia Supreme Court ruling declared parts of Canada’s current medicinal marijuana laws unconstitutional.

The law, which forbids any supplier from distributing medical marijuana to more than one patient, has forced the non-profit clubs into operating illegally, despite the consent of Victoria’s police department.

The judge has given Health Canada one year to review the laws and make it easier for purveyors of medicinal marijuana, both inside and outside of the law, to keep patients supplied.

The verdict comes as a huge victory for people like Mat Beren of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society (VICS). Beren was caught tending the VICS’ grow-op in Sooke—a district of Vancouver Island—when police raided the facility in 2004 and confiscated 900 plants.

Although Beren was found guilty of growing and trafficking an illegal substance, the prosecution’s demands for a stiff sentence were thrown out.Beren suffered no penalty or criminal record.

This most recent ruling brings into light the legal limbo in which many organizations such as VICS operate. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that marijuana—which is effective for easing the suffering of those with chronic conditions—is a constitutional medicine and the government has a responsibility to provide it to those with a doctor’s prescription.

Beren’s defence made the case that the marijuana provided by the federal government, which is grown in a Manitoba mineshaft, was of poor quality and obtaining it meant jumping over “unnecessary bureaucratic delays or obstacles.”

Philippe Lucas, the director of VICS, also points out that the federal application process can take weeks or months, time that can be ill-afforded by those who are in enough pain to warrant a medicinal marijuana prescription.

It was because of these regulatory hurdles and the inadequacy of federal marijuana supplies that the compassion clubs were able to spring into existence in the first place. VICS, for example, serves more than 850 doctor-referred patients on Vancouver Island.

Justice Marvyn Koenigsberg ruled in Beren’s case that while compassion clubs “enhanced other people’s lives at minimal or no risk to society,” they “did so outside any legal framework.”

The onus to reform the legal framework lies not with the compassion clubs, but with Health Canada and the Canadian College of Physicians, who failed to make medicinal marijuana sufficiently available for chronic sufferers, said Koenigsberg.

Other compassion associations like the Cannabis Buyers Club, a corollary of the University of Victoria’s own Hempology 101 Society, have greeted the likely review of the laws surrounding clubs with enthusiasm.

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