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Still no decision on the business license
By Hempology | May 15, 2002
By Eric & Marlene Young
To: Art Vanden Berg, City Councillor
City Of Victoria
Victoria, BC
Dear Art Vanden Berg:
RE: Ted’s Books Item #6 under Hearings @ 8:00 p.m. March 28, 2002
Eric is 38 years old and was diagnosed in 1996 with multiple sclerosis (MS). Eric
has been procured medicine from the Cannabis
Buyer’s Club of Canada (CBCoC) on and off from September 1998 to this date.
In early 2000, Eric was granted a federal exemption persuant to section 56 of
the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to use marijuana to treat his MS.
Marijuana has greatly improved Eric’s quality of life. We challenge anyone with
doubts on the medicinal benefits of marijuana to visit the website of GW
Pharmaceuticals, a UK company currently developing medicine based on the whole
cannabis (marijuana) plant extracts.
Ted’s Books provided a safe environment where a person with a medical condition
could purchase marijuana at a reasonable price. The fact that someone alleges buying
from the CBCoC hoping to resell on the street, at a profit, implies that if the
CBCoC was not there, ill people requiring medical marijuana would have to go to the
street obviously paying a higher price, and creating financial hardship. Furthermore,
this would expose ill people to a criminal environment. This is unacceptable,
ill people are some of the most vulnerable citizens of our society.
The CBCoC provides an essential service, the CBCoC actually reduces marijuana trafficking
on the street because ill people who require medical marijuana do not have to go to the
street to purchase their medicine. Police actions will not eliminate the need for
medicinal marijuana. These actions only serve to threaten the health of ill people.
Police resources would be better spent trying to stop drug trafficking rather than
harassing the medical marijuana community. Rather than searching Ted’s Books police
resources could have been better spent investigating and arresting the man who was
allegedly going to resell the medicine which he alleges purchasing at the CBCoC.
If the same reasoning that was applied to Ted’s Books was applied to pharmacies thee
would be no pharmacies left open. For example, in the Globe and Mail, April 7, 2002,
pp. F4-F5, Staff Sergeant Chuck Doucette of the RCMP’s drug awareness office in
Vancouver said, in regards to prescription drugs being sold on the street, “We know
that it’s happening, but it falls by the wayside.”
Sincerely,
Eric & Marlene Young
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