cannabisnews.com: Crusade Ending but Landmark Fight Looms





Crusade Ending but Landmark Fight Looms
Posted by FoM on September 23, 1999 at 07:27:48 PT
By Julie Carl, Free Press Columnist
Source: The London Free Press
Lynn Harichy's long-awaited day in court should be a short one. The London grandmother and multiple sclerosis sufferer expects to have a charge of marijuana possession against her stayed in court Monday.
Instead of fighting a courtroom battle to make medicinal marijuana available to people with MS, cancer, AIDS, epilepsy and any other illness it can ease, she plans to spend her waning energy on a bureaucratic fight to allow her alone to grow and use the weed.If successful, she'd be only the third person -- and the first without a terminal illness -- to be exempted by Health Canada from prosecution on marijuana cultivation and possession charges.The exemptions are part of a plan Health Minister Allan Rock announced this spring to weigh marijuana's medicinal use.It's been two years since Harichy, 38, pulled out that joint on the steps of the London police station. Her political statement -- that marijuana eases sick people's suffering and makes a relatively normal life possible -- was one she wanted to continue in court.In July 1998, in another step in that fight, she and her husband, Mike, opened the London Cannabis Compassion Centre, a club that supplied medicinal marijuana to sick people with a doctor's note. The club closed in March after Rock announced the government would hold trials of medicinal marijuana, but not before Mike Harichy was arrested and charged with trafficking.His trial starts Oct. 5.That worries Harichy. But she doesn't worry about the outcome of her own charge, which -- if stayed -- could be reactivated against her within the next year."If I end up in jail it's no different to me from not having my medication. I end up in pain either way."Being in jail would at least have the advantage of exposing people in the system to her agony without marijuana, she says.When she has the drug, she's relatively symptom-free. It takes about eight days after her last toke for the tingling and numbness to start. Not long after, Harichy's balance is shot. She's often paralysed on one side. She sometimes goes blind.The pain is overwhelming.And the disease's traditional medication makes it worse, she says.Since her arrest on the police station steps, two other medicinal marijuana cases have successfully wended their way through the Ontario courts and proven her point. In one case, a temporary exemption was won; in the other, a permanent one, now under appeal.As Harichy waited out the postponements and delays -- on pricey lawyer time -- her health deteriorated. Tiny and frail, she can no longer afford the energy or the money to continue.And that's disappointing to her.She remembers her mother, in the final stages of breast cancer in 1991 -- before Harichy was using marijuana to treat her own illness -- begging her for some marijuana."All I could think was my mother would go to jail, and she wouldn't have any health care at all," Harichy recalls. "I know now her final days didn't have to be so bad."It shouldn't have to be like that. A mother shouldn't have to ask a daughter to sneak her something. She should be able to have a doctor oversee her medication."Osgoode Hall law Prof. Alan Young, who represents Harichy, said she shouldn't feel bad. Although her case wasn't a landmark, she helped pressure the federal government to take a more "accommodating and sensitive position" on medicinal marijuana.But how much longer is it going to take to show that new-found sensitivity to all people with an illness that can be eased by marijuana?The government must move faster on its trials of medicinal marijuana.And while that's moving ahead, it must quickly clear up the 90 or so backlogged applications for an exemption like the one Harichy is seeking.Many of Young's clients are sick people -- many of them dying -- who are forced to break the law to get relief. If they're caught, as the law stands now, they're criminals. They have to waste their precious time defending themselves when they should be living out their days with dignity.Surely, Canada can do better. Thursday, September 23, 1999 Copyright © 1999 The London Free Press 
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Comment #1 posted by kaptinemo on September 23, 1999 at 16:12:39 PT
"It Can't Happen Here", Redux
But, belied by the title of Sinclair Lewis's book, fascism *can* happen here. Ask Lynn Harichy. Ask Peter McWilliams. Ask the ghosts of Esequiel Hernandez and Mario Paz. If anyone has any doubt about the lengths to which the State will go in order to punish the citizenry when they dare speak against it's outrages, here is your wake-up call. Lynn Harichy, God bless her, is but one more righteous person broken at the behest of a government that sanctimoniously uses 'law' as an excuse to destroy lives. It is said that the Road To Hell is paved with good intentions. Well, the closer you get to Hell, the hotter it gets. People begin to suffer from heat induced delirium, and often stagger on, falsely thinking they are heading in the right direction, until it is too late. We here in the US are already at the precipice; will Canada follow suit? Or are you Canucks smart enough to wake up and smell the brimstone?
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