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Regret for resignations Feds forge ahead with marijuana plans

By: Andrea Sands, City Hall Bureau, Edmonton Sun, 07/19/03

Federal Health Minister Anne McLellan says she "regrets" two high-profile resignations from Health Canada's medicinal marijuana program.

But the federal government will forge ahead with what could be the most comprehensive medical-marijuana research in the world, McLellan said yesterday.

"I accept the fact that this is a difficult issue for some people and we will just move forward," McLellan told The Sun.

"We will continue to push ahead with the research and the clinical trials ... and we will share the results, not only obviously with Canadians but I think globally. The clinical trials we'll do will probably end up being some of the largest ever done anywhere."

The director of the Office of Medical Access, Cindy Cripps-Prawak, left her job last week, two days after the department introduced a plan to distribute medical marijuana through doctors' offices. A government spokesman has said Cripps-Prawak's departure was planned months ago.

The interim distribution plan responded to an Ontario court ruling that patients had to be given some legal way to obtain the drug and has been criticized by doctors and patients.

The Canadian Medical Association has urged doctors not to participate. And McLellan said she has her own worries about Health Canada supplying pot to patients.

"My concern, as the minister of health, is if in fact you have a program on the basis of medicinal benefit, you have to prove the medicinal benefit, and that's why we have to do the research on the clinical trials, as we would expect with any other drug, product or therapy."

Cripps-Prawak's is the second recent resignation, after Dr. Greg Robinson - an AIDS patient - left Health Canada's advisory committee because of what he described as inconsistencies in the access program.

Robinson has said he was upset McLellan terminated a study by the Community Research Initiative of Toronto (CRIT) into the use of cannabis as an appetite stimulant.

CRIT had spent about $800,000 of a $2-million grant before its funding was stopped in March, just as it was about to begin clinical trials.