If you haven’t heard of marijuana activist and grower Mik Mann he’s the articulate hippie that looks like Frank Zappa we interviewed for our doc B.C. Bud. He lives out in Port Alberni, a pretty remote town on Vancouver Island where he grows medicinal weed out of the comfort of his basement garden.
For the last decade Mik has enjoyed the benefits of a legal marijuana-growing license under the now defunct federal Marihuana Medical Access Regulations (MMAR). He’s been floating on a healthy dose of seven grams of marijuana a day that he cultivates from 35 plants, under a doctor’s prescription for various debilitating conditions like spinal arthritis and degenerative disc disease. Yet all that is officially set to change under the newly implemented and Conservative devised, Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR), which among other things makes it illegal for users to personally grow their own pot. Instead, medical users like Mik who predominantly make under $30,000 per year and suffer from various diseases will be forced into purchasing corporate dope: only for-profit companies can afford the extensive requirement for licenses to grow in the new system.
Right now, patients pay an average of a $1.80-a-gram for marijuana. That will rise to $8.80 a gram when the MMPR takes effect in 2014. Estimates slap those same patients with an additional $166 million a year for the next 10 years. In other words, the 28,115 Canadians using marijuana to ease chronic pain will be forced into relying on pricier government-sanctioned companies rather than personally growing it themselves, for basically nothing.
– Read the entire article at VICE.
