Saturday, February 21, 2009

Constitutional Right To Smoke The Herb?

On may 14th, 2008, the Montreal compassion center contacted the Quebec human rights commission asking 'if citizens using medical marijuana, with or without Health Canada permits, are entitled to protection under chapter 1.1, sec. 10 of the Quebec charter of rights and freedoms'.

On January 30th, the commission responded in a thorough 28 page written decision that they did indeed benefit from such protection. The implications of this decision on medical marijuana users, in Quebec as well as across Canada, are such that access to medical marijuana is on it's way to becoming a constitutional right.

Love to see how the fellows at Western Standard, who are pro-herb but anti-HRC, will deal with this one.

There's supposed to more information re. this letter at the norml website but, like, umm, there isn't. Maybe someone was supposed to post something but put on some Grateful Dead instead and got totally engrossed by all the lines on their hand.

3 comments:

KC said...

I would have thought the Western Standard folk would be anti-herb.

Terrence C. Watson said...

KC,

Not anymore. We're kind of libertarian now. We're all for the freedom of people to put whatever they want into their own bodies.*

* - in the privacy of their own homes. And we'll make an exception for any hypothetical substance that will turn a person's blood into nitroglycerin or some other explosive compound.

... if there are any such substances.

And BCL, to address your query, my own beef with the HRCs has more to do with the suppression of speech than anything else. I'm pretty much behind anti-discrimination law (in employment, etc), though that might make me a minority among libertarians.

I'm curious as to how this is an issue of unlawful discrimination; at the moment, I'm too tired to research it any further.

P. M. Jaworski said...

Marc Emery is a columnist with the Western Standard.

We've been pro-pot legalization for a very long time. Much more so recently.