K'jipuktuk (Halifax) - On Nov. 13, Members of Maritimers Unite for Medical Marijuana (MUMM) gathered in Grand Parade Square to decry the fact that they, as self-medicating marijuana users, have of late been dealt a double whammy that will soon see them facing criminal charges and mandatory jail time; all for growing their own medicine.

The first shot to MUMM's members is the Health Canada-proposed changes to the Medical Marijuana Access Program, set to be unrolled in 2014. Personal and designated grow licenses, the means by which most medical marijuana users in Canada either grow or procure their medicine from licensed growers, are set for the grinder. Instead, medical marijuana will be grown by large-scale, industrial-style, licensed grow-ops.

Health Canada's justification for this rollback in personal freedom lies in the notion of community safety, and registered abuses of the current program.

Debbie Stultz-Giffin, chair of MUMM, doesn't put any weight in that argument, and sees program violations, if they do in fact exist, as being a minute negative when viewed in the context of a program that has enabled thousands to weed themselves off of big pharma's "legal toxins."

“The RCMP are citing that 35 people have been charged with violations in the program," Stultz-Giffin told the Halifax Media Co-op. "[These people] were either registered patients or designated registered growers. When you do the math on that it equates to 0.002 per cent of the people enrolled in the program that they claim are abusing it. Those people haven't even been to court. We're not talking convictions, we're just talking that the RCMP think that 35 patients have abused the program. And in actual fact, knowing a couple of the patients who've been charged, any of the overages that they had were going strictly to help other patients who had either no means to obtain the medicines they needed, or the clones that they required to grow the next crop of their own medicine.

"We're talking about people who were more healers than dealers."

Harper's second hit on MUMM, and all the MUMMs of Canada, comes with the newly-enforceable mandatory minimums for marijuana cultivation. Since Nov. 6, getting caught growing between six and 200 plants will result in a jail term of six months. Chris Barker, a member of MUMM, expects that this new law will see MUMM's membership mushroom, as medical marijuana users circle the proverbial wagons.

“I expect to see an increase in membership," said Barker. "People are going to have nowhere to go. They're going to be confused, they're not going to know what to do. With the laws just changed, people don't even understand exactly what that's going to mean. Six plants is the same as 200? It doesn't even make sense. You're going to see them in the court system, but there's just going to be so many of them. It's just going to clog everything up. With mandatory minimums everybody's going to trial then. Everybody's 'not guilty,' and it's just going to be a complete disaster. And you're jailing people for using medicine. No victim, no crime. No harm, no foul. It doesn't even make sense.”

Of course, in Stephen Harper's Canada, it does make a certain, macabre, sense.

NDP MLAs Charlie Parker and Ross Landry were highly visible at a recent ground-breaking ceremony for Pictou County's new 100-cell correctional facility. The facility will sleep 200 comfortably, and falls squarely into Minister of Defence Peter McKay's sphere of influence.

There will be a need to fill those beds, and licensed medical marijuana growers, with addresses already registered with the authorities, will be prime targets for police departments looking to beef their statistics.

Pharmaceutical drug sales in Canada have also reached absolutely monstrous proportions. In the year 2000, total sales for patented and non-patented drugs in Canada stood at $10 billion. In 2010 that figure had more than doubled to $22.2 billion.

Research has also noted a steady increase in Canadians' prescription drug use, which in 2009 averaged out to 14 prescriptions per person and did not have a direct correlation to an aging Canadian population. Aggressive marketing of synthetic heroins, such as Oxycontin, which have been increasingly prescribed across Canada as a pain relief option, is the more likely culprit for these inflated statistics, and has left thousands with serious addiction issues.

Set against this backdrop, the self-medicating marijuana user appears to be sagely avoiding the prescription drug crisis at hand. Yet they also present the greatest threat to the pharmaceutical industry. Self-medicating users, especially when gathered together in action/information groups such as MUMM, present the pharmaceutical companies, and the governments they lobby, with a bulwark.

To MUMM's Chris Barker, it's all about big pharma's bottom line. 

“When they privatize it, they're going to make money off of it," said Barker." I can do it myself for next to nothing. It's not like you can't get any other narcotic you want on the street. Just because it's a prescription, it's not going to stop anything.”