The federal government announced this week the first commercial grower of medical marijuana, a company in Saskatoon, which has been providing seeds and product to patients for a few years.

Along with the award came new rules. All cannabis is to be irradiated, powdered and sold for between $9 and $12 a gram. No one can possess more than 150 grams at a time. No one can grow their own. Compassion clubs are out of business. This is supposed to standardize the method of delivery, get the gangs out and stop growing in private homes.

The Harper government, with its jejeune attitude toward anything the left embraces, hereby demonstrates ham-handed, tone-deaf governance. For more than a decade, 30,000 medical marijuana patients have been acquiring their drug either by growing their own, or through compassion clubs, which maintain quality control.

They now pay either nothing (after equipment costs are absorbed) or less than $5 a gram. But that market infrastructure is now toasted, the investment in equipment trashed, and the price effectively doubled. Patients — by definition hovering around poverty — are panicking, and a class-action suit based on individual constitutional rights is being launched. Millions of taxpayer dollars frittered away in the courts will achieve what? Nothing, because odds are that, in two years, like everywhere else in the civilized world, it will be legal.

In the meantime, nothing will be solved and a great deal of pain will have been inflicted. Government trading the well being of the ill for the well being of corporate drug companies, is hardly the optic the Harper government wants to be packing into 2015. Justin Trudeau would clean his proverbial clock with the young, hip and compassionate.

Does the Ministry of Health really think a 100-per-cent price increase will stop underground selling? Ten dollars a gram means $4,500 a pound while just south of the border, in Washington state where it is legal, cannabis sells for $1,000 a pound. Street selling to the sick will increase, only now the stringent controls placed on the drug by compassion clubs will be gone. It seems ministry of health bureaucrats don’t get out into the real economy much.

If cannabis was a drug like opium, these restrictions might make sense. But as it turns out, cannabis is not just palliative, it could be curative for many chronic conditions.

Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s doctor-in-residence produced a game-changing documentary in August outlining cannabis’s multiple applications. But has that been discovered by research in labs? No, the lab work came after cannabis’s curative qualities had been discovered by patients in their search for an inexpensive, organic (not irradiated) herb.

For instance, Sean McAllister is heading a team at Sutter Health in California, believing cannabis might be therapeutic for aggressive breast cancer. But in Canada, cannabis is already helping a two-time breast cancer patient, Sarina Auriel.

According to Sita von Windheim, who makes her formulations, Sarina needs 60 ml a day of fresh raw Cannabis juice — because she cannot tolerate even the smallest amount of smoked or heated Cannabis. A combination of raw leaf juice, Cannabis resin (not available under the new rules) and serum made from the root of the plant put her cancer into abeyance and helped her deal with chemo.