When Georgia Peschel first heard police had raided CALM, a compassion club in Toronto, her initial panicked reaction was this: “Now where will my son get his marijuana?”

For the past three years, Peschel and her 17-year-old have made the hour-long drive into Toronto every two weeks. They would knock on a darkened Queen St. E. storefront, follow a doorman inside, and buy $140 worth of marijuana from the people at CALM, or Cannabis As Living Medicine.

The Newmarket-area, church-going family hardly seem the type to frequent drug dens. But Storm Peschel — named for his tendency to “kick up a storm” while in his mother’s womb — is no regular kid.

At the age of four, Storm was diagnosed with Multiple Synostosis Syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder that causes his bones to slowly fuse. Eventually, his vertebrae will meld and his cartilage will turn hard as bone. Storm doubts he will live past 30.

On a bad night, the pain would cause Storm to scream for hours. When he was eight, doctors began prescribing him codeine, but the drug made him groggy, nauseated and unable to go to school. It also made him depressed.

When Storm was 15, Peschel decided to let her son try marijuana. She knew this was a startling proposition for a parent to make, but her doubts went up in smoke with Storm’s first toke.

“I felt it lift away,” Storm says of the pain that creaks in his hands and joints. “I (now) live a fairly normal life. I don’t actually feel my bone disease takes anything away anymore.”

Since discovering cannabis, Storm has lost 75 pounds from being able to ride his bike and do other activities, and he improved his marks to make the honour roll. He says marijuana has given him a life; his mother says it’s given him hope.

But to date, Storm has found just one source for easily accessible, high-quality cannabis: CALM, a compassion club that sells medical marijuana to some 3,000 registered members.

But CALM, like the dozens of other compassion clubs across Canada, is unlicensed and therefore illegal. And at about 3:40 p.m. on March 31, the club was raided by police and shut down for business.

“It’s a matter of necessity,” says lawyer Alan Young, an advocate of medical marijuana and defender of compassion clubs. “There’s a sense of necessity when you need to break the law in order to achieve a greater good.”

In 2001, in response to a court order, the federal government introduced the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations (MMAR), which established guidelines for allowing sick Canadians to possess marijuana.

But for stakeholders of the program, there is still one vital thing missing when it comes to medical marijuana: reasonable access.

“I think the Medical Marijuana Access Division of Health Canada is the biggest oxymoron we have in federal government,” says Philippe Lucas, a Victoria city councillor and founder of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society. He uses marijuana to treat the symptoms of hepatitis C, which he contracted in Ontario from a tainted blood transfusion. “It’s not about improving access; it’s about restricting access, to the point where we literally force people to break the law in order to treat their symptoms.”

There are two ways of getting marijuana legally, both condemned by medical cannabis users as grossly flawed. The first is to buy from Health Canada, which contracts its supply from Saskatchewan’s Prairie Plant Systems. The contract expires in the fall of 2011, and Health Canada says a “new competitive procurement process” was opened in April 2009. It is currently evaluating new bids.

But currently, the government grows only one strain of cannabis, despite research and patient feedback that show different strains have varying therapeutic effects. Many users also complain the marijuana is vastly inferior to black market supplies, describing it as weak, irradiated (repugnant to many medical users) and inconvenient (orders are currently sent by mail). As of June 2009, about 20 per cent of the 4,029 licensed Canadians were buying marijuana from the government.

Health Canada declined to provide an interview for this story but answered a few questions via email.

The second way to legally obtain marijuana is grow it yourself, or designate another person to do it for you. This option Young calls a “slap in the face” — what other patients are required to grow their own medication, he asks?

“Pretty much the day the MMAR was proclaimed into force was the day I knew it was defective,” Young says. “The routes for access to medicine were so limited that we argued they were constitutionally deficient.”

And the courts have largely agreed. According to Young, the government has lost as many as six court challenges related to medical marijuana, each time a judge deeming the system unconstitutional.

“It’s insulting and it’s irrational,” says Lucas. “If this was any other program but medical marijuana, there would be an incredible uproar right now. This would be a government scandal of the highest order.”

Young criticizes the government for only improving the program reflexively when forced by the courts. And even when changes are made, they are often minimal; in 2003, Young successfully challenged an MMAR restriction that forbade pot growers from supplying to more than one user. A federal court deemed this “one-to-one” restriction unconstitutional and ordered Health Canada to expand it. Health Canada did, just barely, to two-to-one.

“If you don’t tell me that’s the ultimate disrespect and contempt to me, to patients and to the court, I don’t know what is,” Young says.

Compassion club owners say they’re simply doing what Health Canada won’t.

“We bridge the gap between regulation and reality,” says CALM owner Neev Tapiero. “I knew I was helping people and I was quite confidant a jury trial would never convict me.”

Tapiero started CALM in 1996 and moved it to its current location in 2004. The club’s exterior is unmarked, its windows blackened, but inside, CALM has all the trappings of a clinic: waiting room, pamphlets, customer kiosks with scales and hand sanitizer. CALM rules say all members must be licensed or have doctor’s notes confirming their condition.

But the shadowy nature of compassion clubs can invite skepticism about their true motivations, and certainly some of them are shady. Prominent AIDS activist Jim Wakeford, the first Canadian granted federal exemption for marijuana possession, has accused compassion clubs of profiting off sick people by selling at black market prices (most clubs charge between $6 to $12 per gram; Health Canada charges $5).

Tapiero insists CALM steers clear of organized crime and also inspects its marijuana with a microscope. As for the prices, Tapiero says they’re regrettably high, but he has four employees, legal fees, rental payments and a two-year-old son to provide for. He declined to disclose his earnings but says he pays taxes.

Police contend compassion clubs are definitely making profits and that when CALM was raided, cops seized three bags of cash and some 18,700 grams of marijuana and hashish, with a total estimated street value of more than $200,000. (Tapiero says quantities were exaggerated by police.) Tapiero was arrested, along with eight CALM employees and volunteers, and all are now facing drug trafficking charges.

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The raid was captured by CALM’s security cameras, however, and the club has since posted the video online, prompting outrage from members and supporters.

“It’s a public relations nightmare,” Young says. “The officer who decided imprudently to raid the club did not know the bigger picture, and I’m assuming he must regret his decision because you can’t win.”

Detective Jim Brons, who conducted the raid, admits he was unaware of the legal context swirling around medical cannabis prior to making the arrests. He also recently learned of the club’s existence after transferring to 51 Division last summer.

Brons sympathizes with patients who rely on CALM, but says that as a police officer, he simply couldn’t ignore the “numerous” community complaints being made about the club.

“Nobody really wants to engage a compassionate centre in an investigation,” he says. “But they cannot supersede the laws.”

The detective does concede the issue is ambiguous, however, and that he’d like to see clarification from higher-ups.

“Give us some guidelines because right now, there are no guidelines for the Toronto police in relation to compassionate centres,” he says. “I think that’s why they haven’t been enforced.”

If history is any indication, the CALM arrests are unlikely to result in convictions. In 2002, the Toronto Compassion Centre was raided but all the drug-related charges were dropped 17 months later. The federal justice department said proceeding with a prosecution would be against the public interest.

Tapiero’s lawyer, Ron Marzel, is confident CALM’s charges will similarly disappear.

But changes are afoot, according to Health Canada. In an email to the Star, a spokesperson said the government is considering “longer-term measures” to revise the medical marijuana program, focusing on “key areas” such as reasonable access. Public safety and security and overall costs to the government are also being evaluated.

Alan Young has a tiny spark of hope. In December, for the first time ever, he secured a meeting with Health Canada officials to discuss improving the program. He will meet with them again on Monday.

“It may be that the tide is turning and Health Canada will try to fix the problem,” he says, cautiously optimistic. “I think they know they’re vulnerable. They’ve played their hand too far now.”

Young is proposing that Health Canada end its monopoly on marijuana production and start regulating the private sector. He already has a person in mind for Canada’s first supplier of medical marijuana: Sam Mellace, a former Torontonian now living near Vancouver.

Mellace was once connected with CALM but the relationship dissolved over personal differences with Tapiero. He is now critical of compassion clubs but says he shares the same goal: to bring accessible and affordable marijuana to sick Canadians.

He suffers from chronic pain himself and has one of the biggest licences in Canada, permitting him to grow nearly 300 plants. Because of the scale of his grow-op, Mellace thinks his company, New Age Medical Solutions, is ready to start legally producing on an industrial scale for no more than $5 a gram. He is also developing alternatives to smoking cannabis, such as creams and butters.

Health Canada killed a 2006 pilot project to examine marijuana distribution through pharmacies, citing provincial and territorial barriers, but Mellace envisions a future where clinics can prescribe medical marijuana and patients can buy their dosages at Shoppers Drug Mart.

Such a future would certainly the Peschels’ lives easier. But for now, the reality is that Georgia will continue buying marijuana for Storm any way she can.

“I will do whatever it takes to take away my son’s pain,” she says fiercely. “If it means I have to go downtown and try and find someone to buy drugs off of, I would do it.

“Tell me any mother who wouldn’t.”