Tainted Pot

Seriously and terminally ill patients who rely on marijuana to alleviate injuries must continue to endure pain, as the Canadian medical marijuana community is discovering. Although Health Canada approved marijuana to be grown and distributed to those with a medical necessity by biopharmaceutical company Prairie Plant Systems, medical-marijuana patients are becoming violently sick from the government-sponsored weed. Many are vomiting, or experiencing severe diarrhea, that is preventing them from receiving the therapeutic benefits of the cannabis. These suffering people are being forced to decide between tainted pot, and living with pain. Prairie Plant Systems is a proud and profiting research and development biopharmaceutical firm that engineers and manufactures every step of the sterile marijuana cultivation process, "the cycle from seed to product," as their Web site boasts. The weed is being harvested far underground, in an abandoned mineshaft, and evidence is surfacing that the original product was allegedly never intended for immediate public use, nor was the potency of the crop evaluated. This method of underground-laboratory growth is financially preferred, due to its ability to yield the fastest possible return on investment, among the plant-based technological enterprises lurking behind the shadow of corporate America. The pharmaceutical companies have fought the repeal of marijuana prohibition for years, though it seems they still have much to profit from the plant's medical status.