Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti at the Canadian Medical Association’s annual general meeting in Ottawa. Photo: Mark Holleron/CMA They already opposed tobacco. Now the nation’s doctors say Canadians shouldn’t smoke “any plant material” whatsoever, including marijuana.
Delegates at the Canadian Medical Association’s general council meeting voted Wednesday to formally oppose the smoking of any plant substance.
Opponents to the motion said it was a back-door way to ban medical marijuana. Some claimed it smacks of Prohibition all over again.
Taken literally, the blanket statement could cover dozens of plants that people smoke in different cultures.
But outgoing CMA president Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti said smoking harms the lungs’ “natural cleaning and repair system and traps cancer-causing chemicals” in the airways.
He cited a 2008 study by the American Chemical Society that found marijuana smoke contains many of the same chemicals as tobacco smoke but in substantially higher levels.
Smoking marijuana may be more harmful than tobacco, partly because people often take “deeper, longer” puffs, said incoming president Dr. Chris Simpson.
The motion strengthens the CMA’s opposition to marijuana for medical purposes, especially in its smoked form, he added.
The CMA has a long-standing policy supporting decriminalization of pot, “because we don’t see the value of turning people who smoke marijuana into criminals,” Simpson later told reporters.
On medicinal marijuana, the group’s position is unequivocal, he said. “We are very sympathetic to the number of Canadians who tell us that they derive relief from marijuana. So we stand in solidarity with the patients,” he said. “But our position is very clear: The evidence is insufficient to support its use as medicine.”
Dr. Deborah Hellyer, a Windsor, Ont., respirologist said that smoking one joint “is equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes.”
But Dr. Ashley Miller of St. John’s said the “prohibitionist” tone of the motion contradicts existing evidence and she worried about the cultural sensitivity.
Others worried what message defeating the motion would send to the public.
“If we don’t support it, it says, ‘smoke whatever you want’ and I think that’s a really bad message to send to the public,” said Calgary physician Dr. Robin Cox.
Delegates at the policy convention also adopted a motion urging Correctional Service Canada to investigate the psychiatric consequences of solitary confinement.
Psychiatrist Dr. Gary Chaimowitz said the death of Edward Snowshoe, who hanged himself at the Edmonton Institution after 162 days in segregation, and the segregation-cell death in 2007 of teenager Ashley Smith, who died by self-inflicted strangulation, highlight the dangers of prolonged segregation.
Up to one-third of the country’s maximum-security population are in segregation at any time. The average time spent in segregation is about 95 days.
“When I go into these facilities and I see the places people are housed and kept for weeks and weeks, and sometimes years, it is truly unbelievable,” said Chaimowitz, head of forensic psychiatry at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton.
The United Nations has said prolonged segregation is equivalent to torture.
Delegates voted down a motion that would have called for a system of “presumed” consent for organ donation. Proponents said countries such as France with presumed consent — where organs and tissues are retrieved from the deceased unless the person had explicitly opted out of organ donation before they died — have donor rates 25 to 30 per cent higher than Canada.
But Dr. Ted Boadway, who chaired a citizen’s panel on increasing organ donation for the province of Ontario, said their own canvassing and polling on the issue found that people “didn’t want us to presume anything. They wanted us to respect their wish, whatever it was.”
Earlier, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair became the first leader of the official Opposition to be invited to speak at the annual doctors’ gathering.
Mulcair accused the Harper government of attempting to recruit doctors “in their ideological crusade against marijuana.”
“That’s not governing. That’s bullying,” he told delegates.
The Canadian Medical Association, the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada declined the government’s invitation to endorse a proposed Health Canada advertising campaign on the dangers of marijuana use by young people.
Health Canada had asked the physicians’ groups to review the ads for accuracy and lend their logos and endorsements, which could have drawn MDs into the politically charged debate over the legalization of marijuana.
Mulcair accused the Conservatives of returning the country to an “era of crippling cuts” and said the NDP would use any federal budget surplus to reverse the Conservatives’ plans to cut $36 billion from health-care spending starting in 2016.
The federal Health Ministry later said in a statement that it is providing the highest recorded health transfer dollars in Canada’s history to provinces and territories. The ministry said the funding will reach $40 billion annually by the end of the decade and that health-care transfers have increased by almost 50 per cent since the Conservative government took power.
Mulcair called the state of health care on some First Nations’ reserves “a shame” and criticized the Conservative government for shuttering nine veterans’ service centres as a “wave of new veterans” returns from a decade of war in Afghanistan.
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Incoming CMA president’s inaugural speech:
Canada’s hospitals are “overflowing at the seams” with patients who don’t need to be there — frail and aging seniors, many of them with dementia, who have nowhere else to go, says the incoming leader of the Canadian Medical Association.
Dr. Chris Simpson, incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association. Simpson is professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at Queen’s University in Kingston .
This “warehousing of seniors” is costing the system $2.3 billion a year and highlights the urgent need for a national rethink of seniors’ care, Dr. Chris Simpson said in his inaugural speech Wednesday as president of the CMA.
Simpson, who also chairs the national Wait Times Alliance, said Canadians are facing long waits for virtually every non-urgent test, surgery or procedure “because the beds needed are filled with patients who don’t need to be in hospitals.”
Seniors waiting placement in other facilities are occupying about 15 per cent of hospital beds. But, “Instead of focusing on getting them back to their independence we put them in beds, because that’s what we do in hospitals. We put people to bed instead of putting them in a care environment that lifts them up and restores them and helps them live a dignified life.”
Overall, three million bed-days are used every year in Canada by patients well enough to be discharged and who should be cared for somewhere else.
Simpson repeated the CMA’s call for a national strategy for seniors’ care that would include tax incentives and respite and community care to provide support to families looking after their aging relatives, as well as affordable housing for seniors.
Simpson said Canada continues to slip in world rankings of health care performances. Canada ranked next to last — 10th out of 11 — in a recent Commonwealth Fund survey on the quality of health care systems in different countries.
More private care isn’t the answer, he said, noting that the U.S., “with the most private care” was the only other country that ranked worse than Canada.
“Our system doesn’t deliver the quality that it should. It doesn’t deliver the timeliness that it should. And it doesn’t deliver the value for money that it should,” said Simpson, a professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont..
Simpson said seniors’ care is the “paramount health care issue of our time” and should be the federal government’s highest priority, given the unprecedented demographic shift now underway in Canada as boomers age. Today, Canadians can expect to live, on average, to 81, compared to 51 at the beginning of the 20th century.
“The constitutional construct that we have has been for too long an excuse for the federal government to be absent from the table,” Simpson told reporters. “We’re not suggesting that they should take all responsibility from the provinces. We’re simply suggesting that they have a leadership role to play in setting the tone, in setting the standards …. to start to move the dial forward.
“ I don’t want to be 10th out of 11. I want to be first, and I think Canadians do too,” he said.
“We can’t do that without federal leadership helping us.”
skirkey(at)postmedia.com
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