With all the issues that have divided the United States and Canada recently – softwood lumber, fisheries and natural gas to name but a few – it’s good to see the two nations united in neighborly agreement. It’s not good that the agreement is to perpetuate an irrational phobia regarding the medicinal use of marijuana.

Canada seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. An Ontario Court of Appeals two years ago upheld the right of a Torontonian suffering from epilepsy to smoke marijuana to ease his seizures and ordered Ottawa to amend the law that made it illegal for sick people to possess the drug. The federal government chose not to challenge that ruling in the Supreme Court and instead carefully began crafting a policy that would have restricted the use of medical marijuana as pain relief to only the sickest Canadians – an estimated 800 people – with the pot grown at government farms under strictly controlled conditions.

The careful crafting came to an abrupt end last week when Health Minister Anne McLellan announced at a meeting of the Canadian Medical Association that it all was being shelved until the issue is resolved by the Supreme Court and clinical trials on medical marijuana are completed. Trouble is, there is no remotely relevant case before Canada’s high court and the years-long process of clinical trials has yet to begin.

This abrupt turnaround came as the result of intense lobbying on two fronts: The United States insisted that medical marijuana, even under the most controlled regime, would lead to increased cross-border trafficking in the drug for recreational purposes; Canadian physicians objected to one drug being approved based upon political pressure without being subjected to the rigorous testing required of all other drugs.

Canadian physicians, and their colleagues in this country, are absolutely correct in vigorously maintaining that court orders, street demonstrations and even referendum votes are no way to approve medicine for market. They would be even more correct if they lobbied as hard for the clinical trials they rightly maintain are necessary.

As for the United States, its concern that roughly 800 pounds of medicinal marijuana grown at secure facilities for roughly 800 pain-wracked people would increase this country’s prodigious appetite for a recreational buzz is simply absurd. For all of Canada’s worrying that their neighbor to the south is pushy and meddlesome, they picked a fine time to listen to us.