A YOUNG man boarded the streetcar carrying an abundant bouquet of mint. 

It enlivened the carriage, became a talking point.

An older couple asked where he’d bought it from. He’d grown it, it turned out, in his community garden plot. He handed the couple a fragrant sprig.

Before long he was handing sprigs out up and down the carriage.
What did he plan to do with it, someone enquired? 

“I’m going to dry it, grind it down and add it to my joints,” he said, matter of fact.

I was in Toronto earlier this month and, not realising the Ontarians’ relaxed attitude to cannabis, I was wholly taken aback, surreptitiously squinting at the other occupants of the tram to see how they reacted. No one reacted. It was not worth reacting to.

Cut to the UK and we've just had a week long barney about whether a seriously ill young boy might have access to a medicine that stops him having daily, life-threatening epileptic seizures. Why on earth might treatment be stopped? 

Well, because the treatment is medical cannabis. Billy Caldwell's mother, Charlotte, treats her 12-year-old son with cannabis oil that contains two things: CBD (cannabidiol), which is a legal cannabinoid without psychoactive properties, and illegal levels of the intoxicating compound THC (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol).

It is, of course, the latter that causes an issue. 

After his mother's campaigning, Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided to allow Billy “one bottle” of cannabis oil as a “short term emergency”.

What happens when that bottle runs out remains to be seen but it is clear this treatment works for the schoolboy and without it he suffers badly.

In light of this case, Mr Javid has now pledged a review of medical cannabis in the UK but was quick, on announcing it in the Commons, to emphasise the move is “no way a first step in the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use." 

As Professor David Nutt, the UK's former chief drug policy adviser, has pointed out, there have already been reviews by the Royal College of Physicians and the House of Lords, which are still relevant. 

Yet another review seems merely like delaying tactics from a government cleaving to the notion that the public will be outraged if it is seen to be "soft on drugs", a ministerial terror that seems an increasingly archaic hangover from the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. 

Westminster is currently blocking plans by Glasgow's local authority to introduce a safe injecting space in the City Centre. The Home Office accepts submissions from the city council that it would cut deaths and infection rates, keep drug users safe and take the issue off the streets - but heroin is illegal, so that's that.

The council continues to push for the plan but the reluctance speaks again to a ministerial terror of dealing reviewing drug policies head on, despite public attitudes in the past 40 years shifting. 

Cannabis has been used as medicine for thousands of years. The first reference to the plant's medicinal properties is generally accepted to be in a 2700 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung's pharmocopoeia. 

Cannabis as a medical herb was also accepted in the UK until the aforementioned Misuse of Drugs Act. Cannabinoid-based tinctures were available as medicine in pharmacies throughout the country.

We allow morphine to be legal for pain relief, we use amphetamine and benzodiazepine-based medicines, and yet cannabis, which has been cited as useful for patients with a range of ailments from brain tumours to glaucoma and Crohn's disease, is banned. 

As the law forces parents to act illegally in order to keep their children alive, this is moral issue requiring action, not more political foot dragging. Some 37 countries currently have medical cannabis programmes while in the UK people are dying due to political squeamishness.