Surprise, surprise, another diet pill may be pulled from store shelves.

Meridia, manufactured by Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories, is under review by the FDA after a study raised concerns that the pill increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Yesterday, fully half of the FDA’s advisory panel recommended that it be pulled from the market.

Available only by prescription in the U.S. and Canada, Meridia is intended for patients who need to lose 30+ pounds. Its chief ingredient is sibutramine, which suppresses appetite and can cause an increase in blood pressure and heart rate in some patients. It has a long list of possible negative side effects, including anorexia, which can be devastating to the mental, emotional, and physical health of those taking the drug.

According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, almost 60% of adult Canadians (about 14.1 million) are overweight or obese, and it’s no surprise that many of them turn to diet pills to shed weight. Manufacturers usually advise that they should be taken in combination with a calorie-reduced diet and exercise. But how often does that happen? “I know a guy who takes HydroxyCut,” a friend told me once. “He eats whatever he wants and doesn’t gain a pound.” That’s the truth about diet pills, really. They become a substitute for healthy eating and exercise.

The drug companies also insist they aren’t habit-forming, but, as a former diet pill addict, I can attest otherwise. My addiction went hand in hand with an eating disorder, but even when I started to eat normally, I struggled to get off the pills. Losing weight is difficult, and given the thin-obsessed society we live in, women remain extremely susceptible to their allure.

I’ve been off them, and maintaining a healthy, comfortable weight, for several years now. In fact, I’m thinner now than I was for much of the time I took diet pills — a feat achieved simply by healthy eating and exercise.

I wasted a lot of money filling the pockets of the diet industry when the real solution was free. Not only in financial terms, but also free of negative side effects. Eating a well-balanced diet and exercising is a guaranteed way to keep your body trim and in shape, and, unlike many diet pills, is good for your overall physical and cardiovascular health. But it’s not a popular choice because it isn’t easy. It takes time and effort, dedication and education, and the results aren’t immediate.

But it’s worth it. This past weekend, I completed my first marathon — that’s 42.2 km of running — and I have never been so proud of my body. There isn’t a diet pill in the world that can make me feel that sort of pride.

Should Meridia be taken off the shelves, I’m sure it won’t be gone for long. It will likely be reformulated and returned, like so many others. Even so, I’d advise everyone, overweight, obese, or not, to keep it and all other diet pills out of your medicine cabinet. I’m glad they’ve been banished from mine.

In a guest column in the Seattle Times on Friday, the former US attorney who indicted Marc Emery in 2005 for selling pot seeds over the internet wrote:

“The U.S. war against marijuana has failed and actually threatens public safety and rests on false medical assumptions. Our marijuana policy is dangerous and wrong  . . . . the law has failed, the public is endangered, no one in law enforcement is talking about it and precious few policymakers will honestly face the soft-on-crime sound bite in their next elections.”

This includes our own homegrown cowards, principally Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Rob Nicholson, who had Marc Emery deported to the US in May to serve a five-year sentence that will begin next week.

As Lib MP Ujjal Dosanjh put it back in March when he joined forces with Con MP Scott Reid and NDP MP Libby Davies to present petitions from 12,000 Canadians in the HoC asking Justice Minister Rob Nicholson not to sign extradition papers:

“It appears to me that we have assisted a foreign government arrest a man for doing something that we wouldn’t arrest him for doing in Canada.”

A Canadian man at that. The rhetoric from the DEA at the time of the 2005 bust was absurd:

“Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General’s most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets.

“Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a signficant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.”

In a letter to his wife Jodie yesterday, Emery remarks on the importance of getting supporters to write to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and the US DoJ for the Saturday Sept 18th Marc Emery Support Day. I don’t care if you don’t smoke pot — I don’t smoke pot — but write a letter or support a rally on Sept. 18th. I’ll stick up a reminder then.

History, ironically aided by his former prosecutor, is already moving to vindicate Emery. Too bad he still has to serve the time so that Canada can continue to suck up to the phony “dangerous and wrong” moribund US War on Drugs, huh?

Bill C-15, an amendment to the Controlled Drugs [and Uncontrolled Growth of the Prison Industry] Act, guarantees, among other travesties, automatic jail time for people who grow and sell five marijuana plants.

Believe it or not, this is an improvement over what the Cons originally proposed — jail time for just one plant — until the Bloc and NDP managed to leverage it up to five plants in the Committee on Justice and Human Rights, where 13 of 16 expert witnesses spoke against the new bill.

There’s a lot of old US War on Drugs bullshit here, endorsed by the Libs and Cons just as the US begins to repudiate it.

From Friday’s Hansard, HoC :

“California, New York, Michigan, Delaware, Massachusetts are all repealing their mandatory minimum sentences with other states considering the same.

“Counsel to the United States House of Representatives committee on the judiciary, Eric Sterling, stated emphatically his decision to promote mandatory minimum sentences in the United States was probably ‘the greatest mistake of my entire career over 30 years in the practice of law.’

What the Americans found was that the goal of the legislation to reduce drug use failed. The goal of safety in the communities failed. The goal of raising the prices of drugs and lowering the purity failed. The goal of reducing organized crime failed.”

Yesterday in the HoC, Keith Martin, Lib, asked why we can’t “decriminalize simple possession, for example, of marijuana and allow people to have a couple of plants”?

Indeed. People receiving sentences of two years less a day will wind up in the already overcrowded provincial prisons. What to do? What to do?

The Canadian Bar Association, as quoted in the HoC :

“We believe the Bill would not be effective, would be very costly, would add to strains on the administration of justice, could create unjust and disproportionate sentences and ultimately would not achieve its intended goal of greater public safety.”

Libs will have to suck it up hard to vote for this one today, as they party with the Cons like it’s 1969. The NDP and Bloc will vote against it.