Health Canada has changed the rules regarding medicinal marihuana to the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations, set to come into effect on April 1. The new rules change the requirements for growers in Canada, with the only source being licensed producers.
Julian Strauss, who operates cannibasoils.ca, a (Togo area) Saskatchewan-based medical dispensary, grower and manufacturer, says that the changes primarily affect teir ability to grow, in that they are no longer able to do so and must buy wholesale from someone licensed under the new regulations. This will increase costs substantially, and Strauss says this will most directly affect the patients who are in most need of treatment, as they are largely chronically ill or disabled, and have conditions which make full-time employment unrealistic.
"It would be a drastic change, and what it does is it creates a financial barrier that is insurpassable. An unobtainable medication for ninety per cent of our patients," Strauss says.
"What it's done is create a very lucrative recreational market. If you have a full time job, you're not disabled and you're not chronically ill, you can go to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist and get a prescription for cannabis and afford the cost."
Strauss emphasizes that the people who are most in need of medicinal cannabis will have disabilities and chronic illnesses that prohibit or limit full time employment, so increased prices will hit them the hardest.
"If you're actually chronically ill, medicare does not cover dried cannabis or cannabis extracts. The only people who truly need the product have a wall."
There are about ten companies who currently have a license to grow under the new regulations, Strauss says, and they are able to completely own the market through regulation. With competition kept out, he adds, there is no honest market signal as to what the price of cannabis should.
"When you take competition out of the game, regulate the industry so heavily that the few players that are involved have very little incentive to keep prices down, so we already have collusion. All of the companies in the market have stated their price per gram of over $10."
As a smaller producer, Strauss explains that it is impossible for him to become licensed by Health Canada due to the sheer cost of the different requirements. He says that for his own company, in order to comply with regulations it would require getting in an insurmountable amount of debt, which means he also could no longer offer the product at the kind of price patients can afford.
"The kind of debt one has to incur in order to enter the market means you have to have a price point of around $8-10 gram."
They currently have a court order to prevent the new rules from coming into effect, but Strauss says they do not know how long the adjudication will take and what the end result will mean for the company and its patients. He also says that it's legally a charter violation, and that is why the injunction is in place.
"You create a system where there are no incentives to modern production, there are no incentives to agricultural style production, there's no incentive to keep the price down through open-market real competition, there's a regulatory capture for those who can afford to buy in."
Strauss adds, that Health Canada is on the wrong side of history, noting that research is continuing to show that the plant cannot hurt the human body, and there is no potential for biological harm, but the medical uses are continuing to expand. It says that it should be a right of Canadian citizens to be able to plant, grow and consume cannabis.
"Over the next five years or ten years the conversation that we're going to have in the world is going to expand exponentially. Every three weeks we get a new piece of corroborated, independently verified, peer-reviewed, scientific method-based studies that show what cannabis does for things like insulin production, metabolism, the endocrine system, all of the basic health functions of the human body are regulated and kept in check by one of the numerous compounds in the human body which cannabis mimics."
While confident that the future will show the value of cannabis in the medical environment, Strauss has to deal with the regulations in place today, and how to serve patients while also remaining within Canadian law. The current plan, he explains, is to move aspects of the business to places which are more friendly to what they are doing. They are moving to Uruguay and export permits for the extracts. He emphasizes that they will do whatever they can under laws in place to serve their customers.
"What we're dealing with right now is trying to put together some kind of structure or framework that we can import."
