The Conservative government is launching a $1.3-billion free market in medical marijuana this Tuesday, eventually providing an expected 450,000 Canadians with quality weed.
Health Canada is phasing out an older system on Monday that mostly relied on small-scale, homegrown medical marijuana of varying quality, often diverted illegally to the black market.
In its place, large indoor marijuana farms certified by the RCMP and health inspectors will produce, package and distribute a range of standardized weed, all of it sold for whatever price the market will bear. The first sales are expected in the next few weeks, delivered directly by secure courier.
"We're fairly confident that we'll have a healthy commercial industry in time," Sophie Galarneau, a senior official with the department, said in an interview.
"It's a whole other ball game."
The sanctioned birth of large-scale, free-market marijuana production comes as the Conservatives pillory Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's campaign to legalize recreational marijuana.
Health Canada is placing no limits on the number of these new capital-intensive facilities, which will have mandatory vaults and security systems. Private-dwelling production will be banned. Imports from places such as the Netherlands will be allowed.
Already 156 firms have applied for lucrative producer and distributor status since June, with the first two receiving licences just last week.
The old system fostered only a cottage industry, with 4,200 growers licensed to produce for a maximum of two patients each. The Mounties have complained repeatedly these grow-ops were often a front for criminal organizations.
The next six months are a transition period, as Health Canada phases out the old system by March 31, 2014, while encouraging medical marijuana users to register under the replacement regime and to start buying from the new factory-farms.
There are currently 37,400 medical marijuana users recognized by the department, but officials project that number will swell more than 10-fold, to as many as 450,000 people, by 2024.
The profit potential is enormous. A gram of dried marijuana bud on the street sells for about $10 and Health Canada projects the legal stuff will average about $7.60 next year, as producers set prices without interference from government.
Chuck Rifici of Tweed Inc. has applied for a licence to produce medical weed in an abandoned Hershey chocolate factory in hard-scrabble Smiths Falls, Ont.
Rifici, who is also a senior adviser to Trudeau, was cited in a Conservative cabinet minister's news release Friday that said the Liberals plan to "push pot," with no reference to Health Canada's own encouragement of marijuana entrepreneurs.
Rifici says he's trying to help a struggling community by providing jobs while giving suffering patients a quality product.
"There's a real need," he said in an interview. "You see what this medicine does to them."
Tweed Inc. proposes to produce at least 20 strains to start, and will reserve 10 per cent of production for compassionate, low-cost prescriptions for impoverished patients, he says.
Patients often use several grams a day to alleviate a wide range of symptoms, including cancer-related pain and nausea. They'll no longer be allowed to grow it for themselves under the new rules.
Revenues for the burgeoning new industry are expected to hit $1.3-billion a year by 2024, according to federal projections. And operators would be favourably positioned were marijuana ever legalized for recreational use, as it has been in two American states.
Eric Nash of Island Harvest in Duncan, B.C., has applied for one of the new licences, banking on his experience as a licensed grower since 2002 in the current system.
"The opportunity in the industry is significant," he said in an interview.
"We'll see a lot of moving and shaking within the industry, with companies positioning. And I think we'll see some mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances formed."
"It'll definitely yield benefits to the consumers and certainly for the economy and society in general."
Veterans Affairs Canada currently pays for medical marijuana for some patients, even though the product lacks official drug status. Some provinces are also being pressed to cover costs, as many users are too sick to work and rely on welfare.
Health Canada currently sells medical marijuana, produced on contract by Prairie Plant Systems, for $5 a gram, and acknowledges the new system will be more expensive for patients.
But Galarneau says competition will help keep prices in check.
"We expect that over time, prices will be driven down by the free market," she said. "The lower price range will likely be around $3 a gram. ... It's hard to predict."
Saskatoon-based Prairie Plant Systems, and its subsidiary CanniMed Ltd., were granted the first two licences under the system and are already advertising their new products on the web.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/federal-government-to-launch-billion-dollar-free-market-in-medical-marijuana/article14590161/?service=print
Chronic pain is a major medical problem, affecting as many as 100 million Americans, robbing them of a full sense of well-being, disrupting their ability to work and earn a living, and causing untold suffering for the patient and family. This condition costs the country an estimated $560-635 billion annually—a staggering economic burden [1]. Worst of all, chronic pain is often resistant to treatment. NIH launched the Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain [2] to investigate how acute pain (which is part of daily experience) evolves into a chronic condition and what biological factors contribute to this transition.
But you may wonder: what, exactly, is the difference between acute and chronic pain?
Acute pain is an intensely unpleasant sensation transmitted by the nervous system to alert you to a real or impending injury—like a bruise, cut, or burn—or an infection like a toothache. It's a warning that something's wrong with your body, and that you need to take action. It can trigger you to remove your hand from a hot stove or to get rid of that pair of shoes that make your feet hurt every time you wear them. Pain is a powerful protective mechanism: those who cannot feel it, whether from a genetic condition or from an acquired disease of peripheral nerves like leprosy, suffer very serious consequences. But normally, acute pain is short lived—when the injury has healed, the pain is gone.
But in some situations, this acute pain becomes chronic, persisting for months or even years. In many instances that happens because the physiological condition is ongoing and unresolved—as in cancer or arthritis. But in some instances, the pain doesn't appear to be caused by any disease, injury, or detectable damage to the nervous system [3]. That pain is just as real to the person suffering from it, though it is referred to as psychogenic pain.
We currently treat chronic pain with a variety of therapies, including medications, electrical stimulation, and surgery. Medications range from relatively mild over-the-counter drugs like aspirin to more powerful prescription drugs like Vicodin™ or Percocet™, which act on the brain and spinal cord to relieve pain. But these powerful narcotic drugs can cause serious side effects. They also carry the risk of addiction.
We believe that one key to developing better treatments is to identify signs that acute pain is likely to become chronic. By discovering such markers, we can personalize the treatment of pain. We could provide more aggressive treatments for those at high risk for chronic pain and minimal treatment for those likely to bounce back quickly. This would also help to reduce the risk of abuse and addiction to painkillers.
Here's one example. We're funding efforts to understand how the brain perceives a very common problem: back pain. Are there are biological markers that signal which patients' pain will evolve into a more chronic form? Already, promising new fMRI brain imaging studies can predict which people will suffer from chronic pain after the acute phase [4].
We're also looking into whether acute pain causes brain changes in certain people that might enhance pain sensitivity and lead to chronic pain. People coping with chronic pain often suffer from several conditions simultaneously—fibromyalgia and temporomandibular joint disorders or irritable bowel syndrome, for example. Is there some common mechanism?
We know there's a significant difference in the way children, adults, and the elderly react to pain. A paper cut, for example, might cause your 6 year old to erupt in a fountain of tears, whereas most adults would just brush the injury aside. Is that because our wiring changes as we age? It's an intriguing question, and one that we hope to answer.
We're also investigating the use of complementary and alternative methods—like massage, acupuncture, herbal remedies, meditation, and yoga—to treat pain separately, or in addition to traditional analgesic treatments [5, 6]. As part of the Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain, we hope to understand the causes of chronic pain better—and ultimately to alleviate the suffering of millions.
References:
[1] Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research
[2] Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain
[3] NINDS Chronic Pain Information Page
4] Corticostriatal functional connectivity predicts transition to chronic back pain. Baliki MN, Petre B, Torbey S, Herrmann KM, Huang L, Schnitzer TJ, Fields HL, Apkarian AV. Nat Neurosci. 2012 Jul 1;15(8):1117-9.
[5] NINDS Hope Through Research
[6] Chronic Pain and Complementary and Alternative Medicine
NIH Support: NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
