IndoCanadian’s startup bets big on marijuana
TORONTO: Sometimes it can be a positive if your business goes to pot.
That, at least, is the case with the startup TerrAscend Corp, which is making a serious play in the burgeoning field of medical marijuana in Canada and looking ahead to legalisation of the recreational variety this summer.
While TerrAscend’s medical products will arrive in the Canadian market in 2018, estimated to reach $2 billion, its 42-year-old co-founder and chief strategy officer Vijay Sappani believes opportunities also lie in India.
“India has probably the most amount of wealth of knowledge on cannabis, it has some of the best native strains of cannabis,” he told Hindustan times during an interview at TerrAscend’s sprawling facility in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto.
For now, the company is looking at research and development partnerships with leading institutions in India, as well as a firm in the commercial hemp space, though Sappani did not name them due to confidentiality reasons.
“We are looking to partner, collaborate with institutions in India to do research and development but also using local knowledge towards unique strain development. One of the top selling strains in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) is malana cream and that’s from Himachal Pradesh,” he said.
Marijuana import and export remains banned in India. The country though has a long tradition in marijuana use, for religious, cultural and medicinal purposes.
As a leader in the pharmaceutical sector, Sappani feels this gives India another advantage, especially with regard to the medical marijuana industry that has gone mainstream in North America and Europe.
But while laws and rules in India still make that a proposition for the future, the present is in Canada, where medical marijuana use is growing and the market is expected to explode to $10 billion once recreational use is permitted from July 1.
“We have been in the healthcare space and we have seen some of the opportunities and challenges. The number one reason medical cannabis is moving really is patients like it,” said Sappani, who was born in Chennai and worked as a pharmacist in Canada.
“Lot of these patients have been on painkillers, they’ve seen the side-effects, there are lot of addiction issues.”
Gopal Bhatnagar, a cardiac surgeon and director on TerrAscend’s board, said medical cannabis is used in management of chronic pain, oncology-induced nausea, and even for post-traumatic stress disorder.
But there hasn’t been adequate research into its potential, as he said: “The science is certainly evolving. Now the social stigma has been taken away in North America, real scientific research can be done.”
The strains used in medical products make for a different experience than smoking a reefer, as Bhatnagar explained, “Medical marijuana strains are specifically cultivated to give the prescribed effect. So we have strains that will help you with your nausea and give you very little, if any, high. We don’t get the hallucinogenic effect.”