MORE THAN SMOKE
Medicinal pot in other forms coming
TORONTO A number of Canada’s medical marijuana growers are poised to release cannabis oils for authorized patients who don’t want to smoke or vaporize the dried herb to relieve their symptoms. In July, Health Canada gave growers the green light to begin producing the plant-based extracts, which are expected to be approved for sale in the coming months.
Among them are Ontario companies Tweed and Bedrocan Canada Inc., and B.C.’s Tilray.
Tilray says it has 20 cannabis extract products awaiting Health Canada approval, including oils in liquid form, gel caps and a topical preparation for certain skin conditions.
“We really felt it was important to let patients and the general public, physicians and researchers know about these products ahead of time,” Philippe Lucas, the company’s vice-president of research and services, said from Nanaimo, B.C. “We know there’s going to be a lot of questions about the products, the first time that these kinds of extract products will be legally available in Canada.”
Lucas said some patients and doctors aren’t keen about the idea of having to smoke or vaporize dried marijuana. Cannabis extracts allow the drug to be ingested — and more discreetly.
Patients who have been authorized by their doctors to purchase dried medical marijuana to treat such conditions as chronic pain, multiple sclerosis symptoms or epilepsy will not need a new prescription to access cannabis oils, he said.
“There’s an equivalency factor that we’ve put into these and so there will be an equivalency, for example, of the number of gel caps or the amount of oil you’re allowed to order, based on your daily and monthly limits.
“So any Canadian who’s authorized to use medical cannabis right now would be able to access these,” said Lucas, noting the oils will be delivered by mail or courier in the same way the dried herb is cur- rently shipped. Prices for the oil extracts, he said, should not be substantially higher than the $4 to $14 per gram for the dried products.
Bruce Linton, chairman and CEO of the recently merged Bedrocan and Tweed, said the company initially plans to release two or three cannabis oil products, which could be scaled up to 10 or more, depending on patient demand.
“There are different types of oils,” Linton said from the Tweed plant in Smiths Falls, Ont., southwest of Ottawa. “The combination of ingredients is expected to have a similar effect in its oil form as it does in its flower form.”
As well, some oils produced by the various growers will have different concentrations of the weed’s main medicinal ingredients: THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive agent that provides marijuana’s high, and non-psychoactive CBD (cannabidiol), which is being used by some patients to control seizures.
Lucas of Tilray said some parents have been going through the laborious process of making their own cannabis oil from dried marijuana to give to their children with epilepsy or other seizure disorders that are resistant to or poorly controlled by standard pharmaceuti- cals. Typically these oils come from strains high in CBD.
Jennifer Ayotte of Oshawa, Ont., said having cannabis in oil form would be a major benefit in treating her 23-year-old daughter Stephanie, who suffers intractable seizures from Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Ayotte makes brownies containing dried marijuana that her daughter can eat. One brownie can be divided into many small portions and ingested throughout the day to control her seizures.
The medicinal pot has made a big difference for Stephanie, who had been having up to a dozen seizures a day and had fallen down stairs and broken her leg as a result.
Traditional anti-convulsive drugs either didn’t work or provided little improvement, and they also had side-effects “that were just awful,” said Ayotte, explaining that some made her daughter so psychotic that she tried to jump out of the car on one of the province’s busiest highways and kicked in one of the vehicle’s doors.
While ingesting marijuana has reduced Stephanie’s seizures by at least 90 per cent, the high sugar content that makes them palatable has led to unwanted weight gain in her daughter, who also has severe cognitive impairment.