‘There is a need for more research’
Whither medical marijuana? Recreational pot has put medicinal on the backburner
Canada is riding high when it comes to cannabis. By next summer, the country could be the first G7 economy to have legalized recreational marijuana, creating an all-new industry expected to generate billions of dollars in cash for companies and government coffers.
But while pot smokers and the companies that will serve them celebrate, the concerns of the medical marijuana industry seem to be getting short shrift.
For one thing, the federal government in November proposed to subject medical cannabis to the same excise tax — or “sin tax,” as some refer to it — as its recreational cousin. The mere prospect of a medicinal marijuana tax has been taken as a slight against the drug’s therapeutic properties, since critics note that other medicines are not subject to such a charge.
“The taxation proposal clearly illustrates the government is not taking cannabis seriously as a medicine,” said Jonathan Zaid, founder and executive director of Canadians For Fair Access to Medical Marijuana, a national non-profit organization. “Patients are already facing affordability challenges and this tax is really going to compound barriers to access for patients across the country.”
Canada, understandably, is paying more attention now to recreational cannabis than its existing medical regime, but it is doing so at a sensitive time for the latter, as the tax brouhaha demonstrate.
The number of clients signing up to receive medical cannabis has exploded to more than 200,000, but doctors remain hesitant to prescribe cannabis.
There are high expectations for demand and the amount of money the medical sector will be worth — even after the recreational market opens — and the current regime also remains ripe for some innovation, since patients still receive the product via mail.
Mackie Research Capital in September estimated that the number of registered marijuana patients would hit 630,000 people—or approximately 1.7 percent of the population—by 2024. With that many potential customers, M ac kieprojec ted the value of the medical market would be between $1.9 billion and $2.6 billion.
“The nice thing is that I think the medical market will continue to be the most valuable market because of the direct relationship between producer and patient, or customer,” said Chuck Rifici, chairman and chief executive of Cannabis Wheaton Income Corp., which helps fledgling pot producers with financing.
“There is no way for provincial or for any level of government to intermediate themselves into that medical relationship between producer and customer.”
But PwC said in a report earlier this year that some industry stakeholders felt the federal government’s “tight timeframe” for recreational legalization would lead to a lack of consultation and the potential to miss the opportunity to right the medical regime.
“Because decision-makers will have so little time for regulatory development, the focus will be exclusively on recreational cannabis, to the detriment of changes that may be required for medical cannabis,” PwC warned, adding that changes to the medical regime could be as far away as three years as a result.
One outstanding problem is that doctors may still be hesitant to prescribe cannabis to their patients, creating a bottleneck in the system for both patients and producers.
“This incarnation of the medical cannabis market in Canada came about about four years ago,” said Neil Closner, chief executive of Markham, Ont.-based medical marijuana producer MedReleaf Corp. “And the single biggest challenge that patients and physicians have been encountering is actually obtaining a medical document, or from the physicians’ side, understanding or becoming comfortable with how to prescribe.”
Some of the discomfort physicians may have with prescribing pot was touched on by Dr. Shawn Whatley, president of the Ontario Medical Association, which represents the province’s 30,000 doctors, during his testimony at a provincial legislature’s justice committee in November.
“There is a need for more research on cannabis and at this time there is a gap in knowledge,” he said. “When considering medical cannabis, it is critical to emphasize that physicians receive requests from patients for prescriptions. Given the lack of evidence and knowledge around dosing, drug interactions and the prescription process, this puts many docs in a very difficult position.”