Health Canada officials talk cannabis rules with local police, first responders
Essex MP Tracey Ramsey cleared the air surrounding cannabis licensing concerns at a closed-door meeting in her office Friday afternoon.
Police, first responders and representatives from several municipalities in the region spent over two hours asking questions of Health Canada employees. “In my office we’ve heard from people in our region who have concerns about particular areas in the county where it appears rules are being broken,” Ramsey said following the meeting, which she organized in hopes of gaining upto-date information about changes in the regulation of marijuana. “In Essex, we’re known across the country, and really across the globe, for growing good things,” Ramsey said. “Everything can grow here in Essex, so we’ve become a bit of a hot spot for this growth of this particular industry.” With that growth comes issues about licensing, Ramsey said. Cannabis producers of all sizes must be licensed, ranging from big players like Aphria to new micro producers and micro growers. Medical cannabis users have their own required licences, some of which have been grandfathered in to current regulations. Understanding what valid licences look like, and what the various licences allow individuals and producers to do, was difficult, Ramsey said, and caused a lot of confusion.
During the meeting, Heath Canada representatives, who would not speak with reporters, showed examples of current licences and explained the details of each. Doctors, who have only recently begun to receive details on how to prescribe cannabis to patients, still have questions about how much is too much, Ramsey said.
“We still need clinical trials in our country to determine what is a reasonable amount of consumption in a lot of different ways,” Ramsey said. “People are ingesting, topically applying it, smoking it, and they’re using it in vaporizers.” One outcome of the meeting was a unanimous desire to see results from clinical trials that would allow doctors to better understand reasonable limits to cannabis consumption considering a patient’s health conditions. Ramsey said officials expressed concern for individuals skirting the rules by acquiring multiple medical marijuana licences to obtain more prescriptions.
“When it comes to cannabis, municipalities are bearing a huge brunt of the responsibility,” Ramsey said. “They have to look at the federal regulations, the provincial regulations, and they ’re trying to interpret that on the ground so they can best provide it as a recreational usage for people in their communities.” Municipalities also have to follow regulations for medicinal users who are growing it at home for themselves, and in some cases growing it for others, she said. Product shortage was also discussed, Ramsey said. Health Canada is in the process of approving more licences, and the representatives expressed the belief that once the applications are processed, the shortage will be rectified, Ramsey said.
She suggested the creation of a municipal liaison position, allowing governments to convey information pertaining to cannabis regulations directly to those implementing the rules. That way, Ramsey said, “municipalities can go directly to and have their questions answered like we did today.”