Canada’s legalization of recreational marijuana has caused product shortages and outages for medical users, spurring industry advocates to urge Ottawa to loosen regulations to allow non-licensed suppliers to provide cannabis to medical patients on a temporary basis.
Ad Lucem Law Corp. lawyer Robert Laurie told Business in Vancouver December 7 that he plans to provide file affidavits in B.C. Supreme Court
later this month from medical cannabis users who say that their health is adversely impacted because they are not able to buy necessary cannabis from licensed producers.
Laurie is one of the lawyers involved in a lawsuit against the City of Vancouver and other levels of government, arguing that unlicensed streetfront dispensaries should be able to operate legally.
That, he argues, is because the city has no legal authority to regulate and licence dispensaries, and the federal government is acting unconstitutionally with its current system because it does not abide by Supreme Court of Canada rulings to provide sufficient access to cannabis by medical patients.
The supply crunch has become a crisis, he said, because much product is being funnelled to the recreational sales stream, which became legal on October 17.
Medical patients, Laurie says, are therefore suffering severe pain and other problems.
“It can be anything: severe pain, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome),” he said.
“You tell me, if you’re a medical patient and you don’t take your medicine, take your pick of what will happen. That’s the situation that a patient should not be faced with. The government has said you can only get weed from us. If you get weed outside that, it’s illegal. That forces patients to go, ‘I either have to follow the law and go without my medicine, which will have adverse considerations [or break the law.]’”
Terry Roycroft, president of the Vancouver-based chain of medical clinics Medicinal Cannabis Resource Centre Inc., agreed.
He told BIV December 7 that about 25% to 30% of his clinics’ patients have not been able to get their preferred products.
(Image: Terry Roycroft is president of the Vancouver-based chain of medical clinics Medicinal Cannabis Resource Centre Inc. | submitted)
“We have to sign them up with multiple [licensed] producers so that if the producer that they have first chosen doesn’t have product, or their specific product, they have the ability now to go to others.”
Cannabis Compliance Inc. vice-president of business development Deepak Anand said that the likelihood of the federal government agreeing to loosen regulations to allow medical patients to access cannabis from non-licensed producers on a temporary basis was very slim, or more accurately, “closer to none.”
Roycroft is one of the speakers set to address a panel at the O’Cannabiz Conference and Expo on December 10. That conference is the largest cannabis conference in Canada since the federal government legalized recreational cannabis sales.
