Corporate Cannabis

Philippe Lucas is apologizing for the quality of his cannabis. He is director of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society, which dispenses medicinal marijuana from behind an old storefront in Victoria. “This used to be a school of Chinese medicine,” he says. “Can you feel the healing vibe?” Not at first. Apart from a comfy, well-worn couch in the waiting area, and a batik with yin-yang dolphins that you brush aside to enter the dispensing office, the place feels like a regular medical clinic. It reflects Lucas’s personality: lean, clean-cut, and intense—there’s nothing of the spacey stoner about him. If there’s a “healing vibe,” it emanates from the staff: the receptionist dressed in a fuzzy old sweater welcomes clients with “Hello, beautiful!” and “Can you use a hug?” Then she hugs.

In the dispensing office the cannabis is kept under lock and key. Today’s strains for sale—among them Sweet Tooth, Jack’s Mix, and Other God according to a list handwritten in felt pen on a whiteboard—are grown primarily for recreational use, not medical. As he shows off a sample, Lucas apologizes again, because normally the Society grows and tests for purity the organic pot it supplies to its 400 members. But a recent rcmp bust destroyed their growing facility, forcing them onto the black market. There’s no shortage for patients in need—in BC alone, the rcmp estimates 15,000 grow-ops contribute to a harvest that nationally is worth about $7 billion. The problem is that illegal growers don’t hand out guarantees.

While Lucas struggles in the grey zone of legality to get better pot back on the menu, his patients could soon have an alternative: one that does not involve police raids and substandard cannabis. German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG, and Cannasat Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Toronto, a firm backed by a number of prominent Canadian businessmen, including Citytv co-founder Moses Znaimer and Joseph Mimran, the former head of Club Monaco, want to start selling cannabis-based medicine. Their goal: produce medically approved devices, such as inhalers and sprays, that will deliver the healing powers of marijuana without the poisonous smoke and tar—or the threat of arrest that comes along with distributing it illegally.

In Canada alone there are nearly 50,000 people with multiple sclerosis, many of whom could use such a device, and some estimates suggest another 400,000 Canadians could benefit from medical marijuana. At the moment, only 753 use cannabis legally.

And Alan Young, Cannasat’s legal adviser, a loquacious Osgoode Hall law professor who has fought a decades-long battle to liberalize marijuana laws, says because cannabis-based drugs have the potential to help people in a number of critical areas yet to be discovered, it could become one of the biggest pharmaceutical sectors ever developed. “There is going to be a revolution in the next decade in treatment options,” says Young, his voice rising to emphasize the point. “People are sick and tired of synthetic products that are constantly being pulled off the market for undisclosed side effects. The time is right for herbal products.”

Bayer AG has already paid $60 million for the European rights and $14 million for the Canadian rights to market Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine developed in Britain by GW Pharmaceuticals. Health Canada has been asked to approve Sativex, a whole-plant cannabis extract, delivered in a sublingual spray, and a decision could come this year. It cost GW $100 million to develop Sativex, and while Cannasat vice-president Andrew Williams acknowledges the lead Bayer and GW have in the emerging sector, he believes the market will be large enough to support a number of companies. Cannasat is now putting together investors and a scientific team, which Williams says could lead to the creation of a suite of cannabis-based drugs over the next six to ten years.

Inhalers and sprays that provide the benefits of medical marijuana, but don’t necessarily get you stoned, offer another advantage. Between 1999 and 2001, Ottawa gradually established the Medical Marihuana Access Regulations and awarded Prairie Plant Systems of Saskatoon the right to produce and distribute cannabis to patients with authorization from their doctors. But many doctors are still reluctant to tell their patients to smoke medical marijuana because they believe inhaling it is harmful. Now many people advocating on behalf of patients fear that once the new cannabis-based medicines are on the market, Ottawa will favour them over medical marijuana. “There is legitimate fear that if GW gets approval,” says Lucas, “Health Canada is going to say that’s all we need to meet our obligations, we’re shutting down the medical-marijuana program.”

The Holy Grail for corporations trying to turn pot into a legitimate medicine is the vast US market, which is ruled over by politicians who still see marijuana as an unspeakable menace. Euphoria masquerading as a medicine simply won’t fly in the US. But GW may have found a solution. It has developed a tamper-proof dispensing system for the delivery of methadone that critics say could also be used for cannabis-based medicine. It looks like a cross between an asthma inhaler and a cellphone. The doctor keys in your allowable dose, and any attempt to spray a little more cuts you off cold turkey. Corporations see it as a way to profits; smokers call it a Big Brotherish apparatus designed to appease America’s anti-pot paranoia—what they call “euphoriphobia.” One such critic is Hilary Black, founder of the BC Compassion Club Society in Vancouver, who recently joined Cannasat. “The fact is, any pharmaceutical company using prohibition as a tool to market a product—that’s wrong,” says Black. “I have major ethical concerns with that.”

In the mid-1990s, faced with mounting anecdotal evidence of marijuana’s therapeutic value, the British government began funding scientific research into cannabinoids, the sixty constituent chemicals unique to the plant. Dr. Geoffrey Guy, chairman of the biotechnology company Ethical Holdings, made a case that doing pure research for its own sake was not enough. Guy wanted to grow cannabis and study it with a clear-cut goal: to produce a patentable, marketable, profitable prescription medicine.

To his surprise, Guy found the UK government highly receptive. In 1997, he formed GW Pharmaceuticals, where he now serves as executive director, and was granted permission to experiment with massive amounts of cannabis, eventually growing sixty tons a year in greenhouses in a secret location in the British countryside. In 2003, GW submitted the Sativex spray for regulatory approval in the UK, to be used specifically for the relief of pain and muscle spasticity associated with MS.

The Vancouver Island Compassion Society also produces a cannabis spray, albeit a much simpler version. Unlike Sativex, which is a patented medicine, the Society’s spray is a tincture of cannabis administered via a vapourizer called Cannamist. Last May, Lucas received a foretaste of possible legal battles to come with GW, Bayer AG, and its subsidiary Bayer Canada, when he described Cannamist at a medical marijuana conference held by a group called Patients Out of Time, at the University of Virginia. Geoffrey Guy happened to be in the audience, and afterward approached Lucas and asked him if he’d had a chance to look at the any of the many patent applications GW has for Sativex. “He said it with a twinkle in his eye,” recalls Lucas, “but with firmness in his voice.”

There is no question that GW plans to enforce its patents on Sativex, which is a precisely dosed medicine. Warns Guy: “To protect our extensive investment, we have sought to identify and patent certain inventions throughout the growing, extraction and manufacturing process. My comments to Mr. Lucas were made as a friendly and, hopefully, helpful gesture as I did not wish him to invest a great amount of effort into obtaining approval for a product as a prescription medicine only to find that he did not have the freedom to operate in the first place.”

Guy’s warning was reiterated shortly after I arrived in England to interview him, when Mark Rogerson, GW’s grey-templed, elegantly dressed, public relations man, met me at the Oxford train station. “Once it’s approved and Sativex becomes a medicine under the law, there needs to be a minor change in legislation so it can be prescribed,” he said, as he steered his Hyundai (his Audi was in the shop) into near-gridlock. “The Home Office has already said they will do that, and then patients will be taking a legal medicine. But if you are an MS sufferer, it would still be illegal for you to grow cannabis at the bottom of the garden to treat your symptoms. Our medicine will be legal, but anything else will not be.”

We drove to a postmodern, science-oriented industrial park near Oxford, where GW operates a clinic to monitor patients taking part in medical trials. I was introduced to Gillian, a whispery little old lady with MS who has participated in a number of short-term trials and who is now using Sativex as part of a long-term study. She has suffered from intense and painful muscle spasms for thirty-four years. “I never slept through the night, I would wake up every fifteen minutes, and it made the night seem like a few years,” she says. “I had my first lot of cannabis, and I slept right through. That really seemed like the most wonderful thing that ever happened.”

Gillian shows me her little brown spray bottle of Sativex. “Do you get intoxicated?” I ask. “No,” she replied. “I keep my dosage low so I don’t. And I don’t see why anybody should want to get intoxicated.” Then she adds, “Intoxication isn’t necessarily bad. If you fall in love, that’s intoxication. But that’s a chosen one.”