In a short note sent to deputies and which we have obtained, Santé France Cannabis, an association which brings together several representative players in the future sector of cannabis for medical use in France, recommends “planning the postponement” of legalization by one year. medical cannabis in France.
As a reminder, the current experimentation with therapeutic cannabis ends next March. Three options are then available: legalization of medical cannabis, a second experiment or a pure and hard stop. A report produced by an entity external to the Ministry of Health must be presented to Parliament this Monday, September 26 to evaluate the system and fuel the debate on the follow-up to be given.
As recently covered, the extension of experimentation with medical cannabis is widely studied, which Santé France Cannabis supports.
“The national actors gathered in “Santé France Cannabis” propose – as some public decision-makers envisage – to provide for the postponement of one year of the generalization, planned for March 2023, in order to allow the time necessary for the sector of s ‘organise’ concludes the note.
Santé France Cannabis fears that “the generalization of the use of these drugs or the extension of the experimentation will not, under current conditions, be favorable to foreign players to the detriment of the French sector”.
The cultivation of cannabis for therapeutic use and related operations are technically legal in France. However, it remains to define the methods of cultivation or transformation of cannabis for medical use to allow medical cannabis companies to work outside the context of R&D.
If medical cannabis were legalized in April 2023, the supply of patients would not, however, be based solely on imports.
The production of cannabis flowers is effectively reduced to R&D for the moment, but the extraction has been worked on since 2021 by French companies such as Alkion BioInnovations. Meryll Buet, CEO of Alkion, confirms to us that it will be able to supply patients with cannabis extracts and APIs from April 2023. In the event of an extension of the experiment, Alkion will be able to either supply medical products based on cannabis if the chosen scheme allows it, or produce for export if it was granted an authorization for non-R&D production.
For Franck Milone, president of LaFleur, a French medical cannabis company, “we must generalize as quickly as possible and give French companies the possibility of accelerating the development and marketing of their products”. The Angevin company would also be able to supply cannabis-based medical products, not manufactured in France, from April 2023.
Asked by us about this note, Santé France Cannabis did not wish to publish its answers in Newsweed.
