Canada Wants To Know What You Think About Home Cultivation
Canada is an international leader when it comes to cannabis policy, and that was true prior to the country becoming the first G-7 nation to legalize cannabis for adult use.
Canada’s top court ruled that medical cannabis was a constitutional right back in 2000, and a year later lawmakers in Canada passed legislation implementing the ruling into public policy.
Since that time patients have been allowed to cultivate medical cannabis at home, however, Canada is now looking to tighten up medical cannabis home cultivation rules and has launched a ‘consultation on guidance on personal production of cannabis for medical purposes.’
The consultation, which can be found at this link here, opened on March 8th and goes through May 7th and is open to:
- All interested Canadians, including Indigenous Peoples
- Patients and patient associations
- Provincial, territorial, and local governments
- Cannabis industry licence holders and associations
- Law enforcement and first responders and associations
- Health care practitioners and health care practitioner regulatory bodies and associations
The goal of the consultation is to craft criteria that can be used for refusing or revoking a medical cannabis cultivation registration to help combat unregulated cannabis sales.
Canada has a robust legal framework in which people can cultivate cannabis and sell it legally, however, the unregulated market still exists post-legalization.
Rather than putting resources and effort into taking away the rights of patients to cultivate medical cannabis, Canada’s government should be dedicating those same resources to improving the current legal framework in a way that makes the regulated market more competitive with the unregulated market.
Canada’s lawmakers and industry regulators need to figure out how to create a business environment in which the price for cannabis flower and other cannabis products are closer to unregulated prices.
The main reason that consumers point to as to why they still purchase unregulated cannabis in Canada is that regulated cannabis costs too much. If legal options were more affordable, presumably more customers would make legal purchases instead of purchasing unregulated cannabis.
With that being said, the unregulated market for cannabis will always exist to some extent, just as it does for cigarettes and alcohol, which is a fact that seems to often be missed by lawmakers bent on clinging to failed prohibition policies.