CANNABIS SPRAY COULD GET CANADA LAUNCH

Canadian patients may beat Britons to access to Sativex, the
cannabis-based painkiller developed by GW Pharmaceuticals, after the
company asked the country's healthcare regulator for approval.

Dr Geoffrey Guy, the GW Pharmaceuticals chairman, said it was
"technically possible" that Canada could be the first country to
approve Sativex despite an application have been placed with UK
regulators a year ago.

"The Canadian assessment system is shorter," Dr Guy told Times
Online.

"In Canada assessment takes about nine months. In the UK, 18 months is
not unusual."

The comments follow a warning by the company that it had been
overoptimistic in its timetable for Sativex in the UK.

"Whilst the directors of GW have not altered their expectations that
approval of Sativex will be granted, it is now clear that the
regulatory process will continue past the end of the second quarter,"
GW said two weeks ago in a statement which sent shares in the
pharmaceuticals giant down 25 per cent.

The application to Health Canada for approval follows five years of
talks with the medicines and healthcare regulator.

Canada, a market GW estimates at about two-thirds the size of the
UK's, has proved particularly open to the prospect of cannabis-based
treatments after a landmark case which confirmed the right to use the
drug for medicinal purposes. Subsequent legal action obliged cannabis
treatments to be made available on prescription.

While Canadian authorities have, in a trial programme, contracted
Prairie Plant Systems to grow cannabis in a disused mine in Manitoba,
the project has met with mixed success.

GW Pharmaceuticals, which grows more than 40,000 marijuana plants a
year at a secret location in the English countryside, believes that
Canadian approval for Sativex would ease the way for consent in other
Commonwealth countries, Dr Guy said. UK endorsement for the
painkiller, which is administered by spraying into the mouth, would
herald agreement in other European states.

GW Pharmaceuticals shares stood 3.5p higher at 135p in afternoon
trade.