CANNABIS COMIN'

Feds to Let Pharmacies Supply Medical Tokers

OTTAWA -- Health Canada plans to make government-certified marijuana
available in pharmacies, a move that could rapidly boost the number of
registered medical users. Health Canada officials are organizing a
pilot project in British Columbia, modelled on a year-old program in
the Netherlands, that would allow medical users to buy marijuana at
their local drugstore.

There are 78 medical users in Canada permitted to buy Health Canada
marijuana, which is grown in Flin Flon, Man.

The 30-gram bags of dried buds, sold for $150 each, are now sent by
courier directly to patients or to their doctors.

But the department is changing the regulations to allow participating
pharmacies to stock marijuana for sale to approved patients without a
doctor's prescription, similar to rules governing so-called
morning-after contraception pills.

Second in World

A notice of the change is expected to be made public this spring,
allowing for drugstore distribution later in the year.

"We're just at the preliminary stages right now," said Robin O'Brien,
the consulting pharmacist organizing the Health Canada pilot project.

Canada would become the second country in the world after the
Netherlands to allow the direct sale of medical marijuana in pharmacies.

It would also mark the first time that community drugstores in Canada
could sell a controlled substance that is not an approved drug.

"The difficulty is that marijuana does not have a notice of
compliance, so it doesn't have a drug identification number," O'Brien
said.

"There's no pharmaceutical company that's going to come forward to
take it through the regulatory process because they can't get a patent
on it, so it's kind of a limbo drug."