How Recreational Access Affects Medical Cannabis According to the BDSA

The BDSA’s most recent report suggests that access to recreational cannabis is impacting the longer-established medical market. Health card access encourages patients to purchase heavily taxed cannabis for adult use. But is recreational access an advantage or a barrier to medicinal cannabis?

Why Patients Are Moving to Leisure Markets

This author asked Roy Bingham, CEO and co-founder of BDSA, about the pros and cons of accessing adult use for medical cannabis patients.

Well, anyway, in mature states in the US, people say – okay, well, I don’t have to maintain my medical card now because there are shops near me. And they have most of the products I could wish for.

And it’s a hassle and an expense to keep a medical card. So these people are still addressing a medical need. They just don’t bother renewing their cards or getting new cards. And that’s a very important factor as adult businesses become more widespread unless there’s a big tax differential. If there’s a pretty big tax differential, some people will say no, I have to keep a medical card and keep shopping in the medical market.

But in certain markets, that tax differential doesn’t seem to have been enough for people to overlook the disruptive factor of a health card. And there are also people who actually don’t like the idea of ​​having a medical card and also being in a recording system.

Roy Binham

Scientific advances on a taxed drug

According to the co-founder and CEO of BDSA, access to recreational activities should provide benefits that undo an unfair division of medical cannabis patients who are forced to pay taxes.

I think it’s true that the majority of attention to the industry went to adult use. And people haven’t thought as hard about the medicinal uses of these products because a lot of the growth has been on the adult use side.

But I think, as I mentioned, there is a medical basis for a significant number of important patients. And so I think that in due course there will be a lot more medical and scientific work going on, but it will start to bear some fruit.

For example, we’ve seen how Pfizer — the mainstream pharmaceutical company — has invested in a cannabinoid company — [Arena Pharmaceuticals.] For any other company, that would be a massive $6 billion investment.

Binham

Pharmaceutical companies have been trying to develop a CB2 receptor agonist with a price tag in the hundreds of millions for the past two decades.

So they’re going to go down a traditional mainstream route there. But I think there are many other smaller companies with different uses and conditions that they are tracking. They will be hybrid and not mainstream pharma.

Binham

Challenges for medicinal cannabis

According to a previous report by the BDSA, legalizing cannabis poses no threat to alcohol sales. But a scientific study published in PLOS One (1) details how the pharmaceutical industry is poised to lose $3 billion to the plant. Andy Seeger, Director at BDSA, discussed the clinical challenges for medicinal cannabis.

Relaxation, creativity, calm, all of those things are hard to prove when you have to go against the FDA. That’s one of the reasons medical cannabis will run into trouble once it’s federally legalized. They place much higher demands on what the product does.

Andy Seeger

Despite the lack of clinical evidence, (2) separate inpatient access for medicinal cannabis patients is a cause for concern. And Health Canada’s ears are open, at least in light of a meeting they’ve coordinated with the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club.

VCBC is an illegal cannabis dispensary. They continue to struggle to operate in Canada’s legal market to provide inpatient access to tax-free, affordable medicine.

Let us know in the comments how you think the recreational market is impacting medicinal cannabis.

Sources

1. Bednarek Z, Doremus JM, Stith SS (2022) US cannabis laws expected to cost generic and branded drug companies billions. PLoS ONE 17(8): e0272492. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0272492
2. Hachem Y, Abdallah SJ, Rueda S, et al. Healthcare professionals’ perceptions of barriers affecting cannabis prescribing practices. BMC Complement Med. Ther. 2022;22(1):237. Published September 8, 2022. doi:10.1186/s12906-022-03716-9