Germany’s lower house of parliament passed a bill legalizing the production, sale and use of medical marijuana Thursday, Jan. 19 in Berlin.
The bill limits the sale and use of cannabis to those patients “in very limited exceptional cases,” such as with patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, chronic pain, and lack of appetite or nausea related to cancer treatments. Those patients will not be allowed to grow their own medicine at home.
As restrictive as this program might sound, it is an improvement to what existed. Until this law was passed, medical cannabis was only available on a case-by-case basis, as allowed by German authorities. This bill allows patients to get a prescription from their doctor, which can be filled at local pharmacies.
"Those who are severely ill need to get the best possible treatment and that includes health insurance funds paying for cannabis as a medicine for those who are chronically ill if they can't be effectively treated any other way," said Health Minister Hermann Groehe to Reuters.
"Today is a beautiful day," said Rainer Hayek, a lawmaker in Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative CDU party, to Agence France-Presse.
He specified the law would not allow "smoking joints on prescription" and does not legalize recreational use.
Germany does not currently have a regulatory body or framework to license and oversee cannabis cultivators. The German government reached an agreement with Canada in July 2016 that would allow the European super-power to import medical cannabis from Canadian licensed producers, including Canopy Growth Corp.
Bruce Linton, CEO for Canopy Growth Corp., said the German market was interesting for cannabis cultivators.
“This is a very substantial market, and it’s probably the best place to enter the European Union from,” Linton said to The Globe and Mail of the Canadian-German agreement at the time.
Germany joins Austria, Britain, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Italy, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain on the list of European countries that have legalized some form of cannabis or decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana.
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