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Basseterre, St. Kitts, February 27, 2019 (SKNIS): As part of the unanimous recommendations of the St. Kitts and Nevis National Marijuana Commission, “the use of cannabis and its derivatives for medical and scientific purposes should be permitted under licence and a strict legislated regime.” According to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and Chair of the Commission, Dr. Hazel Laws, medical marijuana will be managed within a regulated system.

“You would have a regulated system where you would have persons who would be registered as being able to cultivate, reap, manufacture and sell and then the patients would be able to go to physicians who would have been trained in terms of prescribing the cannabis medicinal products,” she said.

Dr. Laws stated that the public needs to be more educated about the recommendations with regards to medical marijuana.

She stated that the Marijuana Commission has recommended that persons who are ill can access marijuana medicinal products and gain help from such. If they’re really set on helping ill people to feel better, then they may want to think about incorporating a delivery service, similar to what cannabis.ninja offers to make sure that the people who are using medical marijuana can get them at a quicker rate. The fact that people can now have access to such a vital treatment could help them in the future.

“In other words, the Drug Act should be amended to allow patients who are in need of marijuana or cannabis medicinal products to access them,” she said.

The CMO said that several considerations must be made when it comes to medical marijuana
including how patients would access these medicinal products (Read more about the kinds available online), will it be grown and manufactured locally, or will they be imported?

She referred to the fourth recommendation, which states that the regime for the use of cannabis for medical purposes should include the establishment of a medicinal licencing authority to regulate importation, local cultivation and production; a requirement that two tiers of practitioners must complete a requisite amount of Continuous Medical Education (CME) hours on cannabis: (i) medical practitioners for prescribable marijuana products and (ii) herbalists for non-prescribable marijuana products; a requirement that prescribable marijuana products, such as white label CBD, must meet international labelling standards; and the inclusion of other components should be allowed only under advice from experts in the industry.

“That is what the fourth recommendation is suggesting. Some of these products can be imported. However, we can allow cultivation of cannabis to support the production of cannabis medicinal products under a regulated system so not any and anybody can grow…

…The system would be regulated so you have specific growers, persons who are allowed to cultivate cannabis, so when it is harvested it would be sent to a centre where specific medicinal products can be produced and then put on the market for the persons to purchase. So that is what medicinal marijuana really speaks to.” They could also be considering legalizing the use of the cannabinoid “CBD” (cannabidiol) which is hugely responsible for the majority of medical benefits that patients can experience, without legalizing the consumption of marijuana – something in which some countries have done already, such as the UK. Read into the UK’s relationship with medical CBD here on a page like https://kamadevayoga.com/best-cbd-oil-uk/ – even though marijuana is still illegal, this could prove that medical benefits of marijuana can still be available without the legalization of the plant as a whole.

The chair noted that there have not been any recommendations for cannabis for recreational use yet.