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So, when Budget 2018 was delivered on February 27th, medical cannabis advocates, industry executives and patient advocacy groups of all types crossed their fingers and toes, trusting that their hard work and many meetings had not fallen on deaf ears. To their disappointment, instead of removing the proposed sin tax on medical consumers, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government stuck to the party line, saying that without such a tax, Canadians would try to game the system in order to access recreational cannabis, tax free. In a half-hearted effort to convince patients that their lobbying efforts were not completely ignored, Minister Morneau allowed for the exemption of packaged products containing less than 0.3% of THC. In a further exercise of irrelevancy, the budget noted that pharmaceutical products with a DIN number that are derived from cannabis will also be exempt, speaking primarily of synthetic cannabinoid pharmaceuticals like Sativex and Nabilone, already notoriously difficult to obtain, since they are both expensive and significantly less effective than natural cannabinoids. Despite evidence that the vast majority of medical cannabis patients are not moonlighting their medicine on the black market, the Finance Minister continued to insist that patients couldn’t be trusted with their medicine.
CFAMM and its allies expressed their disappointment and frustration at the Finance Minister’s obvious snub, and a number of market commentators took note. In a brief published on March 1, VIII Eight Capital spoke out on behalf of patients, noting that they “believe this policy largely ignores the extensive evidence for the entourage/ensemble effects of cannabinoids and terpenes on positive patient outcome.” They go on to say that “the black market will continue to cap the revenue opportunity for the legalized market unless regulated regimes are set up [properly],” suggesting that without the removal of the excise tax, many cannabis patients will continue to rely on the illicit market to support their medical cannabis needs. Over at Cannabis Investing News, Bryan McGovern picked up CFAMM’s reaction to the Budget, noting that it will be important for investors to watch “how companies in the [cannabis] space react to their actions attempting to convince the government to remove the tax on medical products.”