Health Canada starts selling cannabis grown in a Manitoba mine

For most of the 2000s, the only cannabis the government of Canada grew came out of a mine. In December 2000 Health Canada signed its first contract to produce the plant with Prairie Plant Systems, a Saskatoon biotechnology firm that had grown pharmaceutical plants underground since 1990. The firm beat 34 competitors for a five-year contract worth $5.75 million.

Grown 360 metres down

The crop was to be grown 360 metres underground, in a disused section of a copper and zinc mine at Flin Flon in northern Manitoba, reached by a single entrance. Reporting at the time set the order at about a tonne of research-grade cannabis, which the company would also roll into more than a million cigarettes. They were meant for research into the drug’s risks and benefits, and for the 140 or so Canadians then holding an exemption to possess it on medical grounds. Recipients would have to give the department information for research in return.

Selling it took a court order

The 2001 medical regulations let authorised patients possess cannabis, but gave them nowhere legal to buy it. In January 2003 an Ontario judge held that this was not good enough and ordered Health Canada to make a supply available. The department appealed, and at the same time began selling the mine’s cannabis in August 2003, about three years after the contract was signed.

The terms were unusual for a medicine. Patients paid about $5 a gram, roughly $100 for an ounce, and collected it from their doctor’s office rather than a pharmacy. The product averaged about 10% THC. More than 580 people were then authorised to possess cannabis, yet only a handful filed the paperwork to buy: many doctors objected to acting as the department’s intermediaries. The health minister, Anne McLellan, called the programme an interim measure to satisfy the court while the appeal went on.

Out of the mine

That October the Court of Appeal for Ontario repaired the regulations in Hitzig, and the same day held in R. v. J.P. that, until it did, possessing cannabis had been no valid offence in Ontario.

Prairie Plant Systems kept supplying the government from Flin Flon for almost a decade. It left the mine on 30 June 2009, by which time just over 4,000 Canadians were allowed to possess cannabis for medical use. The mining company said the contract had reached the end of its life, and the grower had moved to a larger site. Health Canada declined to say where, “for security reasons”.

For Canada, the mine marks the gap between permission and supply. For years the law let patients use cannabis while the state remained the only lawful source.^[1][2][3][4]