Cannabis oil made in Jujuy reaches provincial public hospital for the first time

Three years after its launch, Jujuy Cannava’s state-owned company, the first in the country to legally cultivate cannabis for medical use, will make the finished product available to users. The official announcement will be made by the provincial government on Monday October 4 when deliver pharmaceutical grade cannabis oil to 50 patients with neurological diseases at Zavala hospital, from the city of Perico, 30 kilometers from the capital San Salvador.

The users designated – children and adults – to receive the first batch are part of a special program developed by the Jujuy health ministry in 2017, when the province passed its own medical cannabis law. All suffer refractory epilepsy and other neurological conditions, such as multiple sclerosis, and they will receive the oil for free for life as part of a treatment including follow-up by hospital doctors.

The project is part of a provincial therapeutic plan enshrined in the provincial law on the medical use of cannabis, promulgated in 2017, a few months after the promulgation of national law 27,350. The following year, the Ministry of Health of the province opened a registry based on a sample population of patients with refractory epilepsy, including the number in Jujuy is estimated in 120 patients. In this list, the government agreed on the priority for users of the local medical cannabis association.

Public health treatment will be available for five neurologists of the local health portfolio (two children and three adults) who will attend two clinics permanently. This team started a series of case analyzes and consultations some time ago, from which the first 50 patients in the program came.

But they won’t be the only ones. As he walked towards Infobae Gastón Morales, president of Cannava, the number of users will increase: “There are already 50 people and there could be more. It is a program that will be continuously developed”.

“The election of the governor of this public hospital as the center of attention of the special therapeutic program of medicinal cannabis is the first step for the hospital of Zabala to become, in a few years, the highest public health center in the treatment of pathologies applying to medicinal cannabis ”, rejoices the director of Cannava.

However, the special therapeutic program that will be activated from next Monday in Perico is only for neurological diseases like epilepsy. The rest of the pathologies for which cannabis is of great help in many cases, such as painful illnesses, cancer, HIV, among many others, should be treated in private consultations.

Doctors in Jujuy, like those in the rest of the country, are allowed by law to indicate cannabis to patients who they think may need it. The new regulation of Law 27 350, made during the administration of Ginés González García At the start of 2021, it made it possible – in addition to self-cultivation – to extend the treatment to all pathologies. Until last year, it was limited only to refractory epilepsy.

In Jujuy, local law complies with the regulations of national law. Two months ago the governor Gerardo Morales placeholder image presented the Clinical Management Guide for Medicinal Cannabis, which concentrates existing and updated information on the subject, establishes a clinical methodology for physicians integrated into the provincial program and serves to recommend a treatment plan for patients with various pathologies .

It is based on the development of its own information from Cannava’s own research, but also from experiences in the United States, Canada and Israel, countries at the forefront of the question of therapeutic cannabis.

This guide provides information on the indications of the different products that Cannava manufactures for different pathologies. They have been mentioned since pain and nausea from chemotherapy until processing Parkinson’s spasticity, of inflammatory bowel disease a chronic neuropathic pain. But there are no limits for doctors who want to prescribe it for another problem.

For all Jujuy patients who have a medical indication for cannabis treatment, the oil produced by Cannava will be available at 160 pharmacies of the province since November, as announced by Gastón Morales to Infobae. Anyone with a digital prescription signed by a provincial doctor will be able to purchase the product in the provincial territory.

Each user who buys the oil in a pharmacy three months after the first intake will have to answer quality of life questionnaires as part of a “pharmacovigilance” system almost in real time. Although the price of petroleum in pharmacies has not transcended, Morales assured that, being “a public health policy” the price will be “affordable”.

Everything is in line with the arrival of the equipment of the biotechnological complex in the province, among which extraction machines, centrifuges, evaporation columns, distillers, among other technological components exclusively dedicated to the pharmaceutical manufacturing process with cannabinoids.

The product that will arrive at the hospital and pharmacies in Perico in the next 30 days is the harvest that Cannava has taken from part of the crop of 35 hectares and nine greenhouses within the Finca El Pongo. By 2022, Morales plans to expand planting space to 220 hectares and quickly expand them to 600.

The own laboratory is also working there where the plant material of the harvest (the flower of the female plant) is processed, which received this week from the United States, on board a Hercules aircraft provided by the National Department of Defense, equipment that they will allow you to go from 2 kilos per day, as before, to 45 kilos per hour next week.

“This will allow us to cover the quantities of pharmaceutical active principle and finished product needed to supply pharmacies throughout the province from November, which will consolidate Jujuy as a scientific, technological and productive development center dedicated to medicinal cannabis” , he commented. Morals.

This projection goes hand in hand with the future arrival of Cannava oil in the rest of the country, for which the company is under the technical control of ANMAT. In Jujuy, they hope that this activity will develop in the middle of next year.

KEEP READING: