Unfortunately, Health Canada has never justified its decision to only allow us to provide patients with raw cannabis.
There was never a good reason put forward. I think this is the start of our program. I don't think this is the end point of the medical marijuana program. I strongly suspect that due to pushback from physicians, largely, as well as from patients, Health Canada will have to consider allowing medical cannabis producers to ship out cannabis in other forms for ingestion if they really have a concern with smoked ingestion.
Right now all we can do as federal providers is to give people instruction on how they might turn cannabis into oils or butters to be able to do their own baking, but surely we would never give, for example, a raw poppy seed to someone and ask them to make their own opiates out of it, so I think we're asking people to produce medicines that can otherwise be safely and effectively produced in a lab setting to allow them to have an alternative to smoking.