Evidence of meeting #68 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was edibles.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Ryan Vandrey  Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University, As an Individual
Daniel Vigil  Manager, Marijuana Health Monitoring and Research, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment
Dana Larsen  Director, Sensible BC
Hilary Black  Founder, BC Compassion Club Society
Marcel Vandebeek  Administrator, BC Compassion Club Society
Jonathan Zaid  Executive Director, Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana
Daphnée Elisma  Quebec Representative, Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana
Jacqueline Bogden  Assistant Deputy Minister, Cannabis Legalization and Regulation Branch, Department of Health
David Pellmann  Executive Director, Office of Medical Cannabis, Department of Health
Lisa Holmes  President, Alberta Urban Municipalities Association
Marc Emery  Cannabis Culture
Jodie Emery  Cannabis Culture
Bill Karsten  Second Vice-President, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Brock Carlton  Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities

9:25 a.m.

Conservative

Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON

Do your employees have training?

9:25 a.m.

Director, Sensible BC

Dana Larsen

Yes, we try to give them training. It varies. We make sure we talk to everybody. If they can't answer the question, we make sure we have somebody there who can.

9:25 a.m.

Conservative

Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON

Second, where do you get your product?

9:25 a.m.

Director, Sensible BC

Dana Larsen

It's from the illegal market. By definition, we have no choice. There's no legal place for us to get it.

Some is from people who have been growing cannabis for years. Some of them are licensed under the medical program to grow their own cannabis and might have extra, which Health Canada wants them to destroy or dispose of if they have too much. Well, they dispose of it by selling it to a dispensary.

There are many people who make edibles, extracts, and things at home. A lot of them don't meet our standards. The majority of what gets brought to us we reject because it's not the right quality or doesn't meet our needs.

It comes from the black market, by definition, but we do our best to make that the lightest shade of grey it can possibly be.

9:25 a.m.

Conservative

Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON

I have two more questions.

You were talking about how you reject a lot of it. What do you do for quality control?

Then I have a really important question I'd like your opinion on: the age for recreational use. What do you think a cut-off age would be?

9:25 a.m.

Director, Sensible BC

Dana Larsen

For quality control, it's a challenge, because we're not able to access Health Canada's certified labs. They will test our cannabis if we have someone send it in who is legally allowed to possess, but if I put it on my website that a lab tested our cannabis and say “here are the results”, Health Canada will call that lab and say that they're going to lose their licence, that they can't test dispensary cannabis. I can put out whatever results I want, but only I know if I'm telling the truth. I can't tell you which lab did the results. That leaves us in a very difficult position.

We also do our own study. The first thing we do when we get raw buds into our dispensary is look at them under a microscope. I would encourage members to do the same thing. You can see a lot in terms of mould, mildew, the quality of the trichomes and the resinous glands, if they're there and they're ripe. That's just the first step. If it most of it doesn't pass that, we will do a taste test on it. Someone will smoke a bit of it. You can tell if there are chemical contaminants and if it's been over-fertilized. Then we'll send it to a lab, if we can, and after that, if it meets all the standards, we'll put it our shelves.

On edibles and other products, with edibles we typically supply our producers with our cannabis, with an extract, so that we know they're getting a standardized amount and we know where it comes from. We can give them the same strain or a very similar product to help them standardize what they're making. A lot of edibles makers don't use raw buds. They will use an extract so they can make something of a known potency and then put that into their product to help them standardize the dosages.

As to age limit, if I were in charge of the world, I'd make it 16 years old to buy cannabis from a legal place.... That being said, I'm happy with the limit being the same as alcohol. That's not a problem.

The one thing I see lacking in this legislation is that there is no allowance for a parent to give cannabis to their child. You can give alcohol to your children at pretty much any age. A lot of young kids have half a glass of wine with dinner, and we don't criminalize those parents. If those parents were to give their children cannabis or share a joint with their 17-year-old child or something, they could be criminalized and face some serious repercussions. I think that is an issue. To me, the use of cannabis by youth is a family issue to be determined at the family level. This legislation doesn't allow for any sort of family decisions on that, which I think is really a big problem.

9:30 a.m.

Conservative

Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON

You've been a great help. Thank you.

9:30 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

Mr. Oliver.

9:30 a.m.

Liberal

John Oliver Liberal Oakville, ON

Thank you very much for your testimony.

This is our last day of a full week of testimony on this bill from people in the industry and consumers from different walks of life. By the end of this week, we will have heard from 100 or more different witnesses. It's been excellent. If we had done this in our normal process, we would have been at it for about three months. This has really allowed us to delve deeply into the issues, and it's allowed us to compare and contrast testimony, which is often difficult to do when you have it stretched out so much.

When we come to clause-by-clause, I think the edibles will be the one that we're really reviewing. Right now, edibles are excluded from the legal definition of marijuana, so they wouldn't be permitted. I'm going to give you what I've heard in terms of the pros for including and the cons for excluding and ask you if there's anything I'm missing in this analysis.

On the positives for including edibles, I've heard it's public health: otherwise, we're encouraging smoking and ingesting of cannabis through smoking. Edibles give you a healthier alternative for ingesting cannabis. Second, what I've heard is that if we don't bring it into the legal market, it really does allow the black market or whatever market to really continue and to grow in that particular market space. I think Mr. Larsen spoke to that quite pointedly.

Those are the two reasons I've heard for inclusion.

On the reasons for excluding, I've heard that this is a social change, a social experiment for Canada, so go slow and see how what you have is working before you push on to a greater market. Kids' access and kids' accidental ingestion seems to be higher with edibles than with products that you need to smoke. Also, this is hard to regulate and hard to inspect. There's more complexity in edibles than in the more raw plant, although with the work they've done in Colorado, I think there are some pretty good and easily adapted regulations in place. The fourth point has been, “What the heck, it's easy to make at home, so if people want the edibles, they can go and get them.”

Those are the pros and the cons. I rambled through them quickly, so is there anything else you think I should know as we're thinking about the pros and cons of edibles? Is there anything you'd add to those lists?

9:30 a.m.

Manager, Marijuana Health Monitoring and Research, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

Dr. Daniel Vigil

I have a very slight clarification on your first point.

With edibles, you do avoid any of the possible pulmonary effects of smoking. There is one concern that I think is a bit greater with edibles, and that is driving. The fact is that with an inhaled product you can quickly recognize what the effects are and give yourself time to overcome those effects or get back to a safe place to be driving, but with edibles, it's possible that you would not realize that you haven't felt the full effects and potentially would get behind the wheel.

9:30 a.m.

Liberal

John Oliver Liberal Oakville, ON

The variation in speed of the digestion is different.

9:30 a.m.

Manager, Marijuana Health Monitoring and Research, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

Dr. Daniel Vigil

That's right.

9:30 a.m.

Liberal

John Oliver Liberal Oakville, ON

Mr. Vandrey.

9:30 a.m.

Prof. Ryan Vandrey

In the laboratory studies we've done where we acutely dose people with different routes of administration, I think it's important to note that when we give people smoked cannabis versus edible cannabis, the magnitude of drug effects and the types of effects are identical. It's really just the differences in the time course of the effects. I have not seen any evidence that eating it is more dangerous than smoking it, and I would disagree on the argument that you can't perceive the intoxication when you eat it. People are very aware that they're intoxicated.

The challenge is in detecting edible cannabis in a driver who is impaired versus not, but that's a problem across the board independent of route of administration. It is a little different in edibles, in that you get lower blood concentrations.

9:30 a.m.

Liberal

John Oliver Liberal Oakville, ON

Just quickly, for all three of you, would you recommend that Canada include edibles in their allowables, or would you support the slower pace that has been proposed in the legislation?

Mr. Larsen.

9:35 a.m.

Director, Sensible BC

Dana Larsen

I support adding edibles and also other extracts as well, such as hashish and all those kinds of things, both smokable and edible. That has to be part of legalization; only allowing the buds is missing out on a large portion of this.

Yes, I absolutely think this should be included. On this go-slow thing, we've been going slow since 1971. It's time to act, not to go slow.

9:35 a.m.

Manager, Marijuana Health Monitoring and Research, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

Dr. Daniel Vigil

I think ultimately they should be included, but it's very important to get it right. If that takes some time and some learning from the smoked market, I would be in agreement with that.

9:35 a.m.

Prof. Ryan Vandrey

My personal recommendation would be in favour of regulation and quality control over all products. I think that's the greater public good, rather than just allowing one version and then continuing to have black market product available where you don't know what's in it. I think that makes the most sense.

9:35 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bill Casey

Thank you very much.

Mr. Webber.

September 15th, 2017 / 9:35 a.m.

Conservative

Len Webber Conservative Calgary Confederation, AB

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the panel.

My first question is for Dr. Vandrey. As a cannabis researcher, you mentioned that you evaluate label information on products to determine whether it is are accurate or not. That is correct? For Colorado and Washington state licensed producers, have you found that their labelling is quite accurate?

9:35 a.m.

Prof. Ryan Vandrey

Again, I have not conducted any testing in Colorado. The State of Colorado does their own testing. Maybe Mr. Vigil could talk about the outcomes of the tests they have done.

The testing I've done in Washington has been limited to medical cannabis dispensaries, which at the time was distinct from non-medical dispensaries testing. I believe that at that time the regulations over products being sold in medical cannabis dispensaries were not very rigorous, and the testing we found there indicated that most of the products were inaccurately labelled.

9:35 a.m.

Conservative

Len Webber Conservative Calgary Confederation, AB

That's interesting.

Mr. Vigil, on accidental exposure, in your remarks, you mentioned incidents. Do you see a lot of that occurring in your neck of the woods?

9:35 a.m.

Manager, Marijuana Health Monitoring and Research, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

Dr. Daniel Vigil

The term “a lot” is I think important to comment on, because we have seen an increase, as I mentioned, in both poison centre calls and emergency department visits, relative to other reasons that people are making those calls—

9:35 a.m.

Conservative

Len Webber Conservative Calgary Confederation, AB

I'm referring specifically to accidental exposure for children—

9:35 a.m.

Manager, Marijuana Health Monitoring and Research, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

Dr. Daniel Vigil

Right, so let's focus on the zero to eight-year age group for accidental exposure. With regard to poison centre calls, at the peak in Colorado, for one in 10,000 children there was a call related to marijuana. I'll also mention that outcomes related to that were not severe. The majority of those were just some concern—