Thank you.
First of all I want to thank the chair of the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak today. The subject is very close to my heart.
I am a businessman from Halifax, formerly from Fall River, Nova Scotia. I'm a retired RCAF pilot and a former combat arms officer as well. I had a career in the military spanning 35 years. Since then, I've also worked as a first responder in both search and rescue and firefighting.
Over the course of my military career I saw first-hand the mental and physical implications suffered by comrades from PTSD and chronic pain, so this is first-hand.
The bonds we forge in the military continue long after the uniform comes off, and as such, a business venture I became involved in as a co-founder is a company called GenCanBio. GenCanBio is a Nova Scotia company. We're dedicated to pre-clinical research on the interaction of various cannabinoids and terpenes and the efficacy of these ratios on specific conditions.
GenCanBio has been working on and investing in cannabis-related research into PTSD since 2015. Working with the National Research Council of Canada we've developed a high throughput assay to screen these cannabinoid ratios for conditions such as pain and anxiety. GenCanBio has since partnered with an Ontario-based pharmaceutical company called Ethicann for the development of ethical-based drugs based on botanical extracted cannabinoid oils for symptomatologies including PTSD.
Currently, veterans can purchase various forms of cannabis, but the batch-to-batch purity and potency lack the consistency of an approved pharmaceutical. None of my former comrades wants to get high; they want to get better and they want to be productive. GenCanBio and Ethicann believe strongly that smoked medical marijuana will no longer exist shortly. It will be replaced by a standardized, botanically sourced drug that has been subjected to the regulatory scrutiny of Health Canada, the FDA and other regulatory agencies.
Ethicann is currently working with the U.S. Army to develop a clinical protocol for PTSD. We've reached out to Dr. Cyd Courchesne, chief medical officer of Veterans Affairs. We met with her in early December 2018 to discuss PTSD in Canadian veterans and the need for a well-characterized cannabinoid pharmaceutical to treat them.
Dr. Courchesne facilitated for us the outreach to several Canadian PTSD researchers, including the Canadian Institute of Military and Veteran Health Research and the centre of excellence on PTSD and other related mental health conditions.
In January 2019, we met with Dr. Alice Aiken, who is the VP of research and innovation, and Sherry Stewart, professor of physiology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Halifax, both of whom are very excited to work with us on a clinical protocol for PTSD in conjunction with the U.S. and hopefully the Canadian militaries.
We are thus currently working with several Canadian licensed producers and extractors to develop pharmaceutical-grade APIs—an API is an active pharmaceutical ingredient—that can be formulated for clinical studies on veterans with clinically diagnosed PTSD symptoms. Having the support of Veterans Affairs to offset the cost and timelines of these efforts will greatly benefit Canadian veterans.
In closing, I wish to thank the chair and members of the committee for allowing us to express our views today. We believe and have seen that medical cannabis imparts great quality-of-life benefits to our wounded men and women, but I respectfully submit that there's an alternative and better delivery system for this, one that is more effective, more predictable and more cost-efficient. Working together, this is something we can make happen.
As such, I've included in my speaking notes—I'm not sure whether you received these—letters from the presidents of GenCanBio and Ethicann, with requests to continue this dialogue.
Thank you.