Tilray is involved in six clinical trials right now. I'm in Australia to meet with our team that's working on chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. It's a capsule form of ingestion. It's worth mentioning that Tilray produces pharmaceutical-grade cannabis extract products, both as drops and as capsules, with a known dependable standardized source of THC and CBD from one batch to the next. This is as pharmaceutical grade as you're going to find. I'm pleased that patients are switching away from smoking and vaporization of cannabis more and more and our data clearly shows that they're moving toward the oral ingestion of higher CBD products.
I've recently been co-author of a paper looking specifically at cannabis and anxiety, which was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. The primary author of that study is Michael Van Ameringen from the DeGroote institute at McMaster. It's based on cross-sectional data, from the largest patient survey to take place in Canada at that time at 2,132 responses.
What we found was that over half of the patients cited a mental health condition as their reason for using medical cannabis—or at least as a symptom they were treating with medical cannabis—and for those who cited anxiety specifically, 92% reported that cannabis improved their symptoms. Nearly half reported replacing a non-psychiatric drug—opioids or other drugs—and about 46% reported replacing a psychiatric medicine with medical cannabis.
Right now, it's clear that we do need more data. We need clinical trials to get more information on this, so that's why we've moved forward with a PTSD study and we'll soon be announcing a study specifically looking at other mental health conditions with medical cannabis.
I agree that more data needs to be gathered, but right now, what we do know is that over half of the patients in Canada are citing that a mental health condition is being treated with medical cannabis. We feel based on that—and certainly with the reports that we're getting from veterans—the government needs to keep supporting that use to ensure cost is not an obstacle to access and to ensure the taxation is removed, so that it's available when needed. That's why pharmacy-based access is so important.