Canada: companies obtain a license to sell cocaine

The Canadian biotechnology company Sunshine Earth Labs announced on Thursday March 2 that it had obtained a license from the federal health agency of Canada to produce and sell cocaine.

The license agreement comes after a radical change in the positions of the State which seeks to deal with a serious crisis of opiate overdoses which caused thousands of deaths, by decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of cocaine, d heroin and other so-called hard drugs.

Ottawa granted a waiver of the Criminal Code, Canada's penal code, in January to the province of British Columbia (west), for a three-year pilot project.

The objective: to fight against the stigma associated with the use of narcotics which prevents some from seeking help.

Advocates for the measure are also calling for a safer supply of drugs to be available for people with addictions.

They face an increased risk of overdose linked to drugs bought illegally on the street.

10,000 overdose deaths

In a statement, Sunshine Earth Labs said it had received permission from Health Canada to

," as well as morphine, ecstasy, and the heroine.

A similar licensing deal had been offered in February to another company Adastra Labs, which until then had only made products related to cannabis extracts.

Adastra's license also authorizes it to produce psilocybin and psilocin, hallucinogens more commonly associated with mushrooms, the consumption of which produces effects similar to LSD.

,” said its boss Michael Forbes.

British Columbia follows the US state of Oregon (northwest) which decriminalized so-called hard drugs in November 2020. The province is the epicenter of a crisis which has seen more than 10,000 people die of overdoses since a public health emergency was declared in 2016 - accounting for around six daily deaths, out of a population of some five million.