Trudeau refutes the announcement of the sale of cocaine by Canadian companies

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a

on Friday March 3 that companies claim to have obtained authorization to produce and sell cocaine to the general public, and guaranteed that his government was in the process of “rectifying

.

Pharmaceutical companies announced this week that they had obtained a license from Canada's federal health agency (Health Canada) to produce and sell cocaine, a month after the province of British Columbia launched a experimental pilot project for the decriminalization of hard drugs.

One of these companies, Adastra Labs, finally backpedaled Friday at the end of the day, assuring that this license

(has)

(...)

.

Another company, Sunshine Earth Labs, which also declared this week that it could

, had not yet issued a corrective statement on Friday.

Trudeau shocked

Because according to Justin Trudeau, the issuance of this authorization to produce cocaine has nothing to do with experimentation in British Columbia, and in fact aims in a separate project to allow companies to use this substance for

.

, hammered the Prime Minister, who said he was

during a trip in Winnipeg (Manitoba, central).

This decriminalization in British Columbia of the possession of small amounts of heroin, fentanyl and other hard drugs, is a first in the country: it was launched as part of a three-year pilot project aimed at trying to respond to a serious opioid overdose crisis.

The province is the epicenter of this crisis which has seen more than 10,000 people die there of overdoses since a public health emergency was declared in 2016, amounting to around six daily deaths, out of a population of some five million.

British Columbia follows in this approach the American state of Oregon (north-west), which decriminalized so-called hard drugs in November 2020.