MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s well being ministry on Tuesday revealed guidelines to manage using medicinal hashish, a significant step in a broader reform to create the world’s largest authorized hashish market within the Latin American nation.
The new regulation was signed off by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and can now enable pharmaceutical corporations to start doing medical analysis on hashish merchandise.
The hashish reform happening contains the leisure use of marijuana, and can create what could be the world’s largest nationwide hashish market when it comes to inhabitants.
The new medicinal guidelines state corporations which want to perform analysis need to acquire permission from the Mexican well being regulator, COFEPRIS, and this analysis needs to be carried out in strictly managed, impartial laboratories.
“The standard of regulation is very, very high,” stated Luisa Conesa, a lawyer and pro-cannabis activist who spearheaded authorized challenges that led to decriminalization of medical hashish.
“(The regulation) is just not geared toward sufferers rising their very own hashish, it’s geared toward pharmaceutical corporations producing pharmaceutical derivatives of hashish that are labeled as managed substances that want prescription,” he said.
The regulation also sets rules for the sowing, cultivation and harvesting of cannabis for medicinal purposes, which would allow businesses to grow marijuana legally on Mexican soil.
While some cannabis plant imports are permitted for companies looking to create products, exports of Mexican-grown cannabis is prohibited.
Foreign weed companies from Canada and the United States have been looking at Mexico with interest. Many had delayed making investment decisions due to policy uncertainty and were waiting for the final regulation to be published.
Mexico’s lawmakers are also in the final stages of legalizing recreational use of marijuana, with the bill expected to pass in the next period of Congress.
The legislation marks a major shift in a country bedeviled for years by violence between feuding drug cartels, which have long made millions of dollars growing marijuana illegally and smuggling it into the United States.
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