Argentina announces plans to broaden medical cannabis schemes

Eoin Keenan

Last week the Argentinian Minister of Health announced plans to broaden the scope of its medical cannabis programme, three years on from establishing a regulatory framework for the medical and scientific use of cannabis.

The draft regulations have not been published in the official gazette yet but were presented by the minister in a meeting with key stakeholders. The government is listening to demands from patients and advocacy groups, in order to allow patients to home-grow medical cannabis and share crops among multiple patients.

Most importantly, the list of allowed indications of medical cannabis will be expanded to include all patients which could benefit from cannabis treatment and the number of specialists registered to prescribe cannabis will also be increased.

In practice, this will drastically increase accessibility and has the potential to set the stage for the sustained growth in patient penetration as observed in other nascent markets like Germany or Australia, where over two-thirds of the prescriptions are for chronic pain.

Three pathways to the supply of medical cannabis are proposed:

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