The director of a medicinal cannabis growing facility says red tape is preventing the industry developing in New Zealand.
Cannasouth director Mark Lucas appeared on Breakfast alongside Katy Thomas – a spokesperson for Medical Cannabis Awareness New Zealand.
Thomas has a son who uses CBD which she’s struggling to access at the moment. That’s partly due to long processing times at Customs affecting the supply of medicinal cannabis.
Lucas told Breakfast the delays are party because the New Zealand medicinal cannabis industry is a "highly regulated space".
"There's the foundations there for a really successful industry but I think there's definitely still some barriers in the way," he said.
"There's some regulations that I think need some tweaking to give us the ability to really be competitive on the global stage.
"The reason that's important is because we need to operate at a certain scale which is going to allow us to really get involved in the next generation pharmaceutical development."
Lucas said Aotearoa can't afford to be a commodity producer of cannabis, but need to be in an "innovative space."
Cannasouth director Mark Lucas says it's partly because the NZ cannabis industry is a "highly regulated space." (Source: Breakfast)
"We're right there, we're at the cusp of a new industry, there's just a few tweaks to make sure we can really deliver for patients and the rest of the country," he said.
Lucas says the quality standards required of therapeutic drugs is very high which means it takes a long time to develop the infrastructure required to produce locally.
"There's a big dead patch when companies are establishing themselves, their quality management system, their facilities in terms of what looks like forward movement."
'It's really hard'
Thomas said she's struggling to access CBD at the moment which she needs for her son Edward who has epilepsy.
"Because our industry has not developed enough here, we are still required to import our CBD from overseas because there just isn't the plethora of choice that you have in other countries that have legalised medicinal cannabis."
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Thomas said the level of anxiety in her household is "really high" when she can't give her son the care and medicine he needs.
"We know the nights are going to be tough especially as we start to come to the end of the CBD that I've put aside.
"We start to have more and more of these breakthrough seizures and it's really hard."
Thomas says she often hears from other people in similar situations who still experience shortages and delays when trying to buy medicinal cannabis.
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She said people with conditions like epilepsy and multiple sclerosis can be left for two to eight weeks without medicine.
"It feels like things are just as tough as ever, it's still the same but no matter what we do, how we try and pivot to prevent it from happening, the barriers are just insurmountable," Thomas said.
"You're just always on a knife's edge, you're sort of always on the brink just trying your best to hold it together but you just don't know when that relief will come."
"It impacts all of us, we're all collectively traumatised."
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