While the practitioners can allow registered patients to grow a limited amount at home for personal use, the regulator’s findings show that such authorizations rose to a staggering 36.2 grams by the end of March, compared with 25.2 grams in October 2018.

Meanwhile, average purchases by registered patients, who can buy pot from licensed producers and federal medical sellers, have stayed as low as 2 to 2.1 grams every month, data showed.

“An early review of the data signals to me a striking difference in the average amounts prescribed per day in the two different channels,” said Deepak Anand, CEO of Toronto medical cannabis distributor Materia Ventures.

With no concrete limits on personal production, Health Canada is facing rising pressure to tackle the perceived abuse of the home-grow program.

“Health Canada is concerned that high daily authorized amounts are, in a few instances, leading to abuse of the access to cannabis for medical purposes framework and are undermining the integrity of the system,” the regulator said.

CBC News reported in October that the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) raided dozens of illegal cannabis grow operations between July and October, a majority of which had personal production authorization.

“It remains unclear if we are dealing with systemic issues as opposed to targeted ones, as a result of the tremendous pressure the regulator has fallen under recently by provincial and municipal governments,” Anand said.

Health Canada’s finding show 43,211 individuals were allowed to grow marijuana for their personal medical use by the end of September, and 377,024 clients were registered as patients.

— Reporting for Reuters by Shariq Khan and Vishwadha Chander in Bangalore and Steve Scherer in Toronto.

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The company on Tuesday announced next steps in the “business transformation plan” it launched in February to “better align the business financially with the current realities of the cannabis market in Canada while maintaining a sustainable platform for long-term growth.”

Industry observers have said cannabis companies’ fight for market position, against illicit as well as fellow licit producers, has left them piling up inventory, in turn leading to significant price cuts.

The Aurora facilities to be closed include Aurora Prairie, the former CanniMed Therapeutics production site in Saskatoon, a 97,000-square foot, 30-room 19,000-kg/year grow and oil extraction facility and the first and only supplier of medical cannabis to Health Canada from 2000 until 2013.

Also slated for closure is Aurora Mountain at Cremona, Alta., a 55,200-square foot, 4,800-kg/year plant. The Cremona plant was Aurora Cannabis’ first cannabis grow facility and was billed as the world’s first-ever custom-built cannabis grow site.

The closures also include two Quebec sites, Aurora Vie (40,000 square feet, 4,000 kg/year) at Pointe-Claire and Aurora Eau (48,000 square feet, 4,500 kg/year) at Lachute.

The two Quebec sites had been set up for cultivation of “niche and exotic cannabis varieties that cannot be grown in other facilities,” and to meet EU export standards. Aurora Vie today also supplies the company’s Canadian medical and consumer markets with dried flower, oil products and softgel capsules.

The company will also close Aurora Ridge, a 55,000-square foot, 10-room, 7,000-kg/year facility at Markham, Ont., which supplied Canadian consumer and medical markets as well as international markets.

In all, the closures are expected to translate to about a 30 per cent cut in production staff over the next two fiscal quarters, Aurora said Tuesday.

By the end of Q2 2021, Aurora said it expects to consolidate its Canadian production and manufacturing work at four sites: Aurora Sky and Aurora Polaris, both at Edmonton; Aurora River, at Bradford, Ont.; and Whistler Pemberton, at Pemberton, B.C.

A fifth site, Aurora Sun at Medicine Hat, Alta., has been scaled back to six grow bays and “will allow for efficient scale production on an as-needed basis as market demand grows.”

Also, where the company was previously supplying some of its European customers through the Canadian plants now slated for closure, it said Tuesday it plans to “immediately ramp up” cannabis production at its Aurora Nordic facility at Odense, Denmark.

From that site, Aurora said, it believes it can “adequately” service the European market with EU-GMP certified product.

Moving production to larger-scale operations is expected to lead to a “material reduction in per unit cost of goods” by Q3 2021, Aurora said.

For the shuttered sites, next steps will be evaluated at the time of the closures, a company spokesperson said Tuesday via email.

“This has not simply been a cost-cutting exercise,” interim CEO Michael Singer said in the company’s release Tuesday.

Rather, he described it as “a strategic realignment of our operations to protect Aurora’s position as a leader in key global cannabinoid markets, most notably Canada” and to “improve gross margins and accelerate our ability to generate positive cash flow.”

Along with the plant closures and related job cuts, Aurora on Tuesday also announced it will cut about 25 per cent of sales, general and administration staff positions across “all levels of the company, including a restructuring of the executive leadership team.”

Of that group, the company said, most of the staff cuts are “with immediate effect.”

Between office and production staff, the cuts are expected to affect about 700 positions across the company, Aurora’s spokesperson said Tuesday. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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He’s the gatekeeper here. You’ll find another one just like him at the other gate, checking in visitors, scrutinizing IDs, buzzing through the people who pass muster.

But these guards are just your first glimpse of the Fort Knox-style security system at the Olds-based pharmaceutical company. As you make your way through the greenhouse and manufacturing plant, you’ll see plenty more — hundreds of cameras lining the walls, passcodes on nearly every entryway, alarms that wail when you leave a door open a little too long.

It seems extreme, but it needs to be. The greenhouse workers aren’t growing strawberries to make jam, but medical-grade cannabis and drugs.

“It’s like a bank vault. It’s 100 per cent secure,” said Anil Jain, president and CEO of Terra Life Sciences. “I don’t even have security clearance for some parts of the facility.”

Growing a controlled substance and manufacturing pharmaceuticals mean having a level of security that not only keeps the RCMP happy, but also Health Canada and the United States Food and Drug Administration. The latter is unusual, and requires especially stringent security and oversight, said Jain.

Then again, nothing about Terra Life Sciences is quite like its cross-country counterparts in cannabis cultivation. The company’s focus is on the medicine, not the recreational drug, and it conducts clinical trials for diseases such as multiple sclerosis and chronic pain. They produce upwards of 1.8 billion soft gels a year — and no buds.

“Cannabis cultivation is not what Terra Life is all about,” said Jain. “First and foremost, we are a pharmaceutical company making medical-grade products using actives from cannabis.”

• Read more: Aurora to buy Ontario’s MedReleaf in biggest-ever pot deal

And business is booming. In late May, Terra Life Sciences unveiled its new 50,000-square-foot cannabis cultivation facility, which will produce around 5,000 kilograms of dried cannabis a year. The next phase of the expansion will be five times bigger than that — a 230,000-square-foot facility producing upwards of 35,000 kilograms of dried cannabis by next year.

“We couldn’t buy pharma-quality cannabis from anywhere in Canada,” said Jain. “We had to cultivate our own.”

Cannabis cultivation

The production practices are just as rigorous as their security measures. Under federal regulations, the company must test for a multitude of things at every step of the way — including pests, bacteria, and fungi; heavy metals; mycotoxins; and levels of THC and CBD (the active chemicals produced by cannabis plants).

“We’re growing medicine — not plants,” said director of cannabis cultivation Dejun Cui.

“The plants themselves aren’t hard to grow. They’re very easy to grow. But if you want to pass all these tests, you can’t grow it in the field. You have to grow it in a controlled environment.”

Because of that, Terra Life’s new greenhouse is top of the line, with insulated corrugated walls and diffused glass on each of the eight growing bays.

“We built this to the standard that one would build an oil refinery or gas plant,” said Miriam Mitchell-Banks, senior vice-president of supply chain and global collaborations. “Not everybody is building to this level. We build for pharma.”

Each bay is about 4,100 square feet and can hold about 2,000 plants, which are monitored by a central computer system through sensors that measure for things such as temperature and humidity.

“The computer runs the entire facility,” she said. “It’s the real brains of the operating facility.”

But if the computer is the brains behind the operation, genetics lie at its heart.

“That’s the most vital part of this whole thing,” said Mitchell-Banks. “If you don’t have the right genetics, you don’t have anything.”

Terra Life grows more than 100 varieties of cannabis that were designed to treat chronic illnesses. And these plants all start in the ‘mother room,’ where the ‘mother’ plants are grown and then cloned.

“The mother room is our pride and joy and where we have to take the most care and attention,” she said.

Workers take clippings from the mothers, put them into propagation powder, place them into small cubes, and then transport them to the propagation room. From there, the plants grow into seedlings and are then transferred into bigger pots, where they grow into smaller ‘teenage’ plants. At that point, they’re moved into the flowering bays.

Once ready for harvest, they’re cut at the bottom of their stems and then transported by trolley to the trimming room. Not every part of the plant contains active chemical compounds, so the plants are trimmed of all the usable material — separating the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff,’ as it were.

“If I were the size of a plant, the leaves from the shoulders down really don’t have much of the chemicals we’re looking for, so we’ll cut those off,” said Mitchell-Banks.

“It’s the leaves around the shoulder area — the buds — that have the most chemical compounds. Those are the ones we’re going after.”

Buds are then put onto trays and taken into the drying room to reduce their moisture content down to about 12 per cent. (Despite having no active chemical compounds, the waste material is shredded into minuscule pieces and then composted to comply with federal regulations.)

Everything is then completely sterilized for the next batch of plants, and the production process begins anew.

Manufacturing for global markets

That process — from propagation to harvest — takes about three months, but the plants aren’t at the end of the line yet.

From the drying room, the buds are taken to the manufacturing facility, where they’re ground into fine powder and then packed into a two-cylinder extraction machine.

Each cylinder holds about four pounds of dried plant, which is treated with a carbon dioxide solvent. Under the right pressure and temperature, the solvent ‘gloms’ onto the cannabinoids (or the active compounds), and after about seven hours, a thick resin about the size of a cup of butter comes out.

“It’s kind of like making gravy,” said Mitchell-Banks. “When you cool gravy, the fat goes to the top. The fats and lipids in the plant do the same thing in our process.”

The resin is then mixed with ethanol, which removes any unwanted compounds (such as wax), and then further refined to remove the ethanol. The pure product — about 280 grams, when all is said and done — is either blended right away and sent to the encapsulation line, or stored in a vault for later use.

The main production facility has eight encapsulation lines that can produce around two billion soft gels a year. These soft gel machines take ribbons of gelatin and run them over specialized dies that have a series of divots on them. Each one of these divots is injected with the resin and an excipient (a neutral ‘filler’ such as olive or sesame oil), and the resulting soft gels are then dried into capsules and put into the blister packs you’d get at the pharmacy.

These cannabis soft gels sell for three times more than the plants on a per-gram basis in the global market — a boon of the value-added processing that will add not only value to the product but also an additional 150 jobs to Terra Life’s Olds’ facility over the next two years.

“With our blue skies and sunshine, Alberta is the ideal place to grow medical-grade cannabis,” said Jain. “But we will not sell cannabis flowers. We will be cultivating them, extracting them, making soft gels, and then selling them. And through this development of cannabis medical products, we intend to do our part to lead the way in this exciting burgeoning industry.

“That’s value added.”

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“We’ve been offering horticulture programming for over 50 years, so it makes sense for this new facet of the horticulture industry to come our way for training,” said Debbie Thompson, the college’s vice-president academic and student experience.

“It’s a new industry that’s expanding, and people see this as an opportunity to get into that field. This is their first step.”

• Read more: Canada prepares for legal pot with new license class, labels

And for many students, it was more of a leap than a step. Launched on May 1 through the college’s continuing education department, the first three-month class filled up immediately, with two more following suit nearly as fast.

“Within the first day of launching our program, the first cohort of 20 students was full. As of yesterday, we had two more full cohorts,” Thompson said on May 4.

It makes sense. With cannabis expected to become legalized for recreational use sometime this summer, the industry is set to explode, with up to 150,000 new jobs nationwide over the next few years.

• Read more: Canadians spent $5.7 billion on cannabis in 2017

“There are job opportunities out there, and a lot of people who are interested in being employed within the industry see this as an opportunity to expand their understanding of cannabis production,” said Thompson.

“If you’re an individual who has an interest in this one aspect of horticulture, this is a nice introductory opportunity for you to learn a little bit more about it, get some training and education under your belt, and be able to apply this learning to the industry.”

The five-course online program will focus on the ins and outs of cannabis production and regulation, while giving students hands-on experience with the crop during a two-week practicum.

The first two courses offer an introduction to horticulture production, crop production, and facilities, followed by two courses that are more specific to the cannabis industry, including cannabis production, regulations, and legislation. Students then apply these learnings in an actual cannabis production facility at Sundial and Terra Life Sciences, two industry partners in the program.

Workers wanted

Training a skilled workforce for this growing industry was one of the key drivers behind the program, said Anil Jain, president and CEO of Terra Life Sciences.

“This whole cannabis sector is new, and we need to have skilled employees,” said Jain. “The industry is severely lacking in the skills we need to have.”

The need for those skills is only going to grow following legalization, he added. Aurora Cannabis, Sundial, and Terra Life Sciences have all announced Alberta expansion in the last year, and with that expansion will come plenty of career opportunities. Terra Life Sciences alone will need upwards of 150 to 200 new employees, ranging from office staff to production workers and everything in between.

“Alberta is an ideal place for cannabis cultivation, so my expectation is that we’re going to see a significant growth in the industry in Alberta compared to other provinces,” said Jain.

“We’re already starting to see some really large cultivation facilities coming up in Alberta, and that creates a huge opportunity for jobs.”

And the training that students will get through the new Olds College program will give them the skills they need for those jobs, Jain added.

“By having hands-on training during the course of their studies, students will learn a lot more and their skills will be higher when they’re done.”

A key component of that will be the regulations around cannabis production, manufacturing, and distribution in Canada. Because cannabis is legal only for medicinal purposes in Canada, the course will cover the existing regulations around cannabis production until those regulations change to permit recreational use.

“The regulations are quite strict,” said Jain. “Students need to have a pretty good understanding of the regulations and what these regulations mean in a practical sense.”

Terra Life Sciences is also a fully integrated facility, where in addition to cultivation, students will learn extraction and manufacturing to round out their education and give them a better understanding of the broader sector.

But for other students, the cannabis production program may very well be a gateway drug to other Olds College horticulture programs.

“We may find that students really enjoy the opportunity to learn about horticulture, and that might expand their interest into our horticulture program,” said Thompson.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see some additional interest in horticulture from getting a taste of it from the cannabis program.”

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About 4.9 million Canadians between the ages of 15 to 64 purchased both medical and non-medical cannabis last year, the statistics agency said. Medical marijuana is already legal in the country.

The average cannabis user spent about $1,200 on the drug last year, mostly on non-medical marijuana, the report said. Recreational use of cannabis is currently illegal nationwide.

Canadians’ spending on cannabis was well below 2016 levels for alcohol at $22.3 billion and tobacco at $16 billion.

The report, which looked at cannabis consumption going back to 1961, was based on surveys and other data sources. Statistics Canada cautioned that the numbers were provisional and subject to potentially large revisions due to assumptions made and as data on illegal cannabis production is sparse.

The report is part of Statistics Canada’s efforts to measure the economic and social impacts of legalized cannabis. The agency said in November that it would begin incorporating marijuana consumption and spending estimates into economic growth figures in November 2019.

The price of non-medical cannabis has declined by an average of 1.7 per cent a year since 1990 and stood at around $7.50 a gram last year, probably due to increased supplies, the report said.

Nearly all cannabis consumed in Canada came from within the country, accounting for $5.4 billion in 2017.

The size of the country’s cannabis-producing industry was $3 billion last year, down from $3.4 billion in 2014, due to declining prices. That put it on par with the beer industry, which was $2.9 billion in 2014.

–– Reporting for Reuters by Leah Schnurr.

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You might be tempted to put on some Pink Floyd, dim the lights, and give them a little something to mellow them out.

All of the attention on the pending legalization of marijuana has pet owners asking their vets about whether edible cannabis products are suitable for dogs or cats with behavioural problems or medical issues.

But before dealing doggy dope or carrying kitty cannabis, think again, says the Alberta Veterinary Medical Association.

“There is a real lack of evidence and information about cannabis use in animals,” said veterinarian Dr. Phil Buote, the association’s complaints director. “Veterinarians are in a situation where they’re being asked for a product that really doesn’t have sufficient research behind it to be able to safely make the recommendation to administer to pets.”

His association has been fielding calls from vets across the province about the safety and effectiveness of administering cannabis to companion animals, said Buote.

“If an animal owner has exhausted other treatment options, they may look for alternatives, as they might do for themselves in human medicine,” he said. “The issue is whether or not there’s sufficient information that a veterinarian can comfortably and confidently oversee the treatment of an animal with a cannabis-based product.”

And the answer is a definite no can do doggy dude.

“The research is not there to ensure that those products are safe or effective for the treatment of any kind of condition,” he said.

The benefits of administering cannabis to animals are still theoretical as there is a “gross lack of randomized clinical trials and evidence that they are safe and beneficial,” the association said in a recent statement to its members.

Moreover, the pending legalization of cannabis only applies to people, not pets, and there’s been no approval from Health Canada’s veterinary drug directorate — which is typically required for any drug given to pets or livestock.

Veterinarians not only want to see solid research on the safety and efficacy of cannabis products, they also need information such as how to administer it, what dosage to prescribe, and how long the animal should be treated, said Buote.

He also advises against pet owners going on the internet to find products containing cannabis for their animals. There’s no evidence those products actually work and they might be dangerous.

“There’s nothing on the market that’s approved by Health Canada to treat pets,” said Buote.

“There are some products that might barely be described as ‘natural’ health products, though none are approved through natural health product regulations.

“They could be administered to pets, but there’s still no data on the safety or efficacy of those products.”

And the potential side-effects go beyond a case of the munchies.

There has been “a significant increase in the number of incidences of marijuana toxicity” in jurisdictions where cannabis has been decriminalized or legalized, he said. The biggest concern is for dogs, as cats are less likely to eat something that has fallen to the floor or been left lying around.

“We know that dogs aren’t really discerning when it comes to eating things, so they could potentially ingest a discarded butt of a joint or consume some edible products that contain cannabis,” said Buote.

Symptoms in animals include sleepiness, salivation, dilated pupils, bloodshot eyes, a fast heart rate, sensitivity to light or sound, increased vocalization, wobbling, pacing, and agitation.

“Some of those side-effects probably aren’t surprising, but dogs are thought to be very sensitive to THC, one of the active compounds in cannabis,” said Buote.

And while there is some potential for therapeutic uses of cannabis in companion animals, that’s a long ways off, said Buote.

“We don’t really have any research into the risks.”

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