Brazil allows production, sale of cannabis-based medication

The Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency, Anvisa, approved a regulation on the production, import, and sale of cannabis-derived medication.

The decision was made unanimously by the agency’s voting directors, who met Tuesday (Dec. 3) in Brasília. It comes into force in 90 days.

Medicines can only be purchased with a prescription, and product can only be bought at drugstores. Compounding with such substances will not be allowed. “The instructional leaflet for cannabis-based products will include warnings such as ‘The use of this product may cause physical or psychological dependency,’ or ‘Individual use only; do not give it to somebody else.”

“This is excellent news; this is progress. It makes prescription opportunities more democratic,” noted neurologist Daniel Campi, vice-coordinator of the Pain Department of the Brazilian Neurology Academia (ABN). Patients that managed to get a use permit could spend some $600 a month.

A critical view

The specialist, however, argued for “a more critical view” about the medicine’s potentialities. “There’s a gap,” he said, between the demand for the product “to improve quality of life” and the knowledge about which patients such medication can have an effect on.

“It’s like saying there’s a fantastic place in the Amazon forest, but not saying exactly where it’s located,” Campi remarked, while sustaining that universities and research centers should further investigate the effects of this kind of medicine.

He estimates that 70 percent of the demand before the regulation of cannabis for medical use was for lower back pain and headache relief. It was also sought-after in cases of anxiety and sleeping issues.

Brazil’s Hope Association for Cannabis (Abrace) reports that hundreds of people had access to the medication to treat epilepsy, autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and forms of neuropathy. The association publicizes contact details of over 150 doctors who have prescribed cannabis-based medicines.