France advances plans to legalize medical cannabis

France’s four-year campaign to launch a fully regulated medical cannabis framework is finally being realized.

French officials on March 19 sent three documents to the European Union for approval, each detailing a specific part of the country’s proposed medical cannabis legalization process.

Each decree had been finalized some time ago and was initially intended to be sent to the EU in June or July last year, but the collapse of the French government and subsequent turmoil significantly delayed many bills:

• The first decree “defines the framework for the system regulating cannabis-based medicines.”
• The other two decrees were meant to help flesh out the technical details, real-world conditions and enforceable standards of what could become one of Europe’s largest medical cannabis markets.

A key condition is that cannabis will remain a treatment of last resort, as it has been in France’s experiment, and patients must be able to prove they have failed or are intolerant of all other standard therapies.

This item originally appeared on Business of Cannabis. The full story is available here.