Patients using medical cannabis spike in Canada amid pandemic

The largest Canadian hemp companies that specialize in the cultivation / processing / sale of medical cannabis are clearly cramped in a small domestic market. That is why almost all operators of the Canadian medical cannabis market have relied on the export of produced raw materials, as well as products made from it, abroad and lobbying for opportunities to promote the interests of companies from the Maple Leaf country in countries with emerging markets.

Registrations of patients choosing to use the therapeutic properties of cannabis for treatment in Canada grew at the fastest pace in the last three years during the third quarter of 2020. In particular, according to the federal department responsible for regulating the use of medical cannabis, government agencies in Canada registered 73,803 new patients during July-September 2020 planning to use the healing / therapeutic properties of the plant. This is 25% more than in the previous quarter. It should be noted that previously the number of registrations for the use of the medicinal properties of the hemp plant grew at such a rate in the first half of 2017 - more than a year before Canada legalized the possibility of using psychoactive cannabis for recreational purposes.

Number of Patients Using Medical Cannabis in Canada

Despite an increase in the number of Canadian consumers planning to use cannabis for medical purposes, according to new data from Statistics Canada, household spending on various types of medical hemp products in the same quarter fell slightly to $ 113 million.

Commentary of experts of the Association "Ukrainian technical hemp"

The available data show that Canada remains the largest regulated market for medical cannabis in the world. In Q4 2019 and Q3 2020, the use of various products that include medical cannabis was over C $ 600 million.

I would like to pay special attention to the visual trends of the medical hemp market, which are not usually mentioned by Ukrainian lobbyists of this segment of the modern cannabis market:

- the world market for medical cannabis is developing extremely slowly and reaches relative saturation in the second or third year of its existence;

- after market saturation (for Canada this became a reality in mid-2019), the number of patients using medical cannabis is gradually decreasing;

- the development / degradation of the medical cannabis market can be actively influenced by external factors, for example, the COVID 19 pandemic became the driver of the growth of the Canadian market in 2020;

- after 5 years of the existence of a legal mechanism for the use of medical hemp in Canada, the number of people using the therapeutic properties of a plant of this kind has not reached 400 thousand people. If we talk about the fact that the population of Canada is comparable to the population of Ukraine, then once again the question arises of how reliable the data are that in our country the need for the use of hemp for medical purposes reaches the level of 2-2.5 million people;

- the largest Canadian cannabis companies that specialize in the cultivation / processing / sale of medical cannabis is clearly cramped in a small domestic market. That is why almost all operators of the Canadian medical cannabis market have relied on the export of produced raw materials, as well as products made from it, abroad and lobbying for opportunities to promote the interests of companies from the Maple Leaf country in countries with emerging markets.