Licensed Canadian Companies for Selling Cocaine
Sunshine Earth Labs, a Canadian biosciences company, announced on Thursday that it has been granted a license to produce and sell cocaine, reflecting the federal health agency’s effort to improve safety conditions for the nation’s addicts.
Small amounts of cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs have been decriminalized to combat the opioid overdose crisis, which has claimed the lives of thousands of people.
Ottawa granted British Columbia a criminal code exemption in January for a three-year pilot project aimed at removing the stigma associated with drug use that discourages people from seeking help.
Advocates have also advocated for safer drug supplies to be made available to addicts who are at risk of death due to toxic drug poisoning associated with illegal street drugs.
Sunshine Earth Labs announced in a press release that it had received authorization from Health Canada to “legally possess, produce, sell, and distribute coca leaf and cocaine” as well as morphine, MDMA (ecstasy), and heroin.
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Its announcement follows a similar licensing arrangement offered to Adastra Labs in February, which had previously focused on the production of cannabis extracts.
Adastra’s license also allows it to produce and sell psilocybin and psilocin, which are hallucinogens with similar effects to LSD and are commonly known as magic mushrooms.
Michael Forbes, chief executive officer of Adastra, stated, “We will evaluate how the commercialization of this substance fits into our business model to position ourselves to support the demand for a safe supply of cocaine.”
British Columbia is the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize hard drugs, following Oregon in 2020.
Since declaring a public health emergency in 2016, the Canadian province is the epicenter of a crisis that has resulted in over 10,000 overdose deaths.
This represents approximately six deaths per day due to toxic drug poisoning among a population of five million, surpassing Covid-19 deaths at the outbreak’s onset.
The number of fatalities has surpassed 30,000 on a national scale.
