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Italian Military Halts Production Of Medical Cannabis Production Piling Pressure On Supply Chain

ITALY’s military, which remains the sole producer of medical cannabis in the country, has halted production at its Florence facility amid a ‘chronic shortage of personnel’.

The stoppage threatens to further disrupt access to medical cannabis for Italy’s estimated 50,000 patients, and pile further pressure on an already severely under-equipped supply chain.

It comes just months after the military announced its ambitions to achieve triple-digit growth in medical cannabis production this year to 700 kg, marking what it described as the first step towards achieving self-sufficiency in Italy.

However, with the expected three-month gap in production, journalist Fabrizio Dentini believes this means the ‘Italian military will not even be able to produce 100 kg during 2023’.

Production halted

On April 13, during a public event organised by the Medical Cannabis Patients Association in Bologna, suggestions that medical cannabis production at the facility could be under threat were confirmed.

Director of the military’s medical cannabis production plant in Florence, Colonel Gabriele Picchioni, told Italian publication Soft Secrets that production had been stopped at the plant since April 5, 2023, and was expected to continue until mid-June.

Picchioni said that the production of medical cannabis was indeed ‘currently suspended’, but that this was not due to lack of personnel, but rather ‘due to work already planned’ to build a new production line in the facility.

Furthermore, he suggested that the facility had ‘stocks that will make up for the temporary shortages’ stored in its warehouse, and that ‘together with imported cannabis, they should allow us not to have repercussions on therapeutic continuity’.

While he said that production ‘went well’ in Q1 and there was every expectation a similar output would resume in June, he stipulated that ‘we will see if we will be able to produce the 400 kg required by the Ministry of Health’.

Italian Army Pledges To More Than Double Medical Cannabis Production This Year, But Supply Issues Far From Over

Mr Dentini, who broke the news, challenged Mr Picchioni’s statement, telling Business of Cannabis: “The impact is a huge deception as not only is the state not providing the full amount of medical cannabis required yearly on a national level (estimated to be 1,500 kg), but it cannot even provide what has been requested by the Italian Ministry of Health (400 kg for 2023).

“In this situation we can expect that the Italian military will not even be able to produce 100 kg during 2023.”

Regarding the supply of Italian-grown medical cannabis (also known as FM2) in storage, Mr Dentini suggested that this would likely stay in storage indefinitely anyway, as prescribing doctors favour imported products such as Bediol from the Netherlands.

“Italian doctors prefer to prescribe (Bediol) instead of the Italian strain, so it will probably remain in the military storage until Bediol is over in the Italian market. Why do Italian doctors prefer to prescribe Bediol? Simply because this strain is more often on the market, so it is more reliable than the Italian strain.”

Maurizio Valliti, CEO of Italian medical cannabis clinic Clinn told Business of Cannabis that from his company’s experience so far, there was no record of problems with the supply of stock, and that the news would ‘not have any negative impact on the supply on the continuity of care’.

He added that only around 6% of the products his clinic currently prescribed are domestically grown Italian medical cannabis.

‘Chronic shortage of personnel’ 

Despite Mr Picchioni’s assertion that the halt in production was planned, a trade union representative of the military plant painted a very different picture of the situation.

In late February, Umberto Fragassi said in a statement on the Ministry of Health’s website that the ‘chronic shortage of personnel at various levels… and lack of several key figures’ were threatening to see a ‘forced stop’ in the supply of medical cannabis.

Later, he told Soft Secrets that the facility would need to ‘double the people currently employed’ in order to function properly.

“In fact, in order to be able to produce on a large scale, adequate means, human resources and infrastructures are needed, which, to date, are insufficient. This is why as MSW we are asking ourselves how it is possible to continue to ensure, in this critical situation, a minimum production that complies with sector regulations.”

In order to alleviate the ‘critical’ situation, Mr Fragassi has called for an overhaul of the current framework, to give greater bureaucratic streamlining and therefore greater efficiency to the military.

To achieve this, he suggests that, instead of the operation residing under the responsibility of both the authority of health and defence, that responsibility be transferred to the presidency of the council.

“This hypothesis, which has always been opposed by politics, would allow us to have the typical operations and flexibility of a pharmaceutical factory: something unthinkable today with the constraints of the Public Administration.”

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