Tasmanian Alkaloids opens new medicinal cannabis facility at Westbury

Colin Ralph, Tasmanian Alkaloids executive general manager of operations, shows off the new crop at the official launch of the facility.

Photo by Hayley Manning

By Sharon Webb

TASMANIAN ALKALOIDS has employed 11 extra staff and 20 local contractors to establish a new medicinal cannabis facility at its Westbury site.

Built with a $10m loan from the Tasmanian Government, the new facility can extract 90  tonnes of biomass a year, equating to around nine million bottles of medicine.

The company’s goal is to become the largest licensed, and fully commercial, botanical extraction company in the nation.

At the launch of the Tas Alkaloids facility, Tasmanian Minister for State Growth Michael Ferguson said 10,000 patients were already receiving the Tas Alkaloids medicinal cannabis product. The aim is to reach 30,000 by the end of 2020

But media reports suggest Tasmanian patients are angry because they find it difficult to obtain medicinal cannabis.

Tas Alkaloids executive manager Colin Ralph suggested this would improve as Tasmanian GPs and pharmacists became more used to the system.

Labor leader Rebecca White said it was inconceivable that at the same time as Tas Alkaloids’ development, prescribing and accessing medicinal cannabis in the state was almost impossible.

‘Labor welcomes investment in producing medical grade cannabis here in Tasmania but regulation for prescribing and accessing medicinal cannabis in Tasmania needs to be evidence based and consistent with other states,’ she said.

‘Or are we expecting vulnerable patients to move interstate to access Tasmanian produced medicinal cannabis? It just does not make any sense.’

At last month’s official launch of the facility, Mr Ralph described the production of medicinal cannabis as a ‘synergistic partner to our alkaloid business’.

The world alkaloid market is declining because the need to reduce overuse of prescription drugs has led many countries to impose tighter restrictions on narcotic imports.

Tasmanian poppy growers are now growing crops less than half the size of their 2013 crops and Tas Alkaloids is looking to the growing medicinal cannabis industry.

In January 2019 the company’s director of agricultural research Les Baxter told Deloraine Rotary Club members Tas Alkaloids was growing cannabis for medical use at Westbury, allowed by 2016 Australian legislation.

He said cannabis usage focused on childhood epilepsy, nausea in cancer and HIV patients and palliative care, confirming it could also be used for pain management, particularly for multiple sclerosis and neuropathic pain.

‘Its advantages are in decreasing nausea, increasing appetite, managing chronic pain and managing muscle spasms,’ he said. ‘Possible side effects are memory loss and schizophrenia.’

In April this year amid rumoured job cuts of 20 personnel, Tas Alkaloids announced an agreement to sell medical cannabis to Melbourne based Avecho Technologies

Avecho is buying Tas Alkaloids’ natural cannabis products to combine with its own TPM technology to investigate increasing the oral absorption of natural cannabinoids.

TPM is being developed to create injectable, oral and topical products for the human health market but will also be used to enhance the feed efficiency and health of livestock.