Kanavape trial: a heavy verdict

The Marseilles Criminal Court handed down a heavy, very heavy verdict in the case of the Kanavape trial.

Sébastien Béguerie and Antonin Cohen were respectively sentenced to 18 months and 15 months suspended prison terms, €10,000 fines, entry of the sentences in their criminal records, €5,000 in damages to the Order of Pharmacists and publication in Le Monde and Le Quotidien des pharmaciens of the outcome of the trial. The court punished them on all counts except incitement to illicit use of narcotics.

The two entrepreneurs were on trial following an interview with the website Vice, conducted at the time of the launch of the first CBD e-cigarette in France, in which medical information was mixed with commercial information relating to Kanavape. The French Minister of Health at the time, Marisol Touraine, lodged a complaint, and the French pharmacists' association (Ordre des pharmaciens) sued for damages.

For Ingrid Metton, Sébastien Béguerie's lawyer, the court's decision is difficult to understand. In particular, the ruling runs counter to the statements made by the ANSM, which certified that Kanavape was not a medicine, and by the French Ministry of Health, which declared a week before the trial that the marketing of CBD e-liquid was legal. The court also equated the duo's entrepreneurial activities with their associative activities within UFCM-I-Care at the time.

«France's backwardness on the subject is catastrophic, including in the courts,» she confides. «Hemp is treated as either a narcotic or a poisonous plant. We submitted a preliminary question, which was rejected. Cannabis is part of a public debate that France must have. The court totally missed the complexity of the subject.»

At the time, Kanavape had passed through the entire product validation circuit, including ANSM and DGCCRF. No public control authority had banned it at the time, which raises obvious questions about the validity of this control system.

In 2015, Sébastien was sentenced without penalty for his therapeutic use of cannabis. The Marseille court retried the case from a different angle and punished Sébastien more severely than his ex-partner, sending a clear message to patients who treat themselves with cannabis.

Ingrid Metton tells us she will appeal the court's decision.