Ukraine: Parliament works on a bill to legalize medical cannabis

After Romania, whose the Finance Minister recently announced Considering the legalization of medical cannabis, it's Ukraine's turn to think about it. According to lawyer Gennadii Shabas, representative of the Medical Cannabis Association in Ukraine, the parliament's Human Rights Commission has drafted a bill, in conjunction with civil society organizations, for the legalization of the medical and scientific use of cannabis.

Democratic legalization

In principle, everything starts from’a petition filed on January 30 on the government website by the Association du Cannabis Médical and with the support of 16 other organizations. The petition called for regulation of access to medical cannabis products for patients suffering from chronic pain, epilepsy, anorexia, post-traumatic stress disorder, autoimmune diseases, arthritis and rheumatism, and more. In just 42 days, the petition collected over 25,000 signatures. It also obtained the support of the Minister of Health.

That's all it took for Parliament to start drafting a bill with the help of the organizations involved: «After the petition for the legalization of medical cannabis received 25,000 signatures, the Human Rights Commission studied the issue. They said they were preparing a bill and asked us for help,» explains Gennadii Shabas. «The issue will be resolved in any case. I think we'll have a law this year,» he added.

In any case, the pharmaceutical industry seems ready to follow suit: the medical director of Ukrainian pharmaceutical company Farmak, Vitaliy Usenko, has declared that drug developers are ready to work with medical cannabis. «If there are amendments to Ukrainian legislation, then it will be possible to develop medicines based on medical cannabis. We are capable of developing such products and introducing them into clinical practice,» he explains.

On February 14, the European Parliament approved a resolution on medical cannabis calling on countries to relax their laws to allow research into medical cannabis. Non-binding, this text nonetheless legitimizes states to consider some form of regulation, and could be a determining factor in the recent advances made in Romania and Ukraine.