Italy said on Thursday it would grow medical marijuana at a secure military lab outside Florence and distribute it through pharmacies to reduce costs and make it more easily available to the sick.
The use of medical marijuana to treat patients has been legal in Italy since 2007, but only a few dozen people took it through the national healthcare system in 2013 because of the prohibitive cost.
The military lab produces so-called “orphan” drugs no longer made by large pharmaceutical companies that are needed to treat rare diseases, Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti said after signing an agreement with Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin.
Lorenzin said she wanted to “debunk all the cultural or ideological myths” about using certain drugs in health care.
“We already allow the use of drugs in medical treatment that are opiate or cocaine derivatives, and now we’ll use cannabis,” she told reporters.
“The aim is to produce medicine for extremely serious pathologies, such as multiple sclerosis, or for pain relief,” Lorenzin told a press conference. “The project has no ideological or cultural value, it’s just in the interest of the sick.”
The project should produce around 80 to 100 kilos (176 to 220 pounds) of active principle—the extract from marijuana plants used in medicines—each year.
Defence minister Roberta Pinotti said the Italian military’s medical skills are “often unsung or underestimated. In Florence we have everything we need to begin production.”
While the use of marijuana for medical purposes was legalized in Italy at the beginning of the 1990s, this will be the first project to grow it for medicine.
“One gram of active principle costs 15 euros ($19.30) imported. We are certain that the medicines we will be able to produce locally will cost tax payers less than half the amount they currently do,” Lorenzin said.
