Switzerland’s pioneering cannabis pilot project has developed into Europe’s most advanced and accessible adult-use framework throughout 2023.
Six pilot projects have now been approved by Switzerland’s Federal Office for Public Health (FOPH), three of which are already selling cannabis legally to Swiss citizens, and ‘dozens’ more are reportedly in the pipeline.
Without encroaching any international laws, Switzerland has managed to roll out an adult-use cannabis market that could soon outsize many medical cannabis markets across Europe, while collecting much needed data which will be crucial to the roll out of more permanent frameworks in future.
While Switzerland is undoubtedly one of 2023’s success stories, its cannabis project got off to a rocky start.
December 2022 – The ‘Weed Care’ pilot, set to be Europe’s first ever THC adult-use cannabis trial, was initially set to be launched in Switzerland’s third most populous city, Basel, on September 15.
However, just days before the regulated sale of adult-use cannabis was set to launch across selected Basel pharmacies, the city’s health department announced that the cannabis provided ‘narrowly failed to meet the quality standard’, seeing the batch incinerated and the trial put on hold.
The issue, according to the project’s grower’s Pure Production AG, was due to trace amounts (well within the limits of conventional food consumption) of fluopyram, a pesticide found in the greenhouse soil from years before the site was used by Pure.
This began a ‘six-week’ discussion between the government and the study’s proprietors on how to find an alternative source of product to ensure the study could start as soon as possible.
As these discussions were ongoing, Pure successfully harvested a second batch on an alternative site, and received its confirmation that the batch matched ‘all the criteria of the quality assurance’.
In December, 2022, Pure confirmed that Weed Care was now due to begin on January 30, 2023, following the four month delay.
January 2023 – Weed Care is officially launched, seeing selected participants of the pilot able to purchase cannabis for recreational purposes legally for the first time.
It also marked the first implementation of the Cannabis Dispensary System (CDS), a software solution developed by Swiss firm Vigia AG in partnership with the FOPH, enabling stakeholders to ‘track and document every step along the supply chain’.
This software is set to be used in each of the pilot trials, and will play a crucial role in collecting the data necessary for Switzerland’s cannabis project to meet its goals.
“With the cannabis pilot trials, Switzerland can become an example for a structured legalisation process. A possible legalisation is tested in a real environment so that problems can be identified early on and minimised or even eliminated. In addition, it can be jointly determined where the degree between over- and under-regulation lies,” the company explained in a press release.
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