Little more light on the tweed seized MJ, from t

Little more light on the tweed seized MJ, from todays Windsor Star


News / National
Mounties seize two medical marijuana shipments over unauthorized items, won’t say what they were

Two Ontario-bound shipments of medical-marijuana products were seized a couple of weeks ago at the Kelowna International Airport because they contained unauthorized items, RCMP are now saying.
Photograph by: Tyler Anderson/National Post , Postmedia News
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Tweet Douglas Quan, Postmedia News
| Apr 13, 2014 | Last Updated: Apr 13, 2014 - 11:06 UTC
The two Ontario-bound shipments of medical-marijuana products seized by B.C. Mounties a couple of weeks ago contained unauthorized items, police said in a short statement posted on their website.

The companies doing the importing, Toronto-based Mettrum Ltd. and Smiths Falls, Ont.-based Tweed Marijuana Inc., have insisted that they received the necessary approvals from federal regulators to import the products, and Health Canada confirms this.

But the RCMP statement indicates that what was contained in the shipments seized at the Kelowna International Airport did not match what was outlined in the paperwork.

“The marijuana did not match what was authorized to be transferred, and was seized by the RCMP as it contravened Section 261 and 264 of the Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations,” said the statement from Staff. Sgt. Duncan Pound.

Officials, for now, are declining to say what those prohibited items were.

Under the rules, personal-production licence holders had until March 31 to sell marijuana plants or seeds — so-called “starting materials” — to the new, licensed commercial producers as long as they had Health Canada’s approval for the transaction. The sale of dried or finished marijuana products was forbidden.

Mettrum and Tweed, two of 12 licensed producers competing in Canada’s fledgling commercial medical marijuana industry, have their own growing facilities but said they decided to import some products from B.C. home growers to augment their supply. Both companies insist that everything they intended to import was in keeping with federal rules.

“I know what was in our shipment. It did not contain dried marijuana,” Keelan Green, a Mettrum spokesman, said this weekend.

The rules are “crystal clear,” said Tweed chairman Bruce Linton in an interview earlier in the week.

Both companies, however, say they have no intention of fighting to get the items back and have abandoned the purchases.

“It’s been sitting for awhile. We don’t think it’s going to be usable,” Green said.

Both companies had previously suggested that the RCMP seizures might have been the result of “confusion” over the transition from the old regulatory regime, which allowed medical marijuana patients to grow small amounts of pot themselves or use designated growers, to the new regulatory regime, which restricts production to licensed commercial growers.

But the RCMP said in its statement that it “understands the parameters companies licensed by Health Canada need to follow to produce and ship marijuana for medical purposes.”

The RCMP supports efforts to ensure that people authorized to access marijuana for medical reasons continue to have that access, the agency said.

But, “if activities are undertaken outside of the parameters of these licences, the RCMP’s role is to enforce the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA), which is what was done.”