Commercial medical marijuana producers banking on massive sales under new rules

Marijuana plants grow as Julia Ratcliffe, a technical consultant with The Bug Factory, a company that supplies insects for natural pest control, works at the MediJean medical marijuana facility in Richmond, B.C., on Friday March 21, 2014. MediJean currently has a license from Health Canada to grow marijuana for research and development purposes. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

VANCOUVER From the outside, theres little to distinguish MediJean Distribution Inc.s headquarters from the unremarkable office complexes and warehouses that surround it in a sprawling slice of industrial suburbia near Vancouver.

Inside, however, the picture is unlike anything else around it. The company is putting the finishing touches on a massive hydroponic operation as it joins a lucrative new industry made possible by Health Canadas overhaul of the countrys medical pot system.

One of the facilitys growing rooms is already home to dozens of maturing green plants of various strains, and it will soon house many more. The concrete vault is empty, but it will eventually be filled with dried marijuana ready to be shipped across the country.

In contrast to the stereotypical grow-ops of movies and TV newsreels whether for medical use, the black market, or the uncomfortable place where those two worlds collide the facility has a sterile laboratory feel, which is precisely the point.

This is anything but a grow-op, says Anton Mattadeen, the companys chief strategy officer, during a recent tour of the facility in Richmond, B.C.

It is a clean-run, biopharmaceutical facility designed to produce the highest quality produce available. Whatever your views are based on the stigma (of marijuana), thats not us.

Mattadeen makes the same pitch other operators do: MediJean, he says, will be able to produce a wide variety of consistent, high-quality marijuana that simply wasnt available in the makeshift home grow-ops of the old system.

MediJean is one of hundreds of companies that have applied to supply marijuana under new Health Canada regulations that aim to stop patients from growing their own pot and instead restrict production to licensed commercial operations.

A dozen commercial growers have been fully licensed so far, and dozens more, like MediJean, are in the late stages of approval. MediJean expects to produce 90,000 kilograms of medical marijuana in its first year.

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Commercial medical marijuana producers banking on massive sales under new rules