Bush Summit: High hopes for medicinal marijuana industry

Australia’s strict medicinal marijuana production regulations have put producers in a prime position to provide emerging European markets.

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Somewhere in the vicinity of Busselton in Western Australia is the production powerhouse of one of the nation’s lesser known export industries.

In this top secret location, where visitors drive in blindfolded with smartphones turned off, an ASX-listed company is growing marijuana.

And it’s a booming trade thanks to progressive legalisation of the drug for medicinal purposes in Europe, and Australia’s strict protocols around production of the plant.

Meeting those stringent requirements, overseen by the Office of Drug Control and the Therapeutic Goods Administration, has positioned Little Green Pharma to become a global frontrunner in growing the consistently perfect crop to meet the exacting demands of countries like France, which has been using the company’s products in trials and is on the cusp of medicinal cannabis legalisation.

While higher volumes of the plant are grown in countries like the US and Canada, producers in those countries, where use has been legalised in some states, target recreational users and do not meet the requirements of medicinal products.

What Little Green Pharma specialises in is quality control.

A tour of the high-security facility, hidden inside a nondescript shed, is a mix between a walk-through of a neon-lit laboratory, farm, factory and vineyard.

In reality, it is a pharmaceutical operation and conducted with the same hi-tech precision required to manufacture more conventional medicine.

Yet there’s an air of craftsmanship around the process as well.

The passionate way chief executive Paul Long talks about the plants, their products and the techniques used to grow the perfect flower is similar to that of a winemaker talking about his vines. “In our framework, you know exactly what you’re getting; you get a certificate of analysis for every single batch,” Mr Long said.

“You know it’s quality, you know it has been produced in a pharma space like this with no nasties inside the production.”

Little Green Pharma chief executive officer Paul Long on a tour of the company's production facility near Busselton, Western Australia. Photo: Charlie Peel

Little Green Pharma is one of the bigger players in the expanding Australian medicinal marijuana market, already worth about $540m and forecast to reach $700m by 2029.

It also has a large production facility overseas in Denmark, which supplies products to both Europe and Australia.

The company is one of a small handful of approved suppliers of medicinal marijuana, in the form of flowers, oil or vaporisers, to 11 European countries, where doctors prescribe the drug to treat conditions like chronic pain, anxiety and seizures.

Little Green Pharma welcomed the decision by the German parliament in April to remove cannabis from the narcotics list, making it the world’s largest federally legal cannabis market worth an estimated $2.5bn.

Mr Long. Picture: Charlie Peel

With European medicinal cannabis sales expected to increase about 230 per cent over the next four years, Mr Long said Australia’s tightly regulated industry is ready to meet the demand.

“In the June quarter, there was a 44 per cent increase in total imported volume into Germany compared to the quarter before,” Mr Long said.

“We deliver from this site here in Busselton, but also we’ve got a big 30 tonne site in Denmark in Europe, which is just two hours from the (German) border.

“We’re seeing some really big increase in some of our partner orders into Germany, but also into the UK as well.”