PAHundreds of jobs will soon be up for grabs in Australia after plans for the country’s largest medical cannabis manufacturing plant were approved.
Medicinal cannabis producer LeafCann has been approved for cannabis research and medical cannabis for three years, meaning it can get to work building a $50 million start-up cultivation and processing centre.
As well as doubling the size of the existing research facility in Adelaide, it’ll be the first factory in the world to produce oil from plant genes to distribute to patients.
PixabayConstruction work on the factory is expected to begin next year, creating between 200 and 800 jobs.
However, according to LeafCann co-founder and CEO Elisabetta Faenza, the location of the factory will remain confidential for ‘security’ and ‘commercial reasons’.
As per The Advertiser, Faenza said:
It is the largest manufacturing crop of any Australian licence for medicinal cannabis – so it’s a substantial manufacturing facility that has the capacity to produce many tonnes of extracted oil.
At full capacity the medicinal cannabis produced by LeafCann in South Australia will help treat 160,000 patients a year. We will be the first in the world to do this throughout the entire supply chain and SA is the headquarters of it all.
In Australia alone, the medicinal marijuana industry is expected to be worth $1 billion by 2025.
BigstockJust recently, two cannabis-based medicines used to treat epilepsy and multiple sclerosis (MS) were approved for use by the NHS.
However, facing the rigmarole of actually securing medicinal marijuana, the first major trial of the drug in the UK has launched, with 20,000 patients to test its impact on a range of conditions.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.