With the price of cannabis, especially herbal cannabis, hurtling upwards people are starting to pay silly prices for cannabis - prices of £250+ per ounce are being quoted. In these desperate financial times it seems that cannabis dealers are determined not to succumb to austerity measures.
But their inflated prices are nothing compared to the prices being charged by GW Pharmaceuticals and Bayer - who were recently granted a licence for their cannabis spray, Sativex. The price to the NHS of this new drug will be £125 for a 10ml vial. Sativex contains THC at a level of 27mg/ml. So a 10ml vial would contain 270mg. Or £125 for just over a quarter of a gram of THC. Or £600 per gram for THC.
Now compare this to an ounce of herbal cannabis. For the sake of argument (and easy maths) think about an ounce (28g) of strong skunk (say 25% THC). That's 7g of THC - probably selling at around £250/ounce. Or £35/g for this THC. Which is a fair bit cheaper.
Of course, there's GW Pharmaceuticals R+D costs to cover - although the original plants were bought from Dutch growers, and Bayers shareholders to pay. And there's the perks for the board.
But when the NHS is so strapped for cash, surely every little helps!
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1 comment:
I really must correct your maths here!
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think about an ounce (28g) of strong skunk (say 25% THC). That's 7g of THC - probably selling at around £250/ounce. Or £35/g for this THC. Which is a fair bit cheaper.
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No it isn't.
25% THC doesn't mean 25% by weight of sample, it means 25% by weight of the oils the plant produces - minus all the vegetable material and water that holds.
28g of killer street skunk would contain far less than 7grm of THC. It would be interesting to know by how much less, but I would almost be willing to bet by an order of magnitude. 1 grm of pure THC is a hell of a high dose actually.
There is a very important distinction between potency and strength. Potency is the amount of THC contained in the oils - ie in the gloops of resin stuck to the herbal material. There may not be much resin on the sample which would make it weak, but what there is may contain a high ratio of THC to everything else. It's therefore possible to have a weak sample of potent cannabis and, equally, a strong sample of low potency weed.
Potency is not strength and does not really equate to dose at all.
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