Pot Farming, Italian Army style

“To the best of my knowledge, it is the only situation in which the ministry of defence of a European country is tasked with such production,” says Marco Perduca, a former senator in Italy and the current United Nations representative for the Nonviolent Radical Party.

Marco Perduca (Image via Flickr user Marco Gentili)

The Army is busy growing its first marijuana crop as part of a government effort to provide an affordable and safe supply of medical cannabinoids for use in the country. The plan was announced in September and the operation is now up and running.

“They allow for medical marijuana use in Italy, but they haven’t had a national cultivation program yet. So they allow for it, but people still have to get it from either the illicit market or set up an informal network to obtain it,” says Amanda Reiman by phone from California. She’s a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the manager of marijuana law and policy for the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses on drug law reform.

A 2013 law that allows doctors to prescribe medical cannabinoids didn’t actually legalize growing marijuana in Italy, but instead allows these products to be imported from other European Union countries, according to Perduca.

“The only products [legally] available are made in the Netherlands and are imported by a couple of companies that eventually distribute them to hospital pharmacies all over the country and to some pharmacies in the bigger cities,” Perduca tells Modern Farmer in an email.

Perduca says back in 2010, when he was a senator, he and a colleague introduced a recommendation to the government to “initiate medical cannabis production to face the growing demand for such a treatment,” but nothing really came of it.

“Despite the very conservative nature of that administration, the government endorsed [our recommendation] but did not adopt any measure to concretely implement it,” he says.

Now, with ever-increasing demand and a lack of supply, “the government has asked the ministries of health and defence to come up with a proposal to allow national production of cannabis for medical purposes,” Perduca says.

Medical marijuana is used to treat a number of conditions and to help patients manage chronic pain.

The current government wants to lower the price of what patients pay for the product, which typically runs as high as 35 euros per gram, to under 15 euros or as low as 5 euros per gram, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

“What ended up happening is the Italian government saw that the market was way too expensive and the quality wasn’t what they would consider appropriate for medical use,” says Reiman.

The army was tapped to run the growing operation because their lab in Florence already had the necessary facilities and security measures in place, according to the BBC.

For now, it’s “a 100 percent state monopoly on the production and distribution of cannabinoids” and “growing marijuana plants is still considered a serious crime, and can lead up to seven years in jail,” says Perduca.

That may change as there’s also an effort by some in the Italian parliament to legalize marijuana for personal use, led by Sen. Benedetto Della Vedova, according to the International Business Times.

Perduca, a fierce and longtime advocate of drug reform, says all over Europe, “reforms have been adopted to progressively” decriminalize personal possession and “policies have been promoted to concentrate police attention elsewhere” instead of maintaining “uselessly punitive and costly” drug laws.