Technology Specialist at the Medicinal Cannabis Authority Dr. Jean-Saville Cummings while appearing as a guest on VC3’s Roundtable Talk discussed the technological advancements that have been made at the MCA and how those advancements have contributed to the progress being made within the local medicinal cannabis industry.
“From an internal perspective at the MCA, there’s been a huge development, in the opening of the laboratory facility at the authority. It is something that we have spoken about before at length, but overall we’ve been in partnership with a group-the Caribbean gold standards lab-and we now have in St. Vincent, a testing that really gives an advantage to all the operators in St. Vincent.
The facility is now completely open. They have all the equipment that’s required, all the SOPs, that are required, all the technology that is required to do the testing that we need. Testing on raw materials as well as testing on extracting materials, whether it’s creams or tinctures” he said.
Dr. Cummings says that the lab at the Medicinal Cannabis Authority has allowed for the local producers to demonstrate the quality and safety of their products.
The MCA’s Technology Specialist goes on speak about how the technology allows for St. Vincent’s Medicinal Cannabis rollout to be unique when compared to others in the region.
“It is giving us a fantastic opportunity to understand what we are doing and it is really allowing us to show how St. Vincent is different from anywhere else in the Caribbean, really, in terms of how we are rolling this out.
The lab is something that we have here, that, to our understanding, no one else in the Caribbean has a facility like this where everything can be done in one place in terms of testing” he said.
Dr. Jean-Saville Cummings also spoke about the rollout to patients of medicinal cannabis, which he says is not being done elsewhere in the Caribbean.
“The patient access rollout is also something which we alone are doing in terms of getting the data to understand how it is being used, it’s really putting us, putting our operators in a position to understand how best to channel their resources, really for the benefit of the company as well as for the patients here in St. Vincent.
