This is National Pain Awareness Week. If you don’t live with pain, the week won’t mean much to you. But if you do, you will know that its effects can range from discomfort to debilitating. It’s a safe bet that 15 per cent of Canadians – the number is probably higher – live with pain. The problem is more acute among seniors. In St. Albert, with a population of 60,000, that 15 per cent translates to 9,000 individuals who live with pain, perhaps from an inherited medical condition, a sports injury, a traffic accident or growing old.
Many of the medicines used to treat pain are derived from poppies, but Canada isn’t into the poppy cultivation business. All the raw material used by Canadian pharmaceutical companies to produce pain medication now comes from poppies grown in other countries – and Glen Metzler thinks that should change. Metzler is an Alberta businessman who thinks this province would be an ideal home for a poppy-based pharmaceutical industry that would boost revenues for farmers, provide a steady supply of processed poppies to Canadian drug makers, spin off hundreds of good jobs and help keep a lid on health-care costs. (The approximate retail value of medication derived from poppies was almost $600 million in 2009 in Canada.)
The cornerstone of Metzler’s plan is something called the thebaine poppy, which, it must be emphasized, is not the opium poppy. You can’t incise the seedpod of a thebaine poppy and make heroin. The thebaine poppy can be used to produce the raw material for medicine but only through a sophisticated processing system. One more thing: the thebaine poppy grows well in the low-humidity climate of southern Alberta, which is where Metzler’s company, API Labs, is running trials that he expects will lay the foundation for a full-blown industry. This year the company grew exactly one acre of thebaine poppies. Next year it will be 20 acres. The goal, within five to seven years, is 1,000 to 5,000 acres with a processing facility.
For Alberta farmers, this would be a good deal. The return on an acre of poppies is three to six times that of wheat or barley. The processing phase – converting the poppies into the raw material for pain medication – would spin off scores of jobs, with more to follow in research and technical positions. Some of that research might produce new drugs that allow pain sufferers to remain at home and out of hospital, reducing the burden of health-care costs. To boot, the seeds from the poppies could be used for poppy-seed oil and such popular treats as poppy-seed cake. Talk about economic diversification.
Metzler has been joined by some prominent supporters in his quest to bring this idea to fruition. Former federal health minister Jake Epp is one of them. So is Lloyd Hickman, a former Mountie with wide experience in security and working with governments. Security is a big issue for Metzler’s company because of the fear – unfounded – that his poppies will become part of the illicit drug trade.
“You can’t get anything from this plant that’s going to make you happy,” he says.
Indeed if you try to make a tea from thebaine poppies, there’s a good chance it will make you ill.
The greater problem is navigating the many government bodies that have an interest in this type of venture, notably Health Canada, Agriculture Canada, Alberta Agriculture, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Fortunately, Metzler is a patient man. He has already been at this project for six years and it may take until the end of the decade to get it up and running.
We should all wish him well, even moreso in St. Albert where 14 per cent of seniors exceeds the provincial average. Living without pain is recognized under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
-30-
