Paris (AFP)

Emmanuel Macron repeated on Friday "not favorable" to the legalization of recreational cannabis, emphasizing that the Minister of Health was working on the authorization of cannabis for a therapeutic purpose.

The National Assembly gave Friday the go-ahead for an experiment in the medical use of cannabis, as part of the review of the Draft Social Security Budget for 2020.

Asked at a press conference at the end of his trip to Reunion on therapeutic cannabis, around which Reunionese farmers would like to build a sector, Mr. Macron stressed that the executive was "rather favorable to that", that "the Minister of Health (Agnès Buzyn) has taken this subject, is working on it, and in the coming weeks, the next months, we will have an answer".

There must be "first a sanitary authorization led by the Ministry of Health" and as soon as it intervenes, "we will frame and develop it so that it can benefit local producers on our soil ", in Overseas France and metropolitan France, he said, citing in particular the department of Creuse.

On the other hand, he said he was not in favor of "the legalization of cannabis or unsupervised uses" because he "never saw robust studies showing that it did not have any effect on the vigilance especially of the more youth". Therapeutic cannabis, "has virtues in the context of treatment, especially to accompany the treatment of pain," he said.

The deputies voted Friday by an amendment of the rapporteur Olivier Veran (LREM) which authorizes for two years an experiment on 3,000 patients in France of the medical use of cannabis, to which the agency of the drug (ANSM) had already given its downstream.

This experiment will be conducted in hospitals and will involve people suffering from serious diseases - some forms of epilepsy, neuropathic pain, side effects of chemotherapy, palliative care or uncontrolled muscle contractions of multiple sclerosis - for which the derivatives cannabis may be an additional therapeutic contribution.

© 2019 AFP