A Jersey cannabis testing lab that promised to bring pharmaceutical-grade rigour to the island’s emerging medicinal market is facing having its assets seized.
Launched during the early excitement around the Jersey’s emerging medicinal cannabis market five years ago, the business aimed to support the industry by providing scientific assurance for producers, consumers, and regulatory bodies.
But it’s now been confirmed that Jersey Pharm Labs has ceased trading, with creditors due to meet later this month.
“Lack of investor confidence and low demand”
Approached by Express for comment, a spokesperson for the company explained: “The business closed due to a lack of investor confidence and low demand for cannabis testing in Jersey, making it unsustainable for a full-time lab.”
A meeting of the laboratory’s creditors has been scheduled for Monday (19 May) at 4 Wharf Street, and Begbies Traynor have been proposed as liquidators of the company.
The Viscount’s Department has also published a notice that it intends to seize “all moveable assets” from the Le Quai d’Auvergne-based business, with a final date to be confirmed.
Bringing “rigour” to an “emerging field”
Before its website was taken offline, Jersey Pharm Labs advertised a comprehensive list of services, including potency checks, contamination and moisture testing, and genetic analysis to support clone breeding and plant optimisation. It also claimed to assist with regulatory licensing and even forensic or criminal proceedings.
The company said its mission was to ensure “public safety and security by conducting rigorous scientific analysis of all cannabis medical products and extracts”. It aimed to “meet or exceed” international testing standards, and pledged to keep its results “free from bias and outside influence”.
“Having assurances that the cannabis product you buy, grow or license meets the high standards of the pharmaceutical industry ensures that you, your clients or the public at large can be satisfied that this emerging field is being approached with the rigour that it requires. As a business, whether it’s providing your clients with independent certification of the product, analysing your processes to aid with optimisation, testing technological advances, genetic clone selection or assistance in regulation and license issues JPL can support you,” the website read.
Early optimism… and challenges
Registered five years ago, JPL was one of several ventures launched during early waves of optimism that Jersey would be able to gain competitive advantage by being among the first jurisdictions to embrace medicinal cannabis as a legitimate economic sector with huge potential to attract inward investment and diversify the island’s economy.
Back in 2019, then-Economic Development Minister Lyndon Farnham, Jersey’s current Chief Minister, told a Toronto conference of Jersey’s vision to sit at the “forefront” of the European market.
Development of the sector has since stalled, however, with limited access to export markets, regulatory hurdles, and investor caution all cited as barriers to growth.
Between 2016 and 2023, the sector was reported to have brought up to £60m in inward investment to Jersey.
This was chiefly in the form of construction of the cannabis farms, with Economic Development Minister Kirsten Morel explaining at the time: “Because we have a high regulatory bar, it is not possible to create a cannabis farm without spending millions of pounds.”
But those “high upfront costs” meant the return to the businesses has been limited, with Treasury Minister Elaine Millar revealing last year that that “fewer than 12 companies who identified they received income in 2022 as a licensed cannabis cultivator had a positive tax liability for that year”.
Despite hundreds of thousands of taxpayer pounds being spent on consultancy and other work to lay the foundations for the industry, it also emerged last year that “resource constraints” had halted government’s development of a dedicated strategy for growing and supporting the sector.
Developing the industry has not dropped off the Economic Development’s radar altogether, however, with cannabis now likely to be part of a broader plan to grow Jersey’s pharmaceutical and medical technology credentials.
Speaking to Connect Magazine in February, Deputy Morel revealed that government was getting together a “business cluster” of medical companies that had come to Jersey following interest generated by the cannabis sector.
“We’ve got entrepreneurs in Jersey working in different areas of medical technology, but often around plants or fungi, and using them as research to develop pharmaceuticals in some way, shape or form,” he said.
“I think that speaks again to that environmentally-friendly side of life, where people want to break away from ‘Big Pharma’, ‘Big Prescription’, and change to something else.”
Read the full interview below or via the Bailiwick Express app…