Walk along the street in any large enough town in Britain and you can usually smell how successful, or otherwise, the UK’s ban on cannabis is. However, medicinal cannabis companies still have to follow extremely strict licensing requirements. Phytome’s laboratories may be in one of the most picturesque settings in Britain, but they have hefty security. There are 200kg bombproof doors, ram-raid-resistant wire mesh walls, and no recording devices.
Inside the building, racks of cannabis plants appear nearly black under rows of bright lights carefully tuned to different shades of purple, blue and pink and beyond; ultraviolet and far red light, invisible to the human eye, have the potential to stimulate the growth of useful compounds in the plants. Water, fertiliser and even humidity and carbon dioxide levels are controlled in order to find conditions that will stimulate the plant to produce chemicals that may have promising applications.
“Cannabis is a major area of opportunity,” says Vaughan, suggesting there are as many as 500 chemicals in cannabis plants, compared with about 30 in a herb such as basil. “Most people are focused on THC and CBD.But plants can be unpredictable – particularly if left exposed to the vagaries of Cornish weather. Vaughan hopes that by controlling every possible variable, the company can turn a “herbal product into something that can be produced to high grade, high specification”.
For cannabis, the combination of legal recreational use and medicines is creating a large new market. Global sales of CBD, medical and adult-use cannabis reached $44.2bn in 2022, and could expand to $100.4bn by 2026, according to Prohibition Partners, a cannabis industry consultancy. Lots of people said Cornwall was too remote and you wouldn’t attract the talent. That didn’t deter us