Advocacy groups supporting local medical cannabis development have vowed to bring the Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) to court over patent concerns.
They are calling for a court ruling to force the department to reject requests submitted to patent formulas of marijuana extracts filed by foreign pharmaceutical companies.
The move came after negotiations on Jan 11 in which the DIP refused to drop the remaining seven patent applications concerning marijuana extracts from two Japanese companies. The department had already dropped six after pressure by the activists.
Jittima Sritaporn, head of the legal department at the DIP, told the media the department has to make decisions based on the law and also international treaties including a World Trade Organization agreement on patent regulations.
The group considering court action consists of Biodiversity Sustainable Agriculture Food Sovereignty Action Thailand (Biothai), Rangsit University, the Thai Traditional Medical Council and FTA Watch.
In a statement released on Thursday, the group said it would boycott any further discussions as no officials with authority to decide on the matter had attended the Jan 11 meeting.
More importantly, the group said, the DIP was suspiciously keen to greenlight patent requests filed by GW Pharma and Otsuka, despite the fact that these patent requests are against Section 9 of the intellectual property law which prohibits patenting of innovations deemed a threat to public interest.
The group has been pressuring the DIP since last November after learning scores of patent requests on marijuana extracts have been filed.
It claimed that accepting the requests would prevent local pharmaceutical researchers and traditional Thai medicine practitioners from conducting research with similar extracts to those that are granted patents.
"Despite Thailand having marijuana extract resources and local knowledge, people will end up having to buy marijuana-based drugs at a high price," said Parnthep Pourpongpan, director of the Institute of Integrative Medicine and Anti-Ageing at Rangsit University.