If you've been keeping up with Bill C-45, you'll know that the Liberal government wants Canadians to wait up to a whole year after legalization is implemented to be able to legally purchase and use cannabis concentrates and edibles.

While the feds claim they need more time to create legislation (when we all know they could easily lift ideas from places like Colorado or Washington), one B.C.-based licensed producer has found a way around the delay, at least as far as medical patients are concerned.

Canna Farms Limited, a licensed producer based in Hope, announced yesterday that it had created Canada's first legal "whole-plant" cannabis concentrate. 

The concentrate product line, called Canna Kief, is made without using solvents. (For the uninitiated, kief is essentially the finely ground cannabis that builds up in the edges of a grinder.)

Canna Farms explains it well in its April 18 news release: "Canna Kief is a cannabinoid and terpene-rich cannabis powder (commonly known as hash) comprised of a high concentration of trichomes, microscopic resinous glands that contain the active medical ingredients of cannabis, such as THC and CBD."

Kief can be vapourized or smoked on its own, or mixed with other dried cannabis.

The company's first batch of Canna Kief is extracted from Pink Kush, Canna Farms' most popular cultivar (strain). Containing more than 40 percent cannabinoids, it's about twice as potent as the average dried cannabis product currently available through Health Canada's Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR).

“Our novel line of Canna Kief products is an homage to artisanal, small-batch cannabis extraction, originally developed in the Middle East and Asia, and arguably perfected on the West Coast," said Tom Ulanowski, quality assurance person of Canna Farms, in the release. 

Currently, the product is only available to medical patients resgistered with Canna Farms, at an introductory price of $25 per gram.

Canna Farms plans to release additional cultivar-specific varieties of the kief product in high-THC and CBD formulations.