Despite product and app bans in the wake of EVALI vaping illness, regulated cannabis 2.0 products are slowly trickling in

San Francisco vaporizer giant PAX Labs is moving ahead with plans to bring refillable vaporizers to the Canadian cannabis market — despite the removal of its app from the App Store and, more recently, vape oil bans in Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador. The bans came after a spate of cases of EVALI, a sometimes-fatal illness attributed to vape oils.

The second wave of regulated cannabis products, which includes infused topicals, edibles and concentrates, have been legal for more than two months. But so far, Aurora medical cannabis consumers are the first and only Canadians to order some of the new formats as provincial suppliers and retail distributors prepare.

For their part, PAX reps have been working with budtenders to show them how to use their new-to-Canada $45 vape model, PAX Era, with workarounds. Even though the sleek, discreet device has no buttons, details like temperature, session-tracking and dosage amount can all be adjusted with different movements and tricks.

“Remember when you played video games as a kid and there would be a secret cheat code, like, ‘left-right-left-right-V-A-star?” said Tim Pellerin, Canadian general manager at PAX Labs, at the Thompson Hotel in Toronto on Dec. 16. “And then you’d have unlimited lives? It’s like that.”

Ironically, the one major function that won’t work without the app is the child-proof lock, which renders the device useless until the owner logs in.

Similar to a Keurig coffee machine, consumers will be able to buy cartridges filled by licensed cultivators from their local retailers. THC and CBD distillate products will start at around $50, with live resin premium products starting at around $80. Cartridges will give you between 200 and 500 hits of cannabis, depending on how big they are.

EVALI has killed six people in Canada and 52 people in the United States. More than 2,400 people have been hospitalized — something Pellerin said the company does not take lightly. But the vape app ban has impacted the wrong people, according to the company.

“I think they did it with the best of intentions, but they didn’t think through who it would impact,” said Jeff Brown, vice president of public policy and communication at PAX. “There are thousands of veterans, patients, who depend on that app to dose themselves — how much am I taking in, how hot is it, and there’s a child-proof lock that doesn’t work without the app. I think they honestly are trying to do the right thing, but didn’t think through how people need an app to help them.”

Vaporizers use high temperatures to heat the cannabinoids in cannabis flower, oil, resin and shatter. It’s cannabis oils for vaping that have been linked to EVALI, and largely attributed to vitamin E acetate in unregulated products. The severity of the illness prompted the provincial product bans and the app removal from the App store.

Brown’s efforts to meet with Apple haven’t been successful.

“It’s been frustrating so far, but we’ve tried a number of different approaches to this thing and it’s been pretty clear that it’s a decision that was made at a very senior level of the company, so we’re still reaching out, still trying to get a meeting to really explain how it impacts the consumers downstream. It’s not a commercial thing; it’s a health, safety and information thing.”

Want to keep up to date on what’s happening in the world of cannabis? Subscribe to the Cannabis Post newsletter for weekly insights into the industry, what insiders will be talking about and content from across the Postmedia Network.