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by Stockwatch Business Reporter

The TSX Venture Exchange fell 14.98 points to 751.12 Tuesday, extending the number of consecutive down days to eight. Steve and Gary Mathiesen's halted capital pool shell, Strachan Resources Corp. (SCN), will complete its acquisition of Carl Busby's Lotus Ventures Inc. shortly. The target, which recently applied for a licence to produce medical marijuana under Health Canada's MMPR policy, has closed a $343,500 non-brokered private placement of 1,374,000 shares at 25 cents. Lotus has also already received approval to resume trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange.

Strachan, which has 2.5 million shares outstanding, will issue 21,774,000 shares to Lotus shareholders and then change its name to that of its target. Of those shares, six million will go to Mr. Busby and 3.4 million will go to Carl Correia, the two largest shareholders. Mr. Correia, Lotus's 34-year-old chief operating officer, is in charge of the application process for securing the MMPR licence. He submitted an application to Health Canada on Oct. 17, providing details about the company's employees, facility and quality control plans. He expects that within eight months Health Canada will assess the application, provide feedback and allow the company to proceed according to its plan. Lotus will then have to raise $1.6-million to upgrade and equip its facility. When that is complete, Health Canada will conduct its inspection and, hopefully, issue a licence to Lotus. Assuming everything goes according to plan, which it rarely does for start-ups in new sectors, Mr. Correia anticipates the entire process will take 18 months. For now, Mr. Correia possesses four MMAR licences that he received in 2010, which allow him to grow paltry amounts of medical marijuana at a grow-op facility in the Okanagan Valley. The revenue generated is negligible and the MMAR licences will likely expire next year. For investors who do not wish to wait a minimum of 18 months for Lotus to secure a licence, there are plenty of licensed medical marijuana producers that are already trading on the TSX-V. They are (in the order they listed) Bruce Linton's Tweed Marijuana Inc. (TWD: $2.08), Marc Wayne's Bedrocan Cannabis Corp. (BED: $0.70), Denis Arsenault's OrganiGram Holdings Inc. (OGI: $1.12), Robert Gagnon's T-Bird Pharma Inc. (TPI: $0.50) and Michael Haines's Mettrum Health Corp. (MT: $1.60).

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