A Supreme Court ruling, allowing medical marijuana to be consumed in more ways, has some Maritimers jumping for joy while some in Ottawa are clearly less than impressed.

On Thursday, Canada’s highest court unanimously rejected an appeal from the federal government, a move that will allow medical marijuana to be legally used in everything from cookies and brownies to oils and teas.

“I was the guy doing cartwheels,” says Chris Backer of Lower Sackville, N.S.

He’s had a medical marijuana licence for nearly 10 years, and says this ruling will make a big difference for him.

“I can't digest raw bud, OK, I have Crohn’s disease for example, so there's no way that I could ever get it down,” Backer said.

“I need it to be turned into another format where it’s purified and then I can eat it. Because of that I don't take 15 other pills.”

While he says he expected to move would inevitably happen, he didn’t expect today’s event to unfold as they did.

“I was surprised that it went down as easy as it did. Seven to zero. That's like, that's awesome — they're telling Ottawa something,” Backer said.

Chris Enns, who owns a medicinal marijuana vapour lounge in Halifax, says he had a similar reaction: excited, but also expecting the outcome.

He says the people who come to his lounge suffer from diseases ranging from cancer to epilepsy to arthritis and all stand to benefit because he says dried cannabis doesn’t have much medicinal value.

“Now patients can make extracts, whether that be hashes, or they can make suppositories, edibles, topicals — the scope of cannabis' ability now to treat various medical conditions has been expanded and validated by the Supreme Court of Canada,” Enns said.

Federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose made it clear, on Thursday, she wasn’t among those celebrating the ruling.

“Frankly, I'm outraged by the Supreme Court,” Ambrose said.

“The message that judges, not medical experts, judges have decided that something is a medicine, never in the history of Canada has a drug become a medicine because judges deemed it so,” she said.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Jacqueline Foster