A Chilean municipality harvested legal medical marijuana Tuesday as part of a government-approved pilot project aimed at helping ease pain in cancer patients.

The harvest comes after Chile's first planting of pot for medical uses in October 2014. It is the work of a municipality in the capital of Santiago and the Daya Foundation, a nonprofit group that sponsors pain-relieving therapies.

"We're laying the foundations for what will be the national production of medical cannabis," Daya's president, Ana Maria Gazmuri, said after cutting branches from cannabis plants.

Oil extracted from about half of some 850 plants imported from the Netherlands will be given to 200 patients in the coming months.

Santiago (AFP) - Workers in Chile began harvesting the country's first medical marijuana crop Tuesday, breaking new ground in cancer treatment in a nation where cannabis is outlawed as a hard drug.

With the blessing of local authorities, the Daya Foundation, a charitable group, began harvesting some 400 plants sown last October under a special permit to extract cannabis oil to be given free of charge to 200 cancer patients as pain treatment.

The plants were sown in a small field measuring about 100 square meters (1,100 square feet) in La Florida, an affluent district of the capital Santiago.

They were taken to a heavily guarded enclosure after the harvest, and will be dried and sent to a laboratory for processing.

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Chile's congressional health committee approved a bill Monday that would legalize the cultivation of marijuana for private recreational or medicinal use, sending it to the floor for a full debate.

The bill would take marijuana off the list of hard drugs in the socially conservative country and make it a soft drug like alcohol.

It would allow people over the age of 18 to grow up to six cannabis plants for their own use, or for use by minors if they are patients using the substance as part of a prescribed treatment regimen.

But it would maintain the country's ban on using marijuana in public and limit the amount a person can possess to 10 grams.