Grow Life 420

Amid her campaign for Congress, the wife of one of the most prominent voices advocating for keeping marijuana illegal says that she supports federally reclassifying cannabis from its current restrictive status.

Amy Kennedy is one of the Democratic candidates for Congress seeking to unseat Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, after he flipped his party affiliation to Republican and pledged his “undying support” for President Trump.

Kennedy’s husband is Patrick Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island and a co-founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), the nation’s leading cannabis prohibitionist group.

Current candidate Kennedy, like SAM, opposes broad marijuana legalization—but she also disagrees with the group’s platform on at least one key point. Kennedy wants marijuana removed from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, she recently told The Press of Atlantic City. That departs from SAM doctrine, which calls rescheduling “neither necessary nor desirable.”

As far as SAM is concerned, even modest rescheduling is still a step too far and “would do nothing to allow more cannabis-­based medicines.”

In a statement provided to Marijuana Moment by a spokesman, SAM President Kevin Sabet, who cofounded the group with Patrick Kennedy, rejected the idea of any conflict.

“Ms. Kennedy’s position against marijuana commercialization and in favor of research is consistent with SAM’s and the American Medical Association,” Sabet said. “SAM has helped write legislation to create a new schedule for marijuana in order to encourage research while not legalizing, and we are working with a number of campaigns from both parties on smart marijuana policies.”

Kennedy’s campaign did not respond to Marijuana Moment’s request for comment on this story.

SAM policy calls for a near-total departure from existing medical cannabis programs implemented by the states. State-licensed cultivation, manufacturing and dispensaries would be replaced by federally authorized “non-psychoactive,” “non-smoked” and “yet-to-be-approved” components of marijuana, and not the plant itself.

Experts have indicated that providing a pathway for any such system would require additional research. But as long as marijuana remains in Schedule I, such studies will prove challenging, as scientists must go through numerous hoops to lawfully investigate the plant’s effects.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), acknowledged last year that the legal status of cannabis makes research “very difficult.”

For years, SAM has been insisting that Schedule I is not a barrier to cannabis research. But Sabet, the group’s president, serves on the the Board of Scientific Advisors for another group called Friends of the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, a coalition of other anti-legalization health advocates and researchers that has argued in congressional submissions that cannabis’s Schedule I status does in fact impede studies.

Kennedy, the current congressional candidate, also backs decriminalizing marijuana possession as well as expunging prior cannabis convictions—positions backed to some degree by the organization her husband cofounded.

“First we should move to decriminalize, and then do the research and see where that takes us,” she said, according to The Press of Atlantic City. “I’m mostly worried about a for-profit industry [selling marijuana] without having done the research, and the impact it would have. We want to make sure our tax dollars don’t have to go back into our public health.”

SAM has called for treating marijuana possession as a “civil offense” but also says that people caught with it should be “subject to a mandatory health screening and marijuana-education program as appropriate.” The group also floats referring such individuals to treatment programs and says they “could even be monitored for 6-12 months in a probation program designed to prevent further drug use.”

It’s not clear if Kennedy wants to force cannabis consumers who encounter police to jump through all of those hoops, or if she supports having them simply cited and fined as is the case in many states with decriminalization policies.

SAM’s position on expungement is somewhat inconsistent. One part of its website broadly backs “expungement of any personal record regarding possession of small amounts of marijuana” but another recommends states adopt a more restrictive approach providing only for “automatic expungement for first-time offenders who complete treatment or education program without further violations within one year.”

When it comes to medical cannabis, rather than the total repeal-and-replace of existing and popular medical cannabis programs backed by SAM, Kennedy said she supports having health insurance providers cover the often-steep cost of medical marijuana—provided, of course, medical research supports the idea that cannabis is beneficial.

“If we’re saying it has a benefit, let’s get the evidence-based research and get it covered,” she said.

But bolstering research in a significant way would almost certainly require a change in federal law that her husband’s creation, SAM, staunchly opposes. The organization insists that research is possible within the status quo.

SAM also strongly opposes the way in which medical cannabis is administered in states such New Jersey.

“Medical marijuana should really only be about bringing relief to the sick and dying, and it should be done in a responsible manner that formulates the active components of the drug in a non-­smoked form that delivers a defined dose,” the organization’s website states. “However, in most states with medical marijuana laws, it has primarily become a license for the state-sanctioned use of a drug by most anyone who desires it.”

Although Kennedy backs certain modest reforms, her opposition to legalization in a primary field of other Democratic candidates who openly back the idea—which, despite campaign trail promises from New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) to end prohibition, has yet to happen in the Garden State—makes here perhaps the most conservative on marijuana policy.

Even the now-GOP incumbent Drew appears to back the idea of easing restrictions on research.

“We are quite sure now…that medical marijuana, if used properly, can certainly help people,” he told the local newspaper. “I have supported legalizing medical marijuana and expanding its use in a medical sense, as well as enabling more research to occur.”

He also backs decriminalization, though like Kennedy opposes broad legalization. “I just don’t know that we need another recreational drug,” he said. “And I don’t think it will help urban areas.”

In any case, Kennedy’s support for rescheduling in order to bolster research does make her more progressive on cannabis than the organization her husband, himself a former member of Congress, founded.

While Amy Kennedy’s departure from the SAM platform is notable, she isn’t the only Kennedy who sees a need for reform where Patrick Kennedy’s SAM does not. Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) announced last year that he’s in favor of cannabis legalization after previously standing against the policy change and unsuccessfully campaigning to defeat a 2016 ballot measure to end prohibition in his state.

The congressman is mounting a primary challenge to unseat Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and has transformed from a legalization skeptic to a supporter.

New York Governor Will Visit Legal Marijuana States To Take Lessons Back Home

The post Wife Of Prohibitionist Group Co-Founder Backs Reclassifying Marijuana In Congressional Bid appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

When people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) consume more medical marijuana they tend to use fewer prescription drugs, including powerful, habit-forming psychostimulants, according to a new study.

Patients who used medical cannabis components—cannabinoids themselves as well as terpenes— also “reported a higher occurrence of stopping all ADHD medications,” the researchers, whose findings were published late last month in the Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, wrote.

“In this study, we demonstrated that patients treated with [medical cannabis] stopped their ADHD medications, especially in the high MC dose and in the low ADHD symptoms frequency subgroups.”

Specifically, the study found that the cannabinoid CBN, or cannabinol, which is found in the plant in only trace amounts, seemed to trigger the best results—though they conceded that “more studies are needed in order to fully understand” if cannabis and its constituents can be a workable ADHD treatment.

“These results, although not causal, might shed light on the potential beneficial effects of [medical cannabis] on ADHD symptom severity and motivate future prospective studies in order to validate our results,” the researchers concluded, “and perhaps even consider making ADHD an approved indication” for medical cannabis where it is legal.

The team collected data from 53 Israeli medical cannabis patients in an existing database who had previously agreed to participate in surveys and who also had an ADHD diagnosis. Thirty-seven of the 53 patients suffered from some from of mental health condition.

Participants were asked to self-report monthly doses, how they consumed cannabis, the manufacturer or grower and the cultivar name (or strain) between October 2019 and January 2020.

“These findings reveal that the higher-dose consumption of [medical cannabis] components (phyto-cannabinoids and terpenes) is associated with ADHD medication reduction.”

This is a departure from previous research into ADHD and cannabis, the researchers noted. Prior studies had “considered cannabis as a single product in ADHD research, disregarding its inherent complexities and variability between cultivars and combinations of cultivars,” they wrote.

Most patients had previously obtained medical cannabis licenses (the terminology used in Israel) for chronic pain or cancer treatment rather than neurological disorders that co-exist with ADHD.

Forty-seven patients in the study, which was funded by the Evelyn Gruss Lipper Charitable Foundation, reported either smoking or vaporizing their cannabis.

The cannabis consumers were divided into two subgroups: high dose and low dose. Cultivar combinations were complicated: There were 27 different combinations of varieties but, in addition to CBN, the cannabinoids most associated with reduced or eliminated ADHD medication use including THC, THCV and CBD.

Exactly how various combinations of cannabinoids and terpenes “modulate the circuitry involved in both ADHD and comorbid psychiatric conditions” is still unclear, the researchers said. But the study also suggests that finding the proper dose and the proper cultivar—and cultivar combination—may require significant experimentation on the part of the patient.

And patients in Israel enjoy more reliable access to more regulated cultivars than patients anywhere else in the world—suggesting that most American patients, with a basic understanding of THC and CBD and not a lot else, still have a ways to go.

“This indicates a more complex story than simply stratifying treatment based on THC and CBD alone,” the researchers wrote.

Businesses Are More Profitable And Innovative In States With Legal Marijuana, Study Finds

The post Medical Marijuana Patients With ADHD Use Fewer Prescription Drugs, Study Finds appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

“Cannabis cures cancer” is a false and dangerous statement — for now.

It’s false because although some research suggests compounds in cannabis may trigger cell death in some human tumors, a definitive link is far from clinically proven. And it is dangerous, because credulous people have been taken by false promises that cannabis can cure cancer — the leading example of weed-related fake news, mind you— and suffer ill health and criminal justice consequences as a result.

This is the disclaimer and the context necessary to frame a blog post about this recent study, in which researchers have found evidence suggesting that CBD, or cannabidiol, might in fact help certain cancer drugs in their mission to kill certain cancers. If true — a very large if, but a strong possibility! — this is very huge, and one more step towards removing the “for now” qualifier above.

Aware of the anti-inflammatory and other potential healing benefits of CBD, one of the cannabinoids present in cannabis (and now present in just about everything, from cosmetics to turmeric lattes to brownies, because of this awareness) oncology researchers at the Korea University College of Medicine in Seoul, South Korea decided to pair CBD with a common cancer treatment.

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide, with 1.4 million new cases diagnoses worldwide every year. The researchers exposed human colorectal cancer cells isolated in a lab (that is, in a dish and not a human) to a treatment called TRAIL, or TNF-Related Apostosis Inducing Ligand — a protein that has become increasingly popular in oncology circles for its apparent ability to trigger apostosis (death) in certain cancer cells — as well as CBD.

The CBD “significantly increased apoptosis” compared to TRAIL by itself, according to the researchers, whose findings were published May 9 in the journal Cancers.

“Our studies demonstrate that cannabidiol enhances TRAIL-induced apoptosis… and suggests that cannabidiol is a novel agent for increasing sensitivity to TRAIL,” wrote the researchers, adding that “we conclude that the combination of cannabidiol and TRAIL is a significant potential therapy” for sufferers of colorectal cancer.

This is no small breakthrough, the researchers noted.

“To the best of our knowledge,” they wrote, “this is the first report that cannabidiol induces significant TRAIL-induced apoptosis of colorectal cancer cells,” noting that earlier reports suggested that a different protein response was responsible for cancer-cell death.

That sounds great, but it’s a wee more complicated. Specifically, CBD seemed to aid the ability of a particular TRAIL receptor, called DR5 — for “death receptor 5” — to bind to cancer cells and kill them dead.

Colorectal cancers aren’t the only cancers that CBD puts on the run. “Cannabidiol has shown the ability to inhibit proliferation, angiogenesis, and metastasis in various cancers, including colorectal, breast, brain, prostate, and lung cancer,” the researchers noted. So should you try CBD if you have cancer? Sure, why not — but, as this study made abundantly clear, in no way is cannabis a replacement for conventional cancer therapies. Rather, it is a supplement.

For a long time, cannabis’s main aid in cancer cases, in addition to pain relief, was appetite stimulation. Treatments like chemotherapy wreck your appetite, and it is very difficult for a malnourished body to healthy. This study is yet another signal, and a very strong one, that cannabis has more power than that, and it likely won’t be the last.

TELL US, do you know anyone who’s used cannabis while fighting cancer?

The post Study: CBD May Help Cancer Drugs Kill Certain Cancer Cells appeared first on Cannabis Now.

Let’s hear it for Oregon, where recreational cannabis is providing an ongoing lesson in elementary economics and the role of government in the marketplace.

Also, let’s hear it for Oregon, where the state’s cannabis producers have grown and processed so much product — a six or a seven-year supply, depending on who you ask, and that’s if every single plant currently under the lights or the sun were ripped out root-and-stem and never seen again. In Oregon, consumers are enjoying record-low prices.

The state’s Biblical cannabis oversupply is lusted after greedily by consumers and patients in places like Canada and in Louisiana, where production hasn’t quite yet scaled up to meet demand for recreational users or patients, respectively.

But in the meantime, the state’s cannabis market crash is less a moral lesson and more a commercial emergency that’s prompting some government intervention.

With the state drowning in so much unsold cannabis and demand for the plant at a nadir, there would not seem to be much incentive for more entrepreneurs and more companies to acquire more grow licenses to add to the problem.

Just in case there were any such lunatics, the Oregon state Senate in late April approved a plan to freeze cannabis production at current levels for two years.

Growers with existing licenses — the growers who caused this problem — will be able to continue causing the problem should they wish; they’ll be able to renew their licenses and continue growing more cannabis than the market needs. Anyone else wishing to enter the crowded market will have to wait at least two years to apply for a license to grow a product that will be sold at bargain-basement rates.

Even this limited step did not come easy. Oregon lawmakers, mostly Republicans from the state’s rural eastern areas (where commercial cannabis is far less welcome than in urban areas like Portland) rejected an earlier version of government-imposed market limits on Oregon cannabis production in favor of letting “the free market” decide, as the Associated Press reported.

(A brief note on that: Anyone with the idea that cannabis enjoys a free market anywhere at the moment, or at any time in its brief history, might want to consider the artificial limits on licenses issued by states, the strict local requirements would-be cannabis producers have to abide by in order to even apply for a license, the exorbitant application fees, and the unique and byzantine tax structure applied to cannabis sales.)

Will it work? Something had to be done, and something is better than nothing, but whether it will help producers staring at bulging warehouses, overdue bills, and dispensary clients offering them slim percentages of the asking prices their business plans relied upon is another question.

The best hope for producers in Oregon is the legalization of interstate trade, which would allow patients and consumers in medical and recreational states access to a place with an overabundance. That, in effect, would be the “free market” and if Republican lawmakers in Oregon or elsewhere were truly serious about their conservative principles, that’s what they’d be pushing for rather than the much larger government interventions of prohibited interstate trade.

In the meantime, Oregon will remain a lesson for the cannabis industry: Too much cannabis is a very good thing for the consumer only.

TELL US, have you ever been in a situation where you had too much cannabis?

Presidential candidates can be tough on climate change — by some metrics, they must be — but anyone wanting to be president must also say a few nice things about coal. This is because in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two states any would-be president almost certainly must win, coal is equated with decent work.

Such appeals are mostly a nostalgic technique, as only 53,000 Americans work in the coal industry today. This is a fraction of the jobs created by the cannabis industry, for which 2018 was a year of record growth. As The New York Times reported over the weekend, as many as 300,000 Americans now work in the cannabis industry. If current trends continue, that figure could eclipse the million-worker mark by decade’s end.

Marijuana-sector jobs increased by 44 percent last year, according to Leafly. In Florida, cannabis-industry jobs spiked by 703 percent alone, an increase that tracked with a tripling of that state’s medical-marijuana patient base. If Florida were to legalize cannabis for adults over 21, well — look out, LinkedIn!

But what are these jobs? The Times has an answer, and it’s not entirely encouraging.

While exact numbers are elusive, as the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics does not yet have a cannabis-industry specific cut-out, it appears most cannabis jobs “are on the lower end of the pay scale,” the newspaper reported. These are the unskilled labor and low-skill retail jobs, the trimmers who do “rote agricultural work” for “$10 to $15 an hour” and the “budtenders” who make “about $25,000” a year, the newspaper reported.

If you have one of these jobs, you may make a little more, maybe closer to the salary survey published in early April by Fortune. If you do, chances are you live in a city like Los Angeles, Seattle or Oakland, where the egregious cost of living eats up any salary increase you enjoy over a counterpart in Nevada or Ohio or Arizona.

This is not to say that there are not good jobs in cannabis. There are! They are just not that many of them — and they’re going to people who already had good gigs in other sectors outside of cannabis. In fact, having a job outside of cannabis is the way to get a very good job inside of cannabis, as per the Times.

“For upper-level managers and executives, companies say they prefer candidates with a background in highly regulated industries like alcohol or pharmaceuticals,” the newspaper said.

The Times mentions a few of these folks. There’s David Dancer, who worked in marketing for Charles Schwab before MedMen recruited him to be their chief marketing officer. He is now producing “slick videos” and doing the labor of making cannabis attractive to people who do not use cannabis (like people who might have been attracted to investing with Charles Schwab, for example). At Oakland’s Harborside, a household name in California cannabis for more than a decade, the new chief operating officer is an attorney whose resume lists jobs in real-estate development.

There is also increasing demand for “chemists, software engineers and nurses,” the newspaper reported — which is to say there is room for educated people with white-collar jobs. These jobs are available for anyone with the opportunity to attain education, maybe at one of the universities offering cannabis-specific concentrations in one of these traditional fields.

But if you are a budtender or a trimmer, your career track is limited — as are your earnings, even as the cannabis industry continues to balloon into an economic force measured in the tens of billions. This is the caveat that every breathless report touting the marijuana industry’s job-machine must carry. There are jobs, but there are not a lot of great jobs — and if there is a great job, it’s held by someone poached from another good job somewhere else.

Okay, but so what? What this means is that cannabis looks like America, where wealth is concentrated at the privileged top and a good job requires a good education or good connections — in other words, privilege. This is not the cannabis industry’s fault. Cannabis has worked very hard to assimilate and to become part of society — and has not always succeeded, even with all of these billions — and this is what society looks like.

So, about those coal jobs. Why were they good, why do they carry such nostalgic appeal, why must every Democratic presidential candidate tread very lightly in Appalachia while Donald Trump cooks up wild fantasies about coal’s “resurgence”? They were good in part because they were union jobs. It is not an accident that the militant and successful strike by teachers happened in coal country — this was how their great-grandparents won decent jobs in the mines.

Will that happen in cannabis? Maybe, but probably not. Most union jobs in the United States in 2019 are in the private sector.

In this way, cannabis just isn’t so special, but isn’t that what legalization wanted all along?

TELL US, do you want to work in the cannabis industry?

The post The Cannabis Industry Has Lots of Jobs, But Few Are High-Paying appeared first on Cannabis Now.

Every year, tens of thousands of people go to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on April 20. Though sometimes there are fights and (very often) the revelers leave lots of trash behind (as other partiers do in other parks every time the weather is nice), 420 at Hippie Hill is generally a reasonable sane affair. People show up, people get extremely stoned, people go home.

One thing that does not happen at 420 in San Francisco are opiate overdoses. Yet for some reason, both a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as well as a captain in the San Francisco Police Department chose to add the threat of opiate overdoses into the mix.

And as KPIX and SF Weekly reported, claims from both Supervisor Vallie Brown and SF Police Captain Una Bailey that “fentanyl-laced marijuana” caused havoc at 420 last year were made with absolutely no factual basis.

By now, the days leading up to 420 in San Francisco follow a familiar and predictable ritual. There are neighborhood concerns about traffic and crowds. There is hoopla over fences and smoking. There is a press conference in which everyone is exhorted to behave. The event happens, and 350 days later, the whole thing repeats itself.

There was one minor hiccup at 420 in 2018. According to a post-fete report published on ABC-7, paramedics revived “several” people near the park with Narcan for a possible opiate overdose. This means they might have ingested fentanyl. They also might not have.

Nowhere in the press report was it suggested or even implied that they ingested cannabis laced with fentanyl — which, thus far, has been nothing more than a myth peddled across the country by anti-legalization zealots, including the most reactionary members of the Trump White House.

According to more than one drug expert, fentanyl-laced marijuana is also a chemical marvel: the two substances require different temperatures to become activated.

Yet by the time the lead-up for 2019 came around, both Bailey and Brown took pains to tell the public that cannabis sold to 420 attendees last year had fentanyl.

“Please do not buy your cannabis on the street. A lot of it was laced with fentanyl. We know that is deadly,” Brown said at the pre-420 press conference, according to KPIX.

In her e-mail newsletter disseminated to area residents — often the main method in which both reporters and members of the public hear from police — Bailey, the SFPD captain, did exhort 420 attendees to buy cannabis from licensed vendors. That was nice, but her reasoning was not.

“Buying marijuana on the street and not from a legal vendor exposes

you to marijuana that may be laced with other drugs,” Bailey wrote. “Last year we had numerous attendees pass out form using marijuana laced with fentanyl.”

Here is the genealogy: “Several” people were revived with Narcan in 2018, after consuming an unknown drug. A year later, “several” people somehow became “numerous” individuals, all of whom smoked fen-laced weed — a narrative that, after it was spread by police and elected officials, was quickly debunked by health experts.

“I know that’s how it’s been reported, but I don’t think we know how people consumed, or got exposed to the opioids that they did,” Tomas Aragón, a physician and a top official at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, told CBS SF’s Wilson Walker.

SF Weekly dug a little deeper and discovered that Bailey and Brown had even less of a leg to stand on than a sloppy interpretation of a year-old news article. According to the paper, neither SF DPH nor the SF Fire Department had any record of fentanyl overdoses on Hippie Hill in either 2018 or 2019.

One reason why, the newspaper reported, is that fentanyl can’t be smoked like marijuana is smoked. Direct application to flame, as is done when a joint is smoked, destroys the fentanyl. “It’s not even actually possible to get high from smoking it that way,” said Eliza Wheeler from the local Harm Reduction Coalition, which advocates for hard-drug users.

Opiates are a very big deal in San Francisco and many other places in America. More than 70,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of these were caused by opiates.

Why would authorities choose to draw attention away from actual opiate overdoses with demonstrably false statements like this — and why would they do so in San Francisco? Neither Brown nor SFPD responded to SF Weekly’s questions, and Bailey’s newsletter, with its false hysteria, remains online.

TELL US, have you ever encountered “laced” cannabis?

The post San Francisco’s Great 420 Lie: Marijuana-Laced Fentanyl appeared first on Cannabis Now.

David Bronner’s family business is a cannabis business. It always was, even through the worst of cannabis prohibition. 

The Bronners are famous the world over for soap, made special with a particular magic ingredient. You know them because of David Bronner’s grandfather, one Emanuel Bronner. Emanuel Bronner was a bit of an eccentric. He believed soaps containing hemp oil — rich in omega-3 fatty acids that aid lathering without drying out the skin — were powerful and awesome enough to qualify as “magic soap.” 

Thus the world came to have Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, and between their indisputable quality and their famously verbose label extolling the worldview of their creator, these soaps are the bath item every crunchy household cannot live, bathe or mop the floors without.

But in the following decades, as the soap’s magic ingredient became a banned substance, David Bronner became an activist as well as an extraordinarily successful businessman. And now that legalization is on the rise, starting on May 7, the family business will add a recreational cannabis enterprise to its list of endeavors — and a responsible recreational cannabis enterprise at that.

A Brand-New Bronner’s Chapter

An obvious advocate of marijuana legalization who backed up his advocacy with $5 million of material support for legalization pushes since 2001, David Bronner also put his body on the line for the cause. 

In 2012,  he staged a protest in front of the White House with hemp plants. At the time, hemp plants were the only commodity legal to possess, process, sell and import into the United States but illegal to cultivate — yet sales of Dr. Bronner’s Soaps grew from $4 million in 1998 to $111 million in 2017, according to the company website.

Sourcing hemp from outside of the United States was a particular silliness that ended in December, when President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill into law. And with the hemp war mostly won, what better project to take up but selling recreational cannabis under the same broad label?

The company announced Monday that Bronner will sell sun-grown cannabis sold under the brand name Brother David’s. The bud itself will be sourced and distributed by Flow Kana, the Mendocino County-based, eco-friendly cannabis brand and is set to hit the shelves at “select dispensaries” in the Bay Area on that May 7 start date.

Sales will begin in Southern California later that month, as Ganjapreneur reported.

Of course, dispensary shelves are already stuffed full of premium branded cannabis products. What makes Brother David’s different, special or even… magic? Well, mostly because it’s not commercial-grade mids grown in a pollution-producing indoor factory farm.

Now that commercial cannabis is legal, “we need to advance consumer and environmental interests by implementing regenerative organic agriculture in the cannabis industry,” Bronner said. “Brother David’s provides an alternative to the chemical and fossil-fuel intensive industrial ag model being adopted by many corporations in the cannabis industry. As society moves closer and closer toward the federal legalization of cannabis, we need to chart a new course before it’s too late.”

To that end, the launch of Dr. Bronner’s weed coincides with the premiere of a new cannabis-certification brand, called Sun and Earth. Anything with the Sun and Earth label is supposed to be grown with the environment in mind, under the sun and in “carefully tended living soils.” 

Thus Brother David’s cannabis is supposed to be the very, very good stuff, sourced from farmers in Flow Kana’s network, and grown according to these strict and very happy standards. Having such cannabis sold under the Brother David label — that is, under the broad umbrella of Dr. Bronner’s — will then help keep responsible farmers in business, while promoting sustainable cannabis production practices. Nice!

TELL US, do you support sustainably farmed cannabis? 

The post The Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap of Cannabis Is… Dr. Bronner’s Cannabis appeared first on Cannabis Now.

Cannabis-infused dishes are popular, but not extremely popular, as in: “Wow! I could eat this every day, in the way I eat breakfast or drink coffee!” More like popular as in cronuts, or matcha or any other of-the-moment food trend.

This is partially because you can only eat so many low-dose THC marshmallows and salmon blinis — although they are delicious! — before you descend into a dissociative delirium. But it’s mostly because THC products are illegal in most states, and remain strictly regulated in the states where you can legally buy cannabis products in stores.

But fear not, because thanks to Donald Trump and the 2019 Farm Bill, enterprising chefs can still serve their signature dishes in an innovative and trendy way that isn’t just 420 friendly but also 24/7/365 friendly (and also less them upcharge diners). They just have to add CBD, the everyday, all-day, effectively legal cannabinoid.

As CNBC reported recently, 75% of mainstream American chefs surveyed by the National Restaurant Association and the American Culinary Association believe that CBD (and cannabis)-infused food will be extremely popular in 2019, on par with burger joints adding Impossible-branded, plant-based proteins to their menus.

This only confirms what many already know to be true because, like lemonade, CBD was a popular thing to put in food — and it still is. 

The cannabinoid is already among the hottest add-ons in wellness, cosmetics and food — and has remained so despite warnings from the federal Food and Drug Administration and limited “crackdowns” from regulators and health inspectors in states where recreational cannabis is legal, like California, and where it is not, like New York. Authorities have instructed merchants and restauranteurs to remove certain CBD-infused products from menus and shelves and have also instructed certain unscrupulous actors to quit marketing CBD products with patent-medicine-level promises of miraculous cures.

AS CNBC noted, this heat has driven at least some of the demand for CBD-infused food and beverages underground and has compelled other entrepreneurs more concerned about being late than respecting the law to the punch to go ahead with their CBD treats.

“There’s people out there that are willing to risk not being in compliance with local and other regulations in order to not risk being left behind,” Donna Hood Crecca, a principal at food-service industry B2B platform Technomic, told CNBC.

Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s outgoing FDA chief, was at least receptive to the CBD craze and the agency has set its first hearings for allowing CBD to be added to food and drinks on May 31. 

However, the agency has plenty else to worry about, such as regulating —or banning, or doing something — about much more popular e-cigarette brands, like the ubiquitous JUUL.

In the meantime, many bars, coffee shops and restaurants appear willing to risk ire from regulators by slipping CBD into mocktails and coffee drinks, smoothies and other products. And CBD-infused brownies remain staples in bodegas, delis, and even mainstream grocery stores in big cities like New York, where — were you so inclined — you can spend $8 or more for a lemonade, “enhanced” with 15 milligrams of hemp-derived CBD.

Given CBD’s popularity and the relative ease with which the cannabinoid can be isolated from abundant raw plant material, “When will CBD be in everything?” is a fair question. It easily could be soon. Absolutely nothing is stopping consumers from demanding it and the market from providing it — not Trump, not the FDA, nor health inspectors, try as they may.

And what’s bad about that? Nothing, really, aside from general distaste for things trendy and popular and marketed in less-than-straightforward ways. Which, if and when CBD becomes a standard additive, will be a thing of the past. But lament not. For special occasions, like 420, we’ll always have CBD.

TELL US, what’s your favorite CBD-infused treat?

The post Why American Chefs Are So Obsessed With Putting CBD in Everything appeared first on Cannabis Now.

“Under the influence of marihuana changes in personality as shown by alterations in test performance are slight. … The personality changes observed… demonstrate that the subject experiences some reduction in , less objectivity in evaluating situations, less aggression, more self-confidence and a generally more favorable attitude toward himself. These reactions can be ascribed to two main causes, namely, an increased feeling of relaxation and disinhibition and increased self-confidence.”

– The LaGuardia Committee Report: The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York

Whomever he or she may be, the mayor of New York City wields significant power —more power, both hard and soft, than some heads of state.

New York’s mayor has influence over the city’s abundant resources: its political and cultural influence, and its intellectual institutions. New York’s mayor could choose to crack down on gay liberation just as he or she could choose to tolerate, or tacitly support, drug-policy reform rallies like 420 celebrations or cannabis freedom days.

As one of New York’s most prominent mayors once demonstrated, he or she may also have enough power, or influence, or charisma, or willingness to wield all of the above in a benevolent way, to challenge the federal government — and to win, at least intellectually. 

As adults 21 and over in 10 states observe this April 20 with the legal right to consume cannabis recreationally, those in the other remaining 40 should look to the past for an object lesson on how to advance national policy forward — locally, if necessary.

Fiorello LaGuardia served three terms as Mayor of New York City, from 1934 to 1945. Strong-willed, imperious, and attention-seeking, LaGuardia is credited with re-imagining and modernizing the country’s largest city amid difficult circumstances: the Great Depression and New Deal, World War II and the very beginning of the drug war.

In this, LaGuardia and New York stand out. Under LaGuardia, New York was, briefly, America’s most cannabis-friendly city. LaGuardia used New York’s political and cultural influence — and its institutions — to challenge and to debunk the federal government’s justification for marijuana prohibition.

Under LaGuardia, the New York Academy of Medicine published research that directly contradicted claims that cannabis caused crime, or psychosis, or any of the other myriad of fairy tales concocted(for purely political reasons) by the country’s nascent class of drug warriors.

These myths — that marijuana is a gateway drug, that marijuana availability leads to youth use, that marijuana is addictive, and so on — should all sound familiar, as they are repeated today, with roughly the same justification.

Launched in 1939 but not published until late April of 1944 (75 years ago this month) what’s known as The LaGuardia Committee Report was “one of the first” scientific reviews of the effects of cannabis on humans. In what should sound familiar, researchers found that “the sociological, psychological, and medical ills commonly attributed to marihuana have been found to be exaggerated.”

Most of those exaggerations came from one source in particular. Henry Anslinger, the country’s first drug czar and the antagonist in any drug-policy reform tale, spent most of the 1930s promoting marijuana as a deadly drug with a direct connection to crime — which would conveniently justify more power and funding for his nascent Bureau of Narcotics.

With Anslinger stumping around the country, attributing — without research or merit — various atrocities to marijuana, Congress in 1937 passed the Marihuana Tax Act, which removed cannabis from doctors’ medicine chests and started the federal government on its road to criminalizing cannabis and imprisoning its users.

Wild stories about prevalent marijuana use in New York — including among its children — compelled La Guardia to act, but not to pass a law or to send out the police. He called out the scientists.

“When rumors were recently circulated concerning the smoking of marihuana by large segments of our population and even by school children, I sought advice from The New York Academy of Medicine, as is my custom when confronted with problems of medical import,” wrote La Guardia, who noted that he had past personal experience with marijuana. While in Congress, he’d heard reports from a U.S. Army Board of Inquiry called after troops were caught smoking cannabis in Panama. The board found that marijuana was relatively “harmless.”

Researchers compiling the LaGuardia Committee report read available literature and interviewed other experts. They drew a list of 13 main conclusions, the summary of which was: There is no cannabis panic in New York City, or if there is, it exists only in certain peoples’ heads.

They also performed tests on human subjects. Specifically, the researchers asked a group of people to answer a battery of questions and to engage in “play” scenarios, after smoking some cannabis.

The “play scenarios” netted perhaps the least valuable information, wrote the researchers, who noted, “[t]he only very definite change as a result of the ingestion of marihuana was in their attitude toward the drug itself.”

“Without marihuana,” they wrote, “only 4 out of 14 subjects said they would tolerate the sale of marihuana while after ingestion 8 of them were in favor of this.”

The report was published in 1944, when most of the country’s attention was focused on World War II. La Guardia would die soon after, in 1947. A generation later, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, mostly for political reasons — and by the turn of the century, New York City would earn the dubious distinction of the “marijuana arrest capital of the world.” 

Even in 2019, New York has a mayor in Bill de Blasio who, when discussing marijuana policy, falls on old Anslinger-like tropes such as claims of addiction, and though two of the city’s five district attorneys have largely stopped arresting people for marijuana possession, 420 is still an outlaw holiday in New York.

What happened? It’s a fair question. The short answer is, nothing. La Guardia did not lobby to change local or state drug-control policies, and successor mayors fell into line behind federal policymakers. This is at least partly because no concerted public outcry accompanied the committee’s findings, mixed as they were into the wartime confusion. 

That they repeat most science today, which is attempting to drown out the same myths spun for the same reasons Ansligner concocted them, should not be lost on anyone —particularly on 420.

TELL US, how much do you know about the history of cannabis?

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Though it’s the world’s most popular illicit drug in the corners of the globe untouched by legalization and the hot commodity everywhere it’s legal, cannabis nonetheless still requires an introduction. 

Cannabis companies are eager to seize the market in Europe, which by one estimate may be worth tens of billions of U.S. dollars in 10 years. But to do so, they require a little hand-holding when it comes to making the connection and concocting a sales pitch, preferably one rooted in the kind of science that will sell with both governments and the socialized medicine they provide.

One solution? Give the reins to an expert.

Canadian cannabis unicorn Canopy Growth Corp., darling of the North American stock market, has turned to a legendary figure in the English counterculture movement who also happens to be landed gentry: Amanda Feilding. Feilding is the countess of Wemyss and March, and the principal force behind the Beckley Foundation, which has been a leading sponsor of experimental drug research for decades.

“There’s now an unstoppable global momentum behind medical cannabis reform,” the countess told Bloomberg. “It will soon take over Europe.”

Probably true — Britain is lurching erratically but generally in the direction of adopting cannabis-based therapeutics — but companies like Canopy are very much hoping it is a controlled takeover.

A Background in the Underground

As Bloomberg reported in a profile of the countess, Canopy has turned to Feilding to run a $9.6 million research effort meant to quantify cannabis’s value for both cancer pain and opioid addiction.

Cannabis is currently available for medical uses in 10 countries in Europe, but under a variety of controls, all strict. In Italy, cannabis is grown by the military. In the United Kingdom, cannabis prescriptions are available only from specialists who can charge exorbitant amounts.

If successful — and if adopted by either individual patients, or, better yet, nationalized healthcare providers like Britain’s NHS — Canopy stands a much better chance of seizing a sizable portion of that market, in a way more akin to a pharmaceutical company’s dominance of a pill market than, say, a California cannabis brand’s presence in the Instagram feeds of dispensary customers.

And it appears the company could not have recruited a more experienced — or eccentric — ambassador. is best known as a pioneering advocate for LSD with a very unorthodox habit of self-experimentation, and an avid explorer of the intersection of psychedelics, neuroscience, and consciousness. She has spent the past 50 years pushing for drug-policy reform. She first smoked cannabis while listening to Ray Charles, and has written letters to the United Nations, urging the organization to drop a 1961 treaty banning most drug-policy reform, enlisting help from both Jimmy Carter and Sean Parker.

lives in a 500-year-old castle near Oxford she renamed “ Hall” in the 1960s, when she experimented with LSD microdosing generations before Silicon Valley types “discovered” the practice. She also — and this anecdote is mentioned every time Feilding’s name is uttered — once drilled a hole in her head to expand her mind, a practice known as trepanation.

Her unorthodox education — she eschewed the predictable Oxbridge path typical of English nobility for studies in classical Arabic, sculpture, mysticism, and trepanning (hence the drill) — has led to a career in pushing scientific research in support of both psychedelics and cannabis.

“Her ability to take a scientific look at what would otherwise be considered as controversial therapeutics makes her a very good partner,” said Mark Ware, Canopy’s chief medical officer, in an interview with Bloomberg. Ware is himself a leading medical-marijuana researcher, as a former professor of medicine at McGill University’s medical school. “She’s brave enough to step into relatively uncharted waters with us, but is scientifically rigorous enough to be able to give really credible information,” he said of the countess.

The initial study to be birthed from the partnership between Canopy and Feilding’s Beckley Foundation will enroll 250 patients and will examine which cannabis strains work best for afflictions like pain, addiction and anxiety, Bloomberg reported.

Results are expected in 2020, and may fuel sales of products introduced by Spectrum Biomedical UK, a venture between Canopy and the Beckley Foundation. Provided, of course, that governments buy it first.

TELL US, which unconventional theories about cannabis would you like to see researched?

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On April 1, Cresco Labs, a publicly traded cannabis company based in Chicago, announced an all-stock purchase of Origin House, a California-based “products and brands company” in the same space. 

If stock prices stay steady when shareholders of both companies vote on the deal — and if shareholders approve it — the acquisition is valued at roughly $1.1 billion in Canadian dollars, around $826 million U.S. Which is to say this takeover would then have the honor of the biggest-ever transaction in the cannabis industry, supplanting troubled MedMen’s $682 million all-stock of PharmaCann.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of either Origin House or Cresco Labs, you are not alone. Both companies are relatively new — and new even by the very fresh and fast standards of the cannabis space. So what does the deal mean, aside from many numbers and a splashy press release, handy for drumming up interest among investors?

Meet the Players

To use a tired and imperfect but good enough analogy, the purchased entity Origin House is a sort of liquor distribution company. Origin House has five distribution and manufacturing licenses in California, where it claims to deliver “over 130 branded cannabis products to the majority of licensed dispensaries.” Alternately called a “brand house” or a “brand accelerator,” the company is clearly banking on consumers’ penchant for recognizable products. Origin House is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada — where it trades under the name CannaRoyalty — and trades on markets in both Canada and in the United States. Brands you might know that Origin House distributes include Bhang Chocolates; Tommy Chong’s branded cannabis, Chong’s Choice; Défoncé Chocolatier, and Kurvana oil cartridges.

On the buyer’s side, the company’s Illinois home base is a good place for a young and ambitious cannabis company with a decent amount of runway. The state is heavily populated, new Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he wants to legalize recreational marijuana — though as the example of New Jersey demonstrates, governors make such bold promises at their peril — and entry into the market there is still restricted, meaning licensed companies get a bigger piece of the pie. The state caps the number of cultivation and retail licenses, and Cresco already has a couple there as well as in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, Nevada California.

So, What’s the Deal, and What Does it Mean?

It’s a stock deal. No cash will exchange hands. Cresco will swap 0.8428 of its shares for each Origin House share. Origin House shareholders will become Cresco shareholders, then the two companies will become one. 

Since cash is best used for things like paying states tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for distribution licenses, which then may pay off down the road many times more, stakes in companies are an attractive alternative.

Cresco has major national ambitions and, if the deal goes through, a major national presence. In fact, it’s possibly one of the largest cannabis bodies in the United States, with 51 retail licenses and 1.5 million square feet under cultivation in 11 states, as Cresco CEO Charlie Bachtell said in a press release. 

But Origin House shareholders must approve the deal, which would close by the end of June and not every shareholder is thrilled. Jerome Hass, a portfolio manager at investment firm Lightwater Partners, appeared on Bloomberg Canada to share why he was “underwhelmed” and plans to vote against the deal. 

Essentially, he said, it’s a stock-market play aimed at boosting prices in both companies’ stock — and if you are trying to build a company long term, profit longevity should take priority instead. On top of that, he added that American investors aren’t excited about investing in either the Canadian exchanges or the OTC sheets, where both companies trade. OTC stocks’ statements are not audited by the Securities and Exchange Commission, like stocks on NYSE or NASDAQ.

Therein lies the risk in dealing with companies in early or middle stages who are already publicly traded, and the risk in getting too excited about this deal — which isn’t even final. But it sure does make for a catchy headline.

TELL US, do you have any stock in the Canadian market?

The post Billion-Dollar Cannabis? Inside the Marijuana Industry’s Biggest Deal to Date appeared first on Cannabis Now.

One of cannabis’s many persistent mysteries is why all stoners aren’t enormous. Marijuana use does often stimulate appetite and is associated with higher caloric intake. Cue the parade of extremely fresh snack-food “jokes” in “edgy” media when cannabis is mentioned.

And yet, research has revealed the opposite result.

Studies conducted on the matter have actually found significantly lower rates of obesity in marijuana users when compared to non-users, a conclusion that both potheads and scientists have found somewhat baffling.

Intrigued by these findings — and working in a state where voters legalized recreational cannabis use in November — researchers at Michigan State University crunched more data culled from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, or NESARC. The findings, titled “Are cannabis users less likely to gain weight? Results from a national 3-year prospective study,” from researchers Omayma Ashaarawy and James C. Anthony, were published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on March 16.

So, What’s the Skinny?

The batch of data Ashaarawy and Anthony analyzed allowed them to follow both survey respondents’ weight-gain (or loss) and their cannabis use (or abstention). And what they found is consistent with the earlier findings: Despite cannabis users’ reported increased caloric intake, there is a “negative association” between cannabis use and increase in body-mass index, or BMI.

“Evidence shows attenuated [that is, reduced] body mass index gain for cannabis-use subgroups when compared with never-users,” the researchers wrote. “[O]ur findings suggest a cannabis-associated attenuation of BMI gain.”

That is, cannabis users still enjoy healthier weights — itself a thorny term, as there are myriad examples of healthy people with “high” BMIs and rail-thin people with problems — than non-users.

Very few of the study respondents copped to using cannabis. 77 percent of survey respondents said they had never used in their lifetime, 18 percent had used and then quit, 3 percent were new users, and 2 percent were persistent users. And of the 5 percent who admitted current marijuana use, all were under 66 years old, before the age when BMI decreases across the board due to loss of muscle mass.

The researchers also found something interesting within the three sub-groups of cannabis users surveyed: past users, new users, and consistent users. After controlling for other factors including age, tobacco use and alcohol use, it was the consistent cannabis users who enjoyed the lowest BMI gains of the cannabis sub-groups.

Unanswered Questions

Why don’t stoners get very huge and soft? Why is the stereotype of the perpetually stoned guy lying on the couch, absorbing calories, actually just bogus hogwash? That’s the very expensive question. And although theories about increased metabolism and reward systems have been put forward, nobody seems to know for sure. 

The study doesn’t control for other important factors like physical activity and is very careful not to suggest any direct causal links. Put another way, we don’t know what the cannabis use itself is doing. There could be changes in diet and exerciseamong the stoners that make the difference. Further complicating matters is that the cannabis users cohort is very small — only a few thousand people — compared to the 26,000 non-users in the study, which is also based on self-reported data.

But one reason, the authors posited, is good news for medical cannabis advocates. There is a link between inflammation and obesity, and when the CB2 receptor in the endocannabinoid system is activated, there are observed anti-inflammatory effects. This could very well account for the higher caloric intake and the lower BMI observations. Or not. One thing is for sure: More research is necessary, and with more and more states legalizing recreational cannabis, more data will be forthcoming.

TELL US, do you think smoking weed has kept you svelte?

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