Grow Life 420

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?

The post Meet the Psychedelic English Countess Marketing Cannabis to Europe appeared first on Cannabis Now.

http://bit.ly/2uEgYtD April 9, 2019 at 10:05AM Chris Roberts, KahliBuds

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.

http://bit.ly/2uEgYtD April 8, 2019 at 08:27PM Chris Roberts, KahliBuds

Study Finds Stoners are Thinner

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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?

The post Study Finds Stoners are Thinner appeared first on Cannabis Now.

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https://kahlibuds.com March 27, 2019 at 03:00PM