Michigan Cannabis Prices Hit All-Time Low of Less Than $80 Per Ounce

9/04/2024

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The price of retail cannabis in Michigan has reached record lows with the average cost for an ounce of cannabis flower dropping to $79.70 in July, according to a Crain’s Detroit Business report.

While cannabis prices spiked in Michigan late last year in the aftermath of enforcement actions against illicit operators, adult-use product prices have fallen nearly 14.5% in 2024. The previous record low for cannabis flower prices, set in January 2023, was $80.16 per ounce.

This year’s price deflation could be attributed to multiple issues including an oversaturated market, price compression as the industry prepares for the “Croptober” harvests of outdoor cultivators, and ongoing competition from unregulated sources, the report said.

“I have more and more indoor farms coming to me to try and get on our shelves and to do so are offering a low price point. They are still selling last year’s crop and they are selling it at $250 to $300 a pound, leading to that price compression we’re seeing. They have to clear their pipe before another 50,000 pounds [of outdoor product] hit their facility.” — Eric Klar, Quality Roots CEO, via Crain’s Detroit Business

Total cannabis sales in the Great Lakes State reached $268.4 million in July, only slightly trailing the state’s monthly sales record of $286.8 million, which was set in March when Michigan became the first state to surpass California in monthly legal cannabis sales since the launch of California’s legal market.

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Nebraska Initiatives to Legalize and Regulate Medical Cannabis Qualify for Ballot

9/03/2024

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Officials in Nebraska said last week that the campaigns to legalize and regulate medical cannabis in the state will qualify for the November ballot, the Associated Press reports.

Advocates submitted signatures for two ballot initiatives: one to legalize medical cannabis, and one to establish a regulated medical cannabis industry. Both initiatives had surpassed 89,000 verified signatures and had met the requirement of 5% distribution in at least 51 counties per state law, Secretary of State Bob Evnen’s office said in a press release.

“After years of hard work, we are beyond excited that Nebraskans will finally have the opportunity to have their voices heard on this issue in November. Our fight has been long, it has been hard, but we have never given up. Today we celebrate that very soon, patients in this state will have access to medical cannabis treatment.” — Crista Eggers, campaign manager for Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, via the Associated Press

This is the third medical cannabis legalization effort by advocates in the state. In 2022, the petition fell short of the required signatures to qualify for the ballot — and in 2020, the petition’s ballot language was rejected by the state Supreme Court, which argued the petition was improperly addressing two topics: regulation and legalization.

The campaign this year split the issue into two petitions to hopefully meet the court’s standards.

 

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Ohio Cannabis Regulators Issue $212,500 in Fines for Advertising Violations

9/03/2024

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The Ohio Division of Cannabis Control (DCC) last week issued fines totaling $212,500 against five licensed cannabis companies for allegedly violating the industry’s advertising regulations, Cleveland.com reports. The alleged violations included the use of improper signage at dispensary locations, inappropriate social media posts, and in one case offering free food and beverages from an ice cream truck.

In July, regulators set strict advertising rules for the industry’s launch prohibiting ribbon cuttings, celebratory décor, and product displays outside the dispensaries. Regulators also prohibited on-site consumption, product samples, and the hosting of music or food trucks outside of dispensaries.

Greenleaf Apothecaries — which operates retailers in Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Columbus, and Wickliffe — received the largest penalty including separate fines of $150,000 and $12,500, the Associated Press reports. The company said it takes the advertising restrictions seriously and hopes to work with the state toward a resolution.

Ohio voters approved the legalization of adult-use cannabis last November and many of the state’s dispensaries started offering adult-use products last month under rules laid out by the DCC.

A spokesperson for Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said recently the governor has no immediate plans to grant mass pardons for Ohioans with low-level cannabis offenses despite voters having approved the reforms.

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LJ Dawson: Reporting on the Evolution of Cannabis Policy in the DMV

9/03/2024

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In this episode of the Ganjapreneur Podcast, host TG Branfalt is joined by LJ Dawson, the Editor-in-Chief of The Outlaw Report, a Washington, DC-based cannabis news outlet covering the dynamic cannabis landscape in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region. LJ shares her journey from criminal justice reporting to leading an independent cannabis-focused publication, offering unique insights into the intersection of cannabis policy, business, and social justice in one of the most politically charged regions in the country.

LJ discusses the complex challenges of reporting on cannabis in a region where local, state, and federal laws often clash, creating a complicated and ever-evolving market. She also delves into the ongoing efforts to expand DC’s medical cannabis market amidst competition from unlicensed operators, and the broader implications of cannabis enforcement across the DMV. For anyone interested in cannabis policy, journalism, or the intricacies of the DMV cannabis market (regulated and otherwise), this episode provides a nuanced inside look at the current state of the industry.

Find this episode in your favorite podcast app, or listen via the player below! Scroll down for the transcript.

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TG Branfalt:

Hey there, I’m your host, TG Branfalt. This is the Ganjapreneur.com podcast, where we try to bring you actionable information and normalize cannabis through the stories of entrepreneurs, activists, and industry stakeholders. Today I am delighted to be joined by LJ Dawson. She’s the editor in chief of the Washington DC based cannabis news outlet, The Outlaw Report, which focuses on cannabis news and policy in the DC, Virginia, and Maryland region. How are we doing this morning, LJ?

LJ Dawson:

I’m good, TG. Thanks so much for having me on today.

TG Branfalt:

We have a lot to talk about. There’s a lot of recent happenings in the area that you cover, but before we get to that, tell me about yourself and how you ended up editor at the Outlaw Report.

LJ Dawson:

Well, I always joke I’m the least weed smoking cannabis reporter ever. I actually have a background in criminal justice reporting. I had my own criminal justice news outlet. I’ve freelanced reporting on the justice space and protests actually across the country. And I landed in DC right before January 6th, so it was a fun time to show up. I actually came here first in 2019 and did some political reporting. But yeah, I was here in DC and I reported on cannabis in Montana and Colorado a little bit. I’m originally from Colorado. We legalized weed when I was still in high school, if that gives you a little age. Dated myself a little bit there. But yeah, I reported on cannabis. I was always interested in the industry, and then the Outlaw Report reached out to me while I was still freelancing and trying to survive as all of us journalists are in this economy, which is not kind to anyone, especially not US reporters. And so I ended up at the Outlaw Report almost a year and a half ago, and it’s been a really exciting journey since then.

TG Branfalt:

So if you’re not the cannabis reporter smokes the least amount of cannabis, what drew you to reporting on cannabis? Even as far going back as Colorado and Montana,

LJ Dawson:

Cannabis is a fascinating intersection of alternative communities and thought processes. It’s always a great group of people to talk to. I think everyone who does drugs is always more interesting than people that don’t do drugs, obviously. But in all seriousness, cannabis is a really great intersection of criminal justice, business, the economy, legislation, politics, corruption. I mean, every single beat that you can think of is a microcosm in the cannabis beat, and it’s always something going on, something interesting. And cannabis has been criminalized, obviously for a very long time. It was very interwoven into the war on drugs, which obviously came down harder on black and brown people. And I had a history of reporting on injustice, and so I always wanted to cover cannabis in that way. And then also, I definitely believe that plants are the best way to heal ourselves, even if I don’t imbibe in smoking the good herb all the time, or regularly, as some of my good friends do. I definitely respect and believe in the scientific backing that it is a medicine for a lot of people, whether it’s mental health or actual chronic illnesses, et cetera. And so, yeah, I think it’s a great space to look into stuff to report on. So that’s what drew me to it.

TG Branfalt:

So one of the things obviously being in DC that you’re going to have to sort of focus on is the sort of nitty gritty, the legislation, that sort of policy stuff. So explain the current laws in DC as it relates to cannabis, because they’re different than any place else in the country.

LJ Dawson:

Glad you asked TG. So we are the only district in the whole United States. We are not a state, which means that we do not have state rights. So we are actually not allowed to set up anything, pass any legislation without congressional oversight. So that means that if the city council wants to pass the law, it goes into effect, but then it actually has to get reviewed by Congress. And at any point of a time period, some legislator in Congress can say, yeah, we don’t feel good about this, and they can pass a bill, get enough people, colleagues together to pass a bill to actually stop that legislation. And that is what has unfortunately happened for us. So we were able to legalize medical cannabis. DC legalized medical cannabis in 2013, and then we were immediately afterward stopped by a certain Republican, Andy Harris from Maryland,

TG Branfalt:

The Harris, the notorious Harris Rider,

LJ Dawson:

Harris rider that has something against DC. And that rider has basically prevented DC, which is a very liberal jurisdiction from actually setting up a recreational market. And so shortly after we were squashed in that area, there was an initiative passed called the I-71 Initiative, and that basically allowed decriminalized weed for the most part and allowed some home growing and then also allowed people to gift small amounts of weed to each other. I could give you up to two ounces of weed TG, as long as you weren’t giving me any money, I wasn’t receiving any money. And this was tested in court and actually stood as well. And so what happened is people kind of saw this as a little bit of a loophole, and were like, we aren’t going to have recreational weed. There wasn’t recreational weed in Virginia. There still isn’t. There wasn’t adult use in Maryland that just passed last year.

And so people saw this as a little bit of a loophole that they could start to exploit and started setting up actual stores. It started as popups actually, where people were coming together. They had a lot more weed than two ounces, which is the limit. They might’ve had pounds of weed, but they were gifting it. They were breaking it down, gifting it at popups. They were gifting it in stores, but they were actually setting up brick and mortars. And that all started around 2014 and just continued to blow up. And when it first started, police were raiding these places. I mean, they were not okayed by the city officials at all. They were getting raided, but they would, it’s like a cockroach. You squish it, and another one pops back up. And so these people were setting up stores just trapping out of them under the guise of gifting.

I would come in, they’d say, you have to buy this wristband. It’s $50 and oh, you wanted that Tropicana Cherry eighth, here you go. And so it kind of set up these pseudo dispensaries. And obviously Virginia and Maryland didn’t have access to weed. They certainly didn’t have access to underground strains that were getting pushed in through the underground channels into DC. And so people were going to these gifting stores and they were making tons of money. And it started with local entrepreneurs that were already in the cannabis, underground cannabis industry. And then as the years went on, it kind of expanded more to, as we know, the California markets started crashing. There were these large dispos in Cali that were setting up highways, underground highways to DC, to New York, to all these different markets to backdoor their weed that they had to get rid of.

And so it started getting a little bit more influenced by the big players in the cannabis industry that we think of that are a little less interested in the good of the patient, the good of the client. This isn’t your small Humboldt grower that’s working with a small seller in DC. And so anyways, we had an explosion of stores and in 2022, our medical market was still going. So we had a very small medical market, but people, you can go get weed at a gifting store without registering, just walking in, they have access to all the strains that you’re seeing on Instagram that the rappers are smoking, you’re going to go there even if it’s not tested most likely, rather than going to a medical dispensary that’s going to charge you a lot more. And so we had about half dozen medical dispensaries that were still serving patients, but there was a small sales, they weren’t doing numbers at all.

And so in 2022, DC Council had tried to keep passing recreational weed, and that just kept getting squashed by Congress. And in 2022, they were like, all right, we got to figure something out. So they actually passed an expansion of the medical market that we have in DC and they were able to say, okay, we see that we have all these unlicensed operators and we know that people in DC don’t want this illicit economy going on, so we’re going to try to fold unlicensed operators into the legal market, which has been done nowhere else in the US. No one else in the US has extended a peace offering to people that were operating illegally and said, we want you to come into the legal market.

TG Branfalt:

They ban them more than they would let them in.

LJ Dawson:

Right, exactly. You’re penalized basically. So they passed this expansion to do multiple things. They wanted to expand the market. They wanted to open up more licenses for people to grow, manufacture and to sell weed. And they also wanted to bring these unlicensed operators into the legal market. But again, it’s the legal medical market. It can’t be the recreational market because Congress has kept us from passing something. And so they passed this legislation and we’ve been in a whirlwinds since then, and I can update you on that as we go along. But it’s been just a crazy, crazy period as they’ve tried to transition us into a more expanded pseudo recreational, but still medical market.

TG Branfalt:

And one of the things, correct me if I’m wrong, is they allow self-certification. And I don’t know if that was included in the most recent reforms, but for patients, right?

LJ Dawson:

Absolutely. So that was included in the most recent reforms. One of the things that our government acknowledges in DC is that we have a barrier to people accessing legal cannabis. We can’t have any random person off the street, of course, 18 plus 21 plus access adult use cannabis. And so they said, alright, if we still have to have people certified as medical patients, we’re going to make it as easy as humanly possible. And so now in a manner of a few minutes, and you can actually do it for free until August 1st, if you’re a DC resident, you can actually self-certify yourself as a medical cannabis patient.

TG Branfalt:

And so what does that actually mean? What does this program look like? And so far, has it been effective in bringing people into the more regulated market?

LJ Dawson:

It’s a great question. So we also offer temporary registrations too, which I want to mention because it’s an acknowledgement that we have a lot of tourists in this area and that there were already people coming in from Florida, North Carolina and shopping in our medical market. Of course, there’s many more people going and shopping in our unlicensed market, but this program has helped a little bit, but there’s a key part of this Maryland legalized adult use last summer, we’re almost on a year of Maryland having adult use cannabis for everyone that’s 21 and over. And so DC had really bad timing with this, right? We started trying to expand our medical market when Maryland just ripped the rug out from under us. So it’s been somewhat successful TG, but we are seeing a slight rise in patients, but we don’t have that many yet, or we have continued to not have that many, and we haven’t seen an increase that you would expect maybe if this was really a great program.

And at the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that people don’t want to register. We are in a place where a bunch of people are federal workers. Cannabis is still stigmatized by many people. Of course, there’s this idea that your medical records won’t be released, but who knows if you’re applying for the CIA, I’m not, don’t worry. But if you’re applying for the CIA, they’ll probably find your records. So there’s this idea that people don’t want to register. I’ve been hearing from the legal medical dispensaries that are in the city right now that 30 to 70% of people are walking out every single day because they don’t want to register. And this is something that’s so easy, it can be free. And a lot of the dispensaries know this is a problem. So they’re actually helping people register right there. So you could walk in and be registered in minutes and people are still saying, no, no, no, I don’t want to do that. And they’re going next door to the unlicensed operator.

TG Branfalt:

That’s really, really interesting that people would choose. And again, I mean I think that that speaks to the region that you’re in where there are so many federal workers and government workers, and there are, we know some sort of slippery slopes when it comes to cannabis use and even applying to the federal government. I mean, you can be found lying on a federal form and things of that nature. And so tell me about some of the challenges covering cannabis policy in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and how do you tow the line between local and national? Because so much of what comes out of DC is national news.

LJ Dawson:

I try not to get caught up in the hubbub on the capitol. There is constantly a cannabis news outlet, and I love all of our colleagues dearly. I appreciate everyone’s work, but there’s constantly people chasing after every single vote change, every single breadth of rescheduling. And the fact is that all of that stuff, whether it’s rescheduling, decriminalization, any of the legislation that’s working its way through Congress is very unlikely to pass, in my opinion, one. And then two is years away from actually impacting the person that is a medical patient or just a normal person trying to go smoke some weed and get a regulated clean product. And so I actually ignore a lot of it. And I’ve been on the hill, I’ve reported on the hill. I’ve great friends that are on the hill every single day. But I think that there’s an over diversion of resources spent reporting on the capitol because it is overcovered, a lot of the stuff that comes out of there is actually not newsworthy.

It’s only newsworthy because we’re giving it saying it’s newsworthy. And there’s so many stories in Virginia, in DC, in Maryland that need coverage, that is actual policy that’s currently in place impacting business owners, people of color patients, everyone that is most disenfranchised by big business, by politics, they’re actually getting impacted right now. So I always make sure that in any of the coverage we’re doing, I am prioritizing those people. And then I’m also prioritizing the small business owner that is either in the hemp industry or the cannabis industry that is trying to have an impact or start a business in this really crazy market.

TG Branfalt:

And I do think, to your point, that it speaks to a broader issue of journalism in general, which is a whole other conversation we could talk about where everything has turned into sort of horse race coverage and game coverage and is covered more like sports than policy. And not to say that I’m not guilty of it myself in terms of poll stories, it’s just the score. It’s just the score. Switching gears a little bit. You had said that you had covered sort of justice topics primarily for a while or had a keen eye on that for a while. How important are the pardons for Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and how important are the optics of a governor? Pardoning a record of people. I mean, this is the broadest pardoning by a governor so far.

LJ Dawson:

I’m really glad you asked this question, TG, and I think you used a key word, which is optics. Public opinion and public political energy is very crucial to the efforts to decriminalize cannabis or to get any movement on Capitol Hill. I do not want to undermine Governor Wes’ action in this case. I mean, it was almost 200,000 people that are being affected by this effort that he’s done. However, it’s not decriminalizing cannabis and these people are pardoned. But I was looking at the application to go through and get your pardon and it’s 27 pages long and every part of that needs lawyers on it and everything. But you’re talking about people that have been screwed over by the system over and over again. The system has never been their friend. And the governor does this and gets a lot of PR attention on the national scene.

He’s saying he hopes other governors join and do this. But I always think there’s a disconnect between the top of the government and actual impact on people. And so it’s great that this door is open for people to pursue expungement, right? Because if you get a pardon, then you have to pursue your expungement and you the cleaning of your record. But this does not fix anything. This doesn’t fix the decades potentially that someone has been refused jobs spent in prisons because of cannabis charges that they faced. I also want to highlight that the difference between nonviolent and violent charges. There’s a really big push on all criminal justice reforms to do nonviolent, nonviolent, nonviolent charges. And of course that’s easier to stomach for everybody. But the truth is, is that if someone was forced to go into the drug game, we’re not talking about people that were pulled over with an eighth of weed or a pipe, but we’re talking about people that had to participate maybe because of the place they grew up in, the economic opportunities they were afforded.

They had to participate in the drug industry. And if they had to, that’s very rarely going to be a nonviolent charge. You’re usually going to have to have a gun on you. You’re usually going to be caught up in the other parts of being in the drug game. And so there’s people who are impacted by the war on drugs that are not going to be nonviolent offenders. And so those people sometimes get left behind. And then there’s also still tons of people, thousands of people federally incarcerated for nonviolent cannabis charges, including Jonathan Wall, who was recently sent to federal prison in Maryland actually on trafficking charges just a few years ago. And so there’s still people currently incarcerated in Maryland, federally. Obviously the governor can’t impact that. He only has a jurisdiction over his state. But I think it’s important that we stay realistic when these things happen and don’t get caught up in any PR or optics that is pushed on us.

TG Branfalt:

I mean, I think the coverage that came out after the fact was similar to when Biden issued those pardons, which really had an effect on what 200 people. I mean, again, I’m not trying to downplay it much like you weren’t either, but the optics were kind of more important than the actual policy that it implemented and the reforms that it implemented.

LJ Dawson:

Yeah, and tj, I feel like a lot of the advocates and people that have been impacted by cannabis criminalization, they’re taught to kind of be grateful for breadcrumbs, right? We’re taught to just be like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for doing this. When it’s like, Hey, this is still not enough and we should be okay being able to say thank you and you need to do more and we need more.

TG Branfalt:

So what are the challenges for the region’s cannabis policy when on one hand you have more progressive, and then on the other hand, you have Republican governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia who has done everything in his power and along with the legislature to block the implementation of cannabis adult use cannabis in Virginia as approved by the previous democratically led legislature?

LJ Dawson:

Yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up. Virginia is a very interesting case. It was literally legalized to have adult use in a democratic controlled legislature. And then Youngkin came in who’s a Republican and has blocked the market. The law has already passed, but he is not allowed the actual implementation of a legal adult use market in Virginia. And they have some of the highest medical costs actually. We see people in our patient counts in DC, Virginia patients are the second highest register people that come over and shop in our medical cannabis market. And also, I’m sure they’re shopping in the illicit stores a lot in DC. And so this has a real impact on Virginians. Not everyone in Virginia is close to DC. They’re not close to Maryland. And so we are kind of at a loss of hope for Virginia until Youngkin leaves office.

That means that we could be looking at 2027, 2028 before an actual adult use market is set up. So there’s also other things going on with hemp in Virginia. So I’m kind of reporting on two opposite spectrums, right? Because there’s Virginia where it’s still the dark ages. There’s Maryland who just legalized adult use last year. The market opened up last year again, but being critical, keeping them in check. The only operators that have been able to sell weed to in the adult market are previously licensed medical dispensaries. And so we have a lot of MSOs, a lot of previously established dispensaries, not small guys, not social equity candidates necessarily making millions of dollars in Maryland and the adult use market, but Maryland also has a lot of cool programs going on to try to engender and cause a growth of social equity or people that were the small guy in the cannabis industry there.

And then we have DC, which is federally controlled and kind of in the middle of the road. I just try to keep up to date with everything. Obviously we have a lot of different things going on, but each state has its own power imbalances. It has its own players, and we just try to make sure that we’re paying attention to all of the major stakeholders so we can accurately report and get the information that each of those states need. The last thing I’ll say is that the markets impact each other too. So Virginia, DC and Maryland are very close together, and the big city centers are very close together. So even if Maryland’s a whole state, Virginia is a whole state DC in the middle, we have a lot of big cities that are all near DC. Baltimore is not too far from us. And so if there’s a market change in Maryland that could push patients into DC if there’s the market change in Virginia that could push patients into DC or out of DC and vice versa. So we try to make sure that people know how the other state next to them or district is impacting their market.

TG Branfalt:

Are you seeing in the region, are you still seeing a lot of, how do I want to put this cannabis enforcement in Virginia? Meanwhile, the surrounding states in the district have legalized, so are we still seeing a lot of harms in Virginia despite the neighborhood being broadly kind of adult use?

LJ Dawson:

Virginia is still pulling people over with pounds of cannabis in their car, and Maryland is too, and DC is actually kind of the only place which I can get into after the only place that is actually not focused so much on cannabis enforcement. But Virginia is very much still focused on cannabis enforcement. They’re very much still a state that is doing traditional policing. They have rural areas there. Manassas, Virginia is tiny. There’s a bunch of rural areas in Virginia that are– it’s a more conservative-run state in all ways down to the police departments. And so you have people getting pulled over in Virginia that are getting busted with cannabis, but that’s still happening in Maryland too. Just because you have an adult use market does not mean that illicit or underground cannabis transportation and selling is not getting enforced as well. And so in Virginia, we actually have a little bit of a replica of dc They’re doing adult sharing, so their shops actually getting sped up that are adult sharing cannabis, right?

No, I 71 initiative in Virginia. It’s they’re trying to create a loophole that doesn’t exist, and those shops have been getting raided. Those shops have been getting shut down and people are forcing or facing jail time and charges for that. And in Maryland as well, people I see every other week someone getting arrested in a news article about someone getting arrested for a pound of cannabis or vapes, et cetera. So there’s still enforcement going on. I would not drive through Virginia if I was anyone with a pound of cannabis. That would be at least make sure your taillights are all working. Do not get pulled over in Virginia. They’re not going to be kind to you.

TG Branfalt:

Have any portions of the law taken effect such as allowing people to possess an ounce personal use, or is that still blocked?

LJ Dawson:

Yes. So you can possess, that’s why I said a pounds. Okay, okay. Yeah, you can possess cannabis in Virginia, right? But yeah, you got to be careful about the amount that you have.

TG Branfalt:

So we talked about, you had mentioned enforcement in Virginia and Maryland. What about enforcement in DC?

LJ Dawson:

So we’ve seen quite the seed change in dc As I had mentioned, there was a proliferation of unlicensed shops towards the end of 2016, probably till 2020. They were getting rated almost weekly, monthly. The cops were allegedly taking the weed and taking the money, and then they were arresting people and then letting them go and letting people just reopen somewhere else. However, in 2022 when they passed the medical cannabis expansion, part of that was actually a safe harbor that starting last year in January, gave unlicensed shops a year to do what they had to do because they were opening up applications and technically saying the doors open, unlicensed applicants or unlicensed operators can apply to become a legal medical dispensary in dc. And this was really unique. In DC we had multiple application periods for different types of businesses, but there was actually specifically an unlicensed operator retail period at the beginning before social equity and before standard. And they gave unlicensed operators 90 days to apply to become part of the legal market, and they actually had to prove that they were operating illegally, paying taxes as a gifting business to qualify for these licenses. It’s quite wild. There were definitely a lot of people who were like, there’s no way I am going to submit any government document saying that I was gifting

TG Branfalt:

Breaking the law,

LJ Dawson:

Right? I was gifting weed, and it definitely wasn’t two ounces. It was millions of dollars. And I was filing taxes saying that off of T-shirts, I made $10 million last year, right? So this was very unique, and they said they weren’t going to enforce, and that safe harbor period ended in January. However, we have not had more than four dispensaries, new dispensaries open, and we’ve had no new cultivation centers and no new manufacturers open. So the council gave them another until September. So another, I think it was four months if they applied to keep doing what they were doing, acknowledging that there’s a lack of supply in DC and that there were patients that weren’t going to be able to be served. So if you’re an unlicensed operator who applied during the licensing period and said you were gifting and they approved you, and you’re in the process of turning into a legal medical dispensary for the location you applied for, you can keep gifting out of it until September of this year.

However, in March, they started enforcement and that enforcement was against shops mostly that had not applied shops that were gifting, which are now most shops don’t even gift. They’re open dispensaries at this point elicit open dispensaries much like you have in New York. And they started enforcement. And the enforcement started very delicately with just letters that said, you’re warned this is what you’re doing. It came from our cannabis regulatory agency. It did not come from the cops. And there have only been a few raids, and most of those raids seem to be because of mushrooms, mushroom products being sold alongside cannabis. Well,

TG Branfalt:

Isn’t that another sort of layer to this? Because DC voters approved psychedelic medication therapies, I should say in 2016.

LJ Dawson:

So we have another initiative called I 81 that’s often mistaken to be just a replica of the I 71 Cannabis Initiative for mushrooms. And what it did actually was decriminalize a possession of a certain amount, and it also deprioritized enforcement of psychedelics. It did not do any gifting legislation or any gifting initiatives such as I 71. So it’s still very illegal to even share mushrooms technically even, and especially to sell them in dc They’re still obviously a federally controlled schedule one substance.

So after they started enforcing in March, they laid off a little bit. They started delivering warnings, and those warnings have not really stopped any unlicensed shops from being open. They got the warnings and most of them stayed open or open the next day, kind of this idea that we’re going to go until the wheels fall off. We’re going to make as much money as we can until they literally kick us out. And this actually started impacting the forecast of the new medical market. There’s over 50 stores that should be opening in DC that’s over a 900% increase. We’ve only had a half dozen stores that were medically licensed retail stores, and now there’s over 50 that should be getting licensed and open in the next three to four months. And the medical market’s not doing well because there’s still an unlicensed market that’s thriving in dc.

And so the medical community, a lot of them are pushing the DC Council to do more, to be able to kick these unlicensed operators out, because every time you put a medical dispensary next to an unlicensed operator, that unlicensed operators always going to win. There’s less barriers to shop. It’s better product in a lot of people’s opinions, even though if it’s unregulated and it’s often cheaper. So we are waiting to see what happens, but they just passed emergency legislation to start being able to padlock unlicensed operators to do the same thing New York did. To seriously try to clear these dispensaries that are unlicensed out of DC so the medical market can actually have a chance.

TG Branfalt:

It’ll be interesting to see how well that works because I live in New York, not the city, obviously very upstate, but there are still quite a bit of illegal dispensaries,

LJ Dawson:

Absolutely TG. I’ve literally seen Instagram ads where unlicensed operators, which Instagram ads is a whole nother conversation, but unlicensed operators have literally been saying, DC’s closing I-71 stores. Don’t worry. We still will have a delivery sign up. Now we’re offering you a percentage off sign up, get in the door, get your number in. And I mean, DC, there’s so much going on in the city. The cops have so many other problems. They do not want to get dragged into cannabis enforcement unless there’s a shootout going on. It’s a big crime like making money to them. It would’ve been maybe some years ago a priority, but right now it’s not. And they do not want to get caught up in the legislative mumbo jumbo that has been caused by the federal oversight in DC.

TG Branfalt:

So I want to you a question that I find myself asking myself and also asking my colleagues and people that I’ve worked with, and as you said at the top, you’re a believer in sort of plant medicine and things of that nature. How do you as editor in chief remain objective? Because most of us covering cannabis have a bit of bias towards cannabis. I’m a lowly podcast host and staff writer, and I believe that that gives me a little bit more leeway, if you will. But as editor in chief, I think that there’s a different responsibility there. So can you talk about that a little bit?

LJ Dawson:

Absolutely. We’re already assumed to be biased, obviously, because we’re called the Outlaw report. We report on cannabis. And there’s an idea in the journalism world that if you’re even reporting on cannabis and a little alternative independent publication, that you’re obviously going to be like smoke weed, everybody. But that is not how we are. I think that it’s very important that we’re still a journalistic news outlet, and our job is to hold everyone accountable. That does not just mean the government. That doesn’t just mean the businesses. That means people too. So we know that cannabis is evolving. We know that cannabis is getting stronger. We know that there are new products coming out. We know that there’s little research on those products. We’re not talking about grandpa’s cannabis getting grown in the backyard anymore, and we need to remind everyone that. And so it is our responsibility to talk about studies.

It’s our responsibility to talk about testing, to report on the cannabis industry as if it was the food industry, as if it was any big industry that people are consuming. I mean, cannabis consumption is now acknowledged that it’s incredibly high. This is something that’s happening. People smoke weed. That’s a PSA for all of us. We always have, right? People smoke weed. People are still smoking weed now, they’re eating weed. I mean, they’re doing everything. And so it’s our responsibility to stay non-biased and focus on both the negatives and the positives of the cannabis industry and hold everyone accountable, whether that be at the top or the bottom.

TG Branfalt:

So one of the interesting things that Outlaw Report has done is launched a map of the progress and locations of DC cannabis licenses. What went behind that decision and how important is that map to stakeholder engagement?

LJ Dawson:

TG, I’m really glad you asked about this. This was a map that organically came up because I was trying to keep track of all of our applications in this last period. And so in our cannabis expansion of our medical market, just in DC, we have had hundreds of businesses apply as manufacturers, cultivators or dispensaries, retail locations. And this map is incredibly important. DC is a small place. Real estate is a high commodity. It’s rare. It’s even rarer to find real estate that you can rent or buy as a cannabis business. And so our map is a really great visual breakdown tracking where all of these cannabis businesses are in the process of getting open. Just because someone gets a license, someone gets their application in, that can mean they’re still months away. And so our license map is a way for people–it’s color coded–

It’s a way for people to keep track either of what’s happening in their own neighborhood, what’s happening in the neighborhood, that they want to open a business where they can actually go buy legal weed that will soon be tested in a lab in DC, we don’t have testing quite yet, and it’s a way to just keep track of what’s going on. It’s not the only offer or perk that we offer to our subscribers. We’re also offering real-time legislative updates, and we hope to expand that to the Maryland market within the next four months. This is our goal to become a sustainable news outlet. All of our articles are free. We will keep them free, but some of this more labor intensive data stakeholder information that we take a lot of time out of our reporting to create, we are asking people to support us and subscribe to get access to that.

TG Branfalt:

Well, hopefully the next time that we chat, we can talk more about how you build the actual subscription model and that sort of thing. But in the meantime, where can people find out more about The Outlaw Report? Where can they find this map and maybe find out more about you?

LJ Dawson”

So come to OutlawReport.com to see all of the most recent news stories we’ve been writing, covering the DMV area, and subscribe to get access to our map. You can find me at @LJreports on Twitter and Instagram, and my email is also on our website. If anyone has any tips, tidbits, or hot takes they want to share.

TG Branfalt:

That is LJ Dawson. She’s the editor in chief of the Washington DC based cannabis News outlet, the Outlaw Report, which focuses on cannabis news and policy in the dc, Virginia, and Maryland region. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, lj. It’s been fun.

LJ Dawson:

Thanks, TG, and hopefully you will have us back.

TG Branfalt:

Definitely. There’s a lot more ground to cover here. You can find more episodes of the entrepreneur.com podcast and the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com and wherever you get your podcasts. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily, along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com app and iTunes and Google Play. This episode was engineered by Wayward Sound Studio. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

 

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Donald Trump Signals Support for Florida’s Adult-Use Cannabis Initiative

9/02/2024

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Donald Trump last week signaled support for Florida’s Amendment 3, which would legalize adult-use cannabis in the state. In a post on Truth Social, Trump predicted the ballot initiative would pass in November and called on lawmakers “to responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run Cities.” 

“At the same time, someone should not be a criminal in Florida, when this is legal in so many other States. We do not need to ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them, and no one should grieve a loved one because they died from fentanyl laced marijuana.” — Trump in a Truth Social post, 8/31/24 

Former President Trump’s position runs contrary to opposition by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who in July launched a political action committee against the proposal. DeSantis has also said he doesn’t believe the proposed constitutional amendment should have been approved for ballots because, he contends, the summary “doesn’t really tell you what the amendment says.”  

Florida hemp industry executives have also pledged to donate $5 million to the state Republican Party to help defeat the proposition and billionaire Ken Griffin last month announced a $20 million donation to support candidates who oppose the state’s proposed constitutional amendment. 

Trump is a resident of Florida and votes in the state. 

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Alabama Cannabis Regulators and Licensees Ask Court to End Injunction and Allow Businesses to Begin Operations

9/02/2024

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Companies awarded medical cannabis licenses in Alabama are seeking a court order to allow them to begin operations, AL.com reports. The bid is supported by the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC), which has attempted three times since June 2023 to award the licenses but lawsuits have hampered the process. 

In a motion to Montgomery County Circuit Judge James Anderson, attorneys for the AMCC are asking him to lift the most recent temporary restraining order that has blocked companies from beginning operations.  

“Lost in the interminable medical cannabis litigation are the thousands of patients for whom the Compassion Act was enacted.” — AMCC attorneys in the motion via AL.com 

The AMCC has awarded licenses to cultivators, processors, secure transporters, and a state testing lab, and while cultivators have begun growing, integrated licensees have been blocked by lawsuits. 

In his July 11 ruling enacting the temporary restraining order, Anderson wrote that “the court is sympathetic to the public interest in getting medicine in the hands of patients” but that the AMCC license approvals from December 12 “are the Commission’s third round of licensing awards at issue.”    

“…and the prior two award rounds remain the subject of ongoing litigation,” he wrote, “meaning that the Commission’s effort to issue licenses now, based on the third round, is already on uneven ground.” 

A pending lawsuit by Alabama Always, which was denied a license and has repeatedly sued the AMCC, claims the agency has not followed the law, including the Alabama Administrative Procedures Act, in awarding licenses. 

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Arkansas Campaign to Enhance Medical Cannabis Industry Submits Additional Signatures

9/02/2024

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The campaign seeking to make changes to Arkansas’ medical cannabis industry last week submitted an additional 38,933 signatures to the secretary of state’s office, the Arkansas Advocate reports. The campaign in July submitted 108,512 signatures, of which 77,000 were verified by Secretary of State John Thurston’s staff from registered voters. 

Arkansas for Patient Access needed 90,704 total signatures from registered voters to get the issue on November ballots and, in accordance with state law, were given an additional 30 days to collect the additional signatures because their initial submission contained at least 75% of the required total.  

The proposed constitutional amendment would allow physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists to certify patients for medical cannabis cards, permit health care providers to conduct patient assessments via telemedicine, and providers could qualify patients based on medical need rather than the 18 qualifying conditions currently outlined by the state. 

The amendment would also allow patients and designated caregivers 21-and-older to cultivate up to seven mature and seven immature cannabis plants and seven young plants and would eliminate patient ID card application fees and extend the term of the card to three years. 

In a statement, Arkansas for Patient Access said advocates “will work tirelessly until the polls close on November 5th to inform and educate voters.”  

“We are confident that when they learn the details of this amendment,” the news release said, “they will enthusiastically support it.” 

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DC dispensaries

The Outlaw Report Launches License Tracking Map for Washington D.C.’s Cannabis Community

8/30/2024

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Washington, D.C., 8.30.24 — The Outlaw Report, the leading independent journalism outlet focused on cannabis policy in the Washington D.C. area, is excited to announce the relaunch of its newly redesigned website. The revamped platform offers an enriched experience for readers, alongside the introduction of a paid membership feature designed to serve all kinds of stakeholders in the rapidly evolving D.C. medical cannabis market.

Founded in 2018, the Outlaw Report established itself as the only dedicated news source covering developments in D.C.’s cannabis culture and industry. With this relaunch, the outlet is not only refreshing its digital presence but also launching a subscription-based membership program that offers subscribers exclusive perks:

  • License Map Access: Members will gain access to an interactive license map displaying the locations of approved D.C. medical cannabis businesses, including retail, manufacturing, and cultivation sites. The map also highlights applications-in-progress, based on updates from the Alcoholic Beverage Control Administration (ABCA).
  • Exclusive, Real-Time Updates: Subscribers will receive live updates on breaking developments and announcements, ensuring they are the first to know about crucial changes in the regulatory landscape.
  • Visibility and Promotion: Higher membership tiers include opportunities for businesses to be featured on The Outlaw Report’s website and in its widely read email newsletter, which reaches tens of thousands of readers each month, including regulators, industry professionals, and medical cannabis consumers.

The Outlaw Report has been at the forefront of reporting on the significant changes in cannabis policy in Washington D.C. Recent years have seen the emergence of “gifting” shops, operating in a legal gray area by offering cannabis products as “gifts” with other purchases. However, ABCA recently began enforcement actions against these shops, serving cease-and-desist orders to several locations. At the same time, ABCA introduced a pathway for these businesses to transition into the regulated medical market, as well as a new policy allowing consumers to self-certify their medical need for cannabis, bypassing the previously required doctor’s visit.

Despite these regulatory developments, many “gifting” shops have not yet applied to enter the regulated market, and most continue to operate in their original format. To help local cannabis consumers know the difference between D.C.’s regulated medical dispensaries and these unregulated shops, The Outlaw Report’s recent website update also includes a public-facing map of licensed locations, along with information about how to self-certify for medical cannabis approval without a doctor’s recommendation. The Outlaw Report’s chief editor, LJ Dawson, has been closely tracking and reporting on the ongoing shifts in the market, providing weekly updates to ensure that the community remains informed.

“The Outlaw provides essential reporting and coverage on D.C.’s evolving and emerging cannabis market. Our new features offer a way to invest in our coverage and stay even more informed on the complicated twists of the market,” Dawson said.

“We are also proudly on the forefront of making local journalism sustainable, and we are excited about our new features building and serving our cannabis community,” she said.

For more information about The Outlaw Report, or to learn more about membership options, visit OutlawReport.com.

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Another Federal Court Rejects Ban on Cannabis Consumers Owning Guns

8/30/2024

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The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled Wednesday that prosecutors cannot file gun possession charges against a Texas woman who admitted to being a cannabis user, according to a Reuters report. The ruling reinforces last year’s decision by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to dismiss the charges.

During an interaction with El Paso police following the arrest of her husband in 2021, Paola Connelly told officers that she sometimes used cannabis. Prosecutors ultimately filed charges against her for possessing firearms while being a consumer of an illegal substance after searching her home and finding multiple firearms, including some owned by Connelly.

U.S. Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt, appointed by former President Donald Trump (R), wrote this week for a three-judge panel that, “Marijuana user or not, Paola is a member of our political community and thus has a presumptive right to bear arms.” The opinion cites a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that expanded gun rights in the U.S. with a new way of determining whether modern firearm restrictions are constitutional: that gun regulations must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” the report said.

The judges argued that because alcohol — which is just as intoxicating as cannabis — was widely available at the time and yet the founders failed to disarm even heavy drinkers, historical precedent says it would be unconstitutional to disarm someone for being a cannabis consumer.

 

 

 

 

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Police Raid Nine Hemp Product Retailers in Allen, Texas

8/30/2024

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Police in Allen, Texas said they raided nine hemp product retailers this week after an investigation found they were selling products containing illegal amounts of THC, the Dallas Morning News reports.

Allen police said the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Collin County Sheriff’s Office assisted them in the investigation.

“The warrants were obtained and executed following an in-depth investigation into alleged illegal activities involving the sale of products containing greater than 0.3% THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis. Products previously sold at these nine locations have tested from 7% to 78% THC.” — Law enforcement written statement, via Dallas Morning News

After the DEA subpoenaed records in July from companies selling legal hemp products, the shops hired San Marcos-based attorney David Sergi in preparation for an incident like this week’s raid, the report said. Sergi represents at least eight of the nine shops targeted in the raid and says his clients have been operating lawfully under the law, and that the raid by law enforcement was an “escalation” meant to intimidate legal hemp product retailers.

“There is a right way and a wrong way under Texas law to deal with products that may be out of compliance, and they have gone down the complete wrong path, and they will be held to account,” he said.

Cannabis remains illegal in Texas although hemp, the non-psychoactive version of the plant, was made federally legal under the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then, the hemp industry’s cannabinoid product offerings have expanded from primarily CBD, which is non-psychoactive, to include intoxicating cannabinoids like delta-8 and delta-10 THC, which can both be synthesized from hemp-derived CBD. The purveyors of these products maintain that they are legal under the current Farm Bill’s definition of hemp, though the DEA has suggested otherwise.

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New Jersey Cannabis Convention Returns to Atlantic City September 6-7

8/29/2024

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The NECANN New Jersey Cannabis Convention presented by Ozone & Simply Herb returns for its 5th year to the Atlantic City Convention Center for two days of cannabis business and education September 6-7, 2024. The largest gathering of the cannabis industry in the state again includes event partner 420NJEvents and its expo floor speaker track on entrepreneurship in the cannabis industry.  Three more speaker tracks on New Jersey’s cannabis industry include 65 expert speakers on topics like branding, cultivating, business & regulatory, energy efficiency, and more.

In addition to the educational component of the two-day event, 200+ businesses will be exhibiting the latest in cannabis products and services, with over 4,000 cannabis industry professionals expected to attend. The exhibit hall floor is open both days from 10am to 4pm with displays, demonstrations and networking.  As always, a number of networking mixers surround the convention headlined by the Official NECANN after party, hosted and produced by 420NJEvents on Friday 8pm-11pm at the Vue Rooftop Bar.

The slate of networking mixers also includes Longview Strategics’ NJ Cannabis Mixer, the New Jersey Cannabusiness Association After Party, and the MPX NJ Happy Hour. Additionally, NECANN’s event partner Blunt Brunch will host a mixer at 11:30am on Friday at the Convention Center for attendees.

“Like all NECANN events, the New Jersey Cannabis Convention is individually designed for this state’s cannabis market, giving a real opportunity for local industry leaders, advocates, entrepreneurs, career and knowledge seekers, and the canna-curious to come together to learn and meet the people paving the way for this exciting new industry,” said Marc Shepard, Founder and President of NECANN. “With the cannabis industry heating up in the Mid-Atlantic, it’s also a timely opportunity for operating and new businesses alike to engage with and learn from consumers, promote their businesses, and promote their products.”

Programming details are available at: CLICK HERE

Exhibitor Floor Map: CLICK HERE

Advance tickets are available at: CLICK HERE

Location: Atlantic City Convention Center

Hours: Friday: 10am-4pm  |  Saturday: 10am-4pm

Admission: $45 for one-day pass; $65 for two-day pass

About NECANN: Since 2014, NECANN has hosted the largest, most comprehensive cannabis industry event series in the country. Our annual schedule includes conventions in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Illinois, Maryland, and Connecticut, making it the largest series in the country. Information for NECANN events is available online at www.necann.com.

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Lawsuit by New York Hemp Retailers Alleges Cannabis Regulators ‘Trampling’ Constitutional Rights

8/28/2024

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A lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court on Monday on behalf of three licensed hemp shops accuses the state Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) of “trampling” on their constitutional rights by conducting “military-style raids” as part of their regulatory crackdown on illegal cannabis sales, the Albany Times Union reports. The raids followed new regulations adopted in December which tightened rules on – and effectively banned – intoxicating hemp products that the businesses had been legally selling without penalty for at least six years. 

The stores – Smoke N Save in Saratoga Springs, Two Strains in Queensbury, and Breckenridge in Manhattan – accuse OCM of treating the hemp shops like unlicensed cannabis sellers, searching personal belongings of workers during the raids, breaking open locked cabinets, turning off store surveillance cameras, and refusing to provide identification.

“Under the guise of an ‘administrative inspection,’ a single (cannabis office) inspector, accompanied by a double-digit contingent of heavily armed police wearing body armor, and without notice, probable cause, or a warrant, are bursting into legal licensed hemp retailer’s business establishments, immediately turning off all cameras to avoid a record of their unlawful actions, and carrying out their unlawful tactics without any regard that the retailer they are raiding is not selling marijuana but is a lawfully operating state-licensed hemp retailer.” — The lawsuit, via the Times Union 

The OCM regulations allowing the raids were first installed last year as emergency rules but were adopted by the Cannabis Control Board in December without public comment or involvement of the state Legislature, the report says. OCM has refused to provide any record or administrative proceedings resulting from the raids. 

The lawsuit also names the New York Sheriff’s Office as defendants. A similar lawsuit was filed earlier this month in Manhattan. 

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Maine Law Allowing for Sealing of Some Cannabis Crimes Now in Effect

8/28/2024

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A Maine law allowing individuals to apply to have their criminal histories for some cannabis crimes sealed took effect this month, the Maine Morning Star reports. The law applies to crimes that are now legal under the state’s adult-use cannabis law.

Criminal defense attorney Matthew Morgan, a partner at McKee Morgan, noted in an interview with the Morning Star that under the law, some professional licensing agencies and law enforcement will still be able to access the records, “but otherwise they will be sealed, and people are allowed to indicate they do not have a criminal record based on the sealing.”  

Barbara Cardone, director of legal affairs and public relations for the Maine Judicial Branch, said the courts could not provide data on the number of people who have requested to have their criminal records sealed under the new rules. 

Last session, lawmakers had considered a bill to automatically seal cannabis-related crimes that are now legal activity but ultimately rejected that proposal due to objections over the cost of the program – about $633,000 according to a judicial branch analyst – and due to First Amendment concerns by the Maine Press Association which argued that automatically sealing records would violate the right of the public to access records of criminal proceedings under the First Amendment.

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Rhode Island Considers Relaxing Cannabis Packaging Rules

8/28/2024

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Rhode Island regulators are considering changes to cannabis packaging in the state, including allowing color, the Rhode Island Current reports. Under current rules, cannabis packaging must include only neutral colors in an effort to prevent packaging from being attractive to children. 

The Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) is also considering placing the name of the laboratory that rested the cannabis on the package, the use of QR codes on labels, and listing the cannabinoids that make up the products instead of only THC potency. 

Allowing colors was recommended by the Cannabis Advisory Board in July, which the panel said would provide “for more branding freedom for licensees.” In an interview with the Current, advisory board member Stuart Procter, co-founder and lab director for cannabis testing facility PureVita Labs, said giving companies the ability to brand products “gives them the ability to differentiate themselves in the market.”  

The proposed change to add cannabinoid content to the packaging would help customers better understand the product profile and would also help businesses understand what profiles are popular among customers. Proctor said that, under the current rules, retailers price and sell products based on THC potency and may stop selling more diver products because they are low in THC. 

“It’s almost like a self-fulfilling, destroying prophecy,” he told the Current. “As that number pushes up and more and more products can’t reach the benchmark, the quality products meant for human consumption are falling away.” 

The CCC expects to announce its decision within the next two months.  

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Colorado Expecting Psychedelic Therapy Centers to Open Next Year

8/28/2024

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Officials with the Colorado Department of Revenue recently released the final regulations for the state’s voter-approved medical psilocybin program; under the program, officials expect psychedelic therapy centers will be approved to open next year by late spring or early summer, The Aspen Times reports.

In 2022, Colorado voters approved a ballot initiative calling for the legalization of psilocybin for medical and personal use; and in 2023, Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed the bill that lawmakers passed to implement the voter-approved reforms. Colorado’s psychedelics program will be the second such program in the U.S. after Oregon launched its medical psilocybin program earlier this year.

The final regulations include two sets of rules, the report said — one from the Department of Regulatory Agencies that covers the training and licensing of psychedelic therapy facilitators and one from the Department of Revenue that covers licensing procedures for the businesses participating in the program, including treatment centers, cultivators, manufacturers, and testing facilities.

Tasia Poinsatte, director of the Healing Advocacy Fund in Colorado — a nonprofit advocating for safe, affordable state-regulated access to psychedelic healing — said the program would be completely different from the state’s medical cannabis industry.

“This is not a dispensary model, and we’re not allowing any kind of retail sales. So nobody will be going in, purchasing psilocybin mushrooms, and then just taking them without this therapeutic and supervised structure. It really is a fundamentally different approach than what we’ve seen with marijuana, and it’s very much geared towards access for mental health.” —Tasia Poinsatte, director of the Healing Advocacy Fund in Colorado, via The Aspen Times

Researchers have found that psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA show a lot of potential against treatment-resistant cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Meanwhile, a study in June found that older adults who have used psychedelics tend to exhibit better cognitive function and fewer depressive symptoms.

 

 

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Home Depot to Stop Drug Testing for Cannabis

8/28/2024

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Home Depot is planning to update its employee drug testing policies in September to remove cannabis screenings, and will stop pre-employment drug testing for most new workers, Marijuana Moment reports.

The policy change was first discussed publicly on the social media platform Reddit, where users on the r/HomeDepot online forum — a self-described “hangout for Home Depot associates” — said they had learned of the pending change from their management. The report confirmed the policy change via a human resources memo from the company.

Moving forward, Home Depot will only conduct pre-employment drug testing “for external candidates with contingent offers in Asset Protection and Corporate Security,” the memo said.

Home Depot — the sixth-largest employer in the U.S. — was not the first major jobs creator to reconsider its cannabis drug screening policies. In 2021, Amazon — the second-largest employer in the U.S. — announced the company would cease its drug screenings for cannabis. Additionally, Amazon announced it would begin lobbying for the federal legalization of adult-use cannabis.

President Joe Biden (D) this year called on his administration to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The move would not federally legalize cannabis but would reduce restrictions on the plant, improving access for research purposes and providing much-needed tax relief to state-legal industries.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said this week it has scheduled a hearing for the rescheduling action for December 2.

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Best Cannabis Seeds

Seeds of Success: Unveiling DNA Genetics’ Best Cannabis Strains

8/27/2024

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Choosing the right seeds can make or break your marijuana growing and consumption experience. Using the best marijuana seeds are crucial for successful cultivation, yield, and bud quality.

High-quality seeds can make the difference between a thriving garden and a disappointing harvest. This is where DNA Genetics stands out as a leading name in the industry, celebrated for their award-winning strains and commitment to excellence.

Let’s find out more about DNA Genetics and their top strains. We’ll look at what makes these strains so popular in the cannabis community and how to find the best choice for you. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned grower, a firm understanding of your options is crucial as we’re here to help you make informed decisions.

About DNA Genetics

Founded in Amsterdam in 2004 by California natives Don and Aaron, DNA Genetics quickly became a leading name in the cannabis seed industry. Drawing from their extensive experience, they set out to create high-quality, innovative strains for both medicinal and recreational users.

Today, DNA Genetics is recognized for its commitment to quality and consistency, producing seeds known for their stability and robust genetic traits. Their reputation is built on years of research and development. They lead in the creation of strains that thrive in diverse environments and deliver exceptional effects.

Trusted by growers worldwide, DNA Genetics has received over 200 awards from prestigious competitions like the High Times Cannabis Cup and Spannabis. Strains like Kosher Kush, Chocolope, and Strawberry Banana have become industry favorites, cementing their status as a leader in the global cannabis market.

Why Choosing the Right Seeds Matters

Cultivating low-quality seeds could result in poor quality crops and buds. The genetics of a plant directly impact its quality, yield, and effects. The strain’s genetic makeup determines its cannabinoid and terpene content, influencing flavor, aroma, and potency.

DNA Seeds

When selecting the best marijuana seeds, you’re selecting reliable genetics that lead to more robust plants, higher yields, and desired effects.

Trusted breeders, like DNA Genetics, ensure consistency through selective breeding and maintaining genetic stability. This results in uniform and predictable plants.

Through rigorous quality control they can ensure that the seeds perform reliably, making them a top choice for both experienced and novice growers.

Feminized Seeds: The Grower’s Choice

Feminized seeds are a popular choice for most cannabis growers as they produce only female crops. These are the ones that yield the prized buds. They also eliminate the need to sex and remove male plants. Ultimately, this streamlines the growing process and maximizes the harvest potential. \

The genetics of feminized seeds are essential for ensuring the best quality, robust plants, as well as increased yields. Reliable genetics lead to consistent cannabinoid and terpene profiles, better resistance to pests, and more predictable results.

By selecting the best marijuana seeds from reputable breeders, you’ll benefit from proven stability and uniformity.  This makes cultivation more efficient and effective.

Featured Strains from DNA Genetics

Kosher Kush

Kosher Kush is an indica-dominant strain renowned for its potent effects and rich, earthy flavor profile. Originating from Los Angeles and once known as “Jew Gold,” this strain has won multiple awards, including Best Indica at the High Times Cannabis Cup.

Kosher Kush offers a deeply relaxing body high, making it a top choice for evening use. Many have reported that it provides relief from insomnia, pain, or stress. With THC levels often exceeding 20%, it provides a powerful, sedative experience.

The strain’s aroma is a complex blend of pine, lemon, and earthy undertones, adding to its appeal among cannabis connoisseurs.

Chocolope

Chocolope is a sativa-dominant strain that results from crossing OG Chocolate Thai and Cannalope Haze. It’s known for its distinct, sweet chocolate flavor with hints of coffee and earth.

It delivers an uplifting and energizing high, making it a popular choice for daytime use. This strain’s effects are often reported as euphoric and motivating, making it ideal for combating stress, fatigue, and depression.

Chocolope’s impressive lineage contributes to its robust growth and high yields, especially in indoor environments. With THC levels ranging between 18–22%, Chocolope is a favorite for those seeking a flavorful, cerebral experience.

Challah Cake

Challah Cake is a distinctive strain that combines the creamy, dessert-like flavors of Wedding Cake with the robust genetics of Kosher Kush. This hybrid offers a balanced high, providing both uplifting and relaxing effects that make it suitable for any time of day.

The strain is known for its sweet, doughy aroma with hints of vanilla and earth, reminiscent of freshly baked challah bread. Challah Cake typically boasts THC levels around 20%, delivering a potent yet smooth experience.

It’s a versatile strain that adapts well to various growing conditions, producing dense, resinous buds that are perfect for concentrate enthusiasts.

White Widow Feminized

White Widow feminized is a legendary strain, celebrated for its powerful effects and easy-to-grow nature. It’s a balanced hybrid that combines the genetics of Brazilian sativa and South Indian indica. The result? A strain that offers both euphoric, uplifting effects and a soothing body high.

Its flavor profile is a blend of earthy and pine notes, with a hint of sweetness.

White Widow is known for its frosty, resin-coated buds, making it a favorite for those who enjoy potent, sticky strains. With THC levels around 18-25%, it’s ideal for users seeking a well-rounded experience that combats stress and pain.

Skywalker Kush

Skywalker Kush is an indica-dominant strain that brings together the best of Skywalker and OG Kush genetics. This potent strain is known for its strong, earthy aroma with hints of citrus and diesel.

Skywalker Kush delivers a powerful, calming body high, making it ideal for evening use. Many have reported its efficacy in providing relief to those with pain, insomnia, or anxiety.

With THC levels often reaching up to 22–25%, it’s not for the faint-hearted. Skywalker Kush thrives in both indoor and outdoor environments, producing large, dense buds that are coated in a thick layer of trichomes. This makes it a favorite among growers and consumers alike.

Green Crack

Green Crack is a sativa-dominant strain that’s famous for its invigorating effects and sharp, fruity flavor. Despite its controversial name, allegedly coined by Snoop Dogg, Green Crack is prized for its ability to provide intense bursts of energy and focus. This makes it ideal for daytime use.

The strain’s genetics trace back to Skunk #1, which contributes to its sweet, citrusy aroma with earthy undertones. The THC levels typically range between 15–20% but the strain is known to be quite potent, so tread carefully.

Green Crack is a go-to for those seeking a cerebral, uplifting high that enhances creativity and productivity. It’s also believed to help combat fatigue and stress.

Blue Dream

Blue Dream is a legendary hybrid that perfectly balances the best of both worlds. It combines the relaxing body effects of Blueberry with the uplifting, cerebral high of Haze.

This sativa-dominant strain is beloved for its sweet berry aroma and flavor, making it a favorite among cannabis enthusiasts. Blue Dream offers a smooth, balanced experience. It’s believed to provide relief from pain and stress without heavy sedation, making it suitable for both daytime and evening use.

With THC levels typically around 17–24%, Blue Dream is versatile, appealing to both novice and experienced users. It’s also a grower’s favorite due to its high yield and resistance to pests.

How to Choose the Right Strain for Your Needs

When it comes to the best marijuana seeds, there are plenty to choose from. It all comes down to your preferences, expectations, and growing experience. Consider the following key factors when determining the right strain for you:

Desired Effects

Each strain has a unique profile that delivers specific effects. Start by determining the effects that you’d like.

Indica-dominant strains, like Challah Cake, are known for their sedating effects, making them ideal if you want to relax or need some help falling asleep. Sativa-dominant strains provide uplifting and energizing effects, making them suitable for daytime use. Finally, hybrids deliver a mix of these effects.

The strain’s cannabinoid and terpene profiles contribute to the experience, so consider them when making your choice.

Growing Conditions

Whether indoors or outdoors, your growing environment plays a significant role in strain selection.

Some strains are better suited to specific climates, light cycles, and nutrient conditions. Some thrive indoors while others thrive outdoors. Ensure that your growing environment matches the seeds’ requirements.

Personal Preferences

Consider your preferences for flavor, aroma, and potency. This is where the strain’s terpene and cannabinoid profile makes its impact.

Flavors range from earthy and spicy flavors to sweet and fruity. The potency of the strain also impacts how you’ll experience your desired effects.

Medical Conditions

Are you using cannabis for medicinal purposes? Select strains based on cannabinoid ratios and the effects they deliver. Strains like Skywalker Kush are known for their therapeutic effects. Just remember to consult your healthcare professional if you’re taking regular medications.

Conclusion

Selecting high-quality cannabis seeds is essential for achieving a successful and rewarding cultivation experience. DNA Genetics has proven to be a standout leader in the industry with its award-winning strains.

To explore these top strains and find the perfect seeds for your cultivation goals, visit the DNA Genetics shop.

For additional growing tips and guidance, check out their informative blog or contact their team of experts. Happy growing!

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DEA Plans Cannabis Rescheduling Hearing for December 2nd

8/27/2024

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Although many cannabis experts and industry insiders were hoping to see a change in cannabis’ federal classification before the upcoming Presidential election in November, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has scheduled a hearing for December 2 to consider expert opinions on the Department of Justice’s proposal to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). This follows a public comment period that received over 40,000 submissions, leading to the decision to hold an administrative hearing after the November elections.

The hearing introduces some uncertainty into the timeline for the potential rescheduling, raising concerns that the rulemaking process may not be completed before January, potentially complicating the transition under a new administration. Despite hopes from some advocates for a quicker resolution, the DEA regularly schedules hearings for major public interest regulatory proposals, and this case is no exception.

If the rescheduling is finalized, cannabis would be subject to the same regulatory controls as other Schedule III substances, while still maintaining specific restrictions under federal law. While some advocates have argued that this development would set the stage for state-legal cannabis markets to be taken over by large pharmaceutical companies, many industry stakeholders believe that Schedule III will enable access to much-needed financial services and remove the burden of IRS Tax Code 280E, which prevents cannabis businesses from deducting any normal business expenses on their tax returns.

The itinerary for the DEA’s upcoming hearing has not yet been laid out, though in all likelihood it will feature presenters from both sides of the debate. Interested parties who may be affected by the policy change must submit a notice of intent to participate in the hearing within 30 days of the notice’s publication.

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New York Cannabis Sales Exceed $260M During First 2 Quarters of 2024

8/26/2024

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Cannabis sales in New York have topped more than $260 million during the first two quarters of 2024, according to Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) Policy Director John Kagia, who told News10 that quarter three sales were on track to surpass those of the second quarter. Kagia added that the state collected about $23 million in cannabis taxes from the second quarter alone. 

“This is one of the benefits that jurisdictions that legalized or approved cannabis businesses to operate in their jurisdictions get to enjoy. The state has a 13% sales tax that’s applied to all cannabis products that are sold. 9% of those monies go to the state, but 4% of those tax revenues are reverted back to the municipalities where these transactions were done.” — Kagia to News10 

Since cannabis sales began in the state, $5.9 million has been distributed to local governments in upstate New York, $3.2 to Long Island governments, and $4.5 million to New York City. 

Since adult-use cannabis was legalized in the state, officials have worked to shut down shops found to be selling cannabis without a license; over the last three months, according to OCM, the state has shuttered more than 1,000 such shops. 

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Report: Ohio Gov. Has No Plans to Pardon Low-Level Cannabis Crimes

8/26/2024

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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has no immediate plans to grant mass pardons for Ohioans with low-level cannabis offenses, according to a report from Axios. Adult-use cannabis sales began in Ohio the first week of this month. 

DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney told Axios that while the governor is not planning any executive action on pardons, the administration is monitoring potential action by state lawmakers, who have proposed various bills to expunge previous convictions for low-level cannabis possession charges, but none have reached the governor’s desk. 

State Rep. Ismail Mohamed (D) told WCMH in April that the charges impact employment, housing, and higher education opportunities for Ohioans. 

Governors in other states have approved pardons for previous crimes that are now legal in the wake of adult-use cannabis laws. According to a NORML report released in June, policy reforms have led to about 2.5 million expungements or pardons for cannabis convictions in recent years. In April, the Massachusetts Governor’s Council unanimously approved the mass pardoning request by Gov. Maura Healey (D) for cannabis possession convictions in the state. That action took effect immediately after the vote and theoretically wiped out all misdemeanor cannabis possession-related convictions ever handed out under Massachusetts state law. In July, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) announced the mass pardoning of about 175,000 cannabis convictions in the state.  

Since the legalization of cannabis, leaders in many states – and even cities in states that have not passed the reforms – have pardoned or expunged low-level cannabis crimes.

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North Dakota Tax Commissioner: Cannabis Taxes Could Reach $7.28M Every Two Years

8/26/2024

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North Dakota’s tax commissioner estimates that adult-use cannabis taxes in the state could reach $7.281 million every two years based on a 5% sales tax rate, the Associated Press reports. The proposed ballot measure does not include a tax rate – a decision that will ultimately be left to lawmakers. 

During a discussion last week with Tax Commissioner Brian Kroshus and a panel of lawmakers, Steve Bakken, who is leading the initiative to legalize cannabis in the state, presented estimates for tax revenue, based on data from six other states, extrapolated for North Dakota. He estimated annual revenues between a low of $7.65 million and an average of $19.46 million. 

The measure included on ballots will include financial estimates, and the legislative panel approved estimates of $10.3 million in revenue, $8.3 million in expenditures, and an “undetermined amount” of other costs related to “behavioral health and social impacts.”  

The panel approved other potential expenses related to adult-use cannabis legalization, including a one-time $4 million expenditure estimated by the state Highway Patrol for oral fluid screening devices that would have to be purchased over the next two years to test for cannabis impairment during traffic stops. Republican state Sen. Kyle Davison called the estimate “just overkill on a fiscal note.”

Republican Rep. Ben Koppelman added that including the fiscal note “feels like we’re packing this to be negative,” adding that he’s “not a proponent of” the reforms, “but we need to be fair.”

North Dakotans will consider legalizing cannabis for adult use for the third time this November. Voters have twice before rejected similar proposals, in 2018 and 2022.

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Missouri Secretary of State Rejects Governor’s Ban on Intoxicating Hemp Products

8/26/2024

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Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s (R) executive order to ban the sale of intoxicating hemp products was held up last week by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who rejected the emergency rules for not meeting certain state law criteria, the Missouri Independent reports.

The ban, which was supposed to take effect on September 1, would have prohibited the sale of hemp-derived products containing delta-8 and delta-10 THC, hexahydrocannabinol (HHC), tetrahydrocannabinol (THC-O), tetrahydrocannabiphoral (THCP), and tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV). But after Ashcroft rejected the governor’s plan, officials now must submit rules to ban intoxicating hemp products like they would any other law — a process that could take up to six months, the governor said in a scathing letter to Ashcroft.

“Without question, our office and hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents across the state view the matter of protecting Missouri children as an emergency in need of immediate action. By refusing to grant emergency rules to ban the sale of unregulated psychoactive cannabis products, especially to children, Secretary Ashcroft is choosing personal vendetta and unregulated, dangerous products over the health and safety of Missouri kids.” — Gov. Parson, in a press release

A spokesperson for Ashcroft’s office said he has the “discretion to determine what constitutes an emergency rule” and noted that the standard rules procedure includes a 30- or 60-day comment period, “where individuals on both sides can comment on the rule.” After the public comment period, the proposal would be considered by state lawmakers on the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, the report said.

Chuck Hatfield, an attorney for the Missouri Hemp Trade Association, told the Independent that lawmakers should be in charge of regulating the hemp products industry, not the governor through executive action.

“Trying to do it through executive order and bureaucratic action is just not good government,” he said. “And I think the Secretary of State today, in part, recognized that.”

 

 

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Vermont Supreme Court Denies Unemployment Appeal by Cannabis Patient Fired for Cannabis Use

8/26/2024

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The Vermont Supreme Court last week overruled an appeal for unemployment benefits by a medical cannabis patient who was fired after testing positive for cannabis on a drug test, ABC News reports.

Ivo Skoric, 59, was terminated on January 9, 2023, from his part-time job cleaning and fueling buses for the city of Rutland for misconduct after testing positive for cannabis on a drug test; and because he was fired for misconduct, state law has prevented him from collecting unemployment benefits. Representing himself, Skoric appealed his case to the state Supreme Court earlier this year where he argued that he should not lose benefits granted by the state just for participating in a state-sanctioned medical program.

The court noted that Skoric’s position had been safety-sensitive and required him to have a commercial driver’s license, and that his firing was the result of violating federal U.S. Department of Transportation regulations.

But while the court rejected his appeal, the justices stopped short of clarifying whether medical cannabis patients in the state are entitled to off-duty cannabis use, noting instead that the Labor Department “properly declined to issue a declaratory ruling” and that Skoric’s “violation of written workplace policy stood as an independent source of disqualifying conduct,” the report said. 

Skoric, who sought a declaratory ruling about whether Vermont medical cannabis patients have the right to use cannabis while off-duty without repercussion, told ABC News the court’s decision does not satisfactorily address the issue: “It does not discuss whether an employee who is medical cannabis patient in Vermont has the right to use cannabis in the off-hours.”

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Sean Myles: Studying Cannabis DNA to Move Beyond the Indica/Sativa Binary

8/23/2024

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In this episode of the Ganjapreneur podcast, host TG Branfalt is joined by Dr. Sean Myles, an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who brings a wealth of knowledge on plant genetics. While Dr. Myles has made significant contributions to the study of plant varieties in apples and grapes, today’s focus is on his groundbreaking work in cannabis research. Within the unique intersection of agriculture, genetics, and the culture and policy of cannabis legalization, Dr. Myles sheds light on how cannabis labeling, genetic diversity, and breeding practices are shaping the future of the industry.

Find the episode on your favorite podcast app, listen via the media player below, or scroll down for the full transcript!

Listen to the episode:

Read the full transcript:

Editor’s note: this transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

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TG Branfalt:

Today we’re joined by Dr. Sean Myles. He’s an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University. He’s done countless, countless studies on cannabis, agriculture, a lot on apples, which I find very interesting, but that’s not where we’re here to talk about today. How are you doing this morning, Sean?

Sean Myles:

Doing great. Thanks for having me on.

TG Branfalt:

I’m real excited. We have a lot to talk about. Before you get into it, man, tell me about yourself. Tell me your background and how you ended up a doctor, associate professor, and all that good stuff.

Sean Myles:

Sure. I’m really passionate about food. I think that’s kind of where it ended up sending me is to learn more about where our food comes from, how it’s produced, how it gets to the table and gets on your plate. I studied genetics, so I look at DNA for a living, and I did my PhD. I actually worked in human genetics and human medical genetics kind of stuff first, but switched gears there in order to chase my wife. My wife is a winemaker and I always figured if I wanted to live somewhere where she lives, I should probably just study grapes. So we figured that out. I started a postdoc in grapes at Cornell and continued on that path. And then we moved back here to, we live in Nova Scotia in Canada, in rural Nova Scotia. It’s a beautiful place to live, and we’ve got lots of apples here. So I switched my research to focus on apples after a while and working on plants and genetics around the time when cannabis was becoming legalized in Canada. It was a real obvious choice to go and start looking at cannabis because such a fascinating crop.

TG Branfalt:

So what interests you most about genetic research in general, whether it be human genetic research or agricultural genetic research?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, I think a lot of my interest stems from an interest in better understanding our past, knowing where our food came from, how domestication and breeding has really taken place and shaped the food that we consume today and what effects that’s had on the food that we eat. It’s a really fascinating thing to be able to do, is to sort of read history by looking at DNA. You can learn quite a bit. So we’ve learned a lot about what we are and how we became human from looking at DNA and fascinating stories by sequencing genomes of Neanderthals and all that kind of stuff. It’s not that different when looking at the DNA of food so we can learn things about where our food comes from and how the different strains of cannabis, for example, are related to each other and how much diversity there is for us to use, which is tremendous. And then that gives us a guide in a way of where we should be going in the future. So the other portion is what do we do with this information and how do we more efficiently and effectively breed new varieties of food that are going to require less chemical input to grow and are going to be healthy for you? So that’s the real motivation.

TG Branfalt:

So we’re talking about the past, I mean cannabis—because of prohibition worldwide essentially—we don’t know a ton about it. And so, what big questions did you set out to answer when you started researching cannabis?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, in general, we were interested in knowing what we call as sort of the general genetic structure of cannabis. So one of the big questions of course, is how different are hemp and cannabis that’s consumed for psychoactive effects. And so one of the first things we did was we collected, we got our hands on some samples of hemp and we got our hands on some samples of cannabis psychoactive cannabis, and we took a look at that. There’s been a lot of theory and theory and hypotheses about, well, hemp is just basically cannabis that doesn’t have any THC, so it’s probably just like one gene that’s turned off, but otherwise there’s a lot of overlap in the way they look and the way they behave. But when we looked at it, we actually found that the hemp and what we call marijuana in the paper, but I believe more appropriately is just called cannabis for, what do you call recreational cannabis, if you will, or medical cannabis.

Yeah, there’s differences. There’s systematic differences across the entire genome so they can be sort of understood as two kind of different genetic groups. So that suggests it may be worthwhile if you see a trait in a hemp line that you’re interested in and you’re a cannabis breeder for recreational purposes, it may make sense to cross it with some hemp at some point and try to use that genetic diversity in your breeding program and that kind of thing. So those are some of the, and just in general is the big question that kept coming up is the use of the terms indica and sativa because these are botanical terms that have been kind of co-opted by the recreational users to mean something, but it’s not really entirely clear what indica and sativa really mean and people have different ideas about it. So we thought looking at the DNA of these large diverse set of samples could shed some light on that.

TG Branfalt:

Do you think that we’ve sort of adopted those terms or accepted those terms as cannabis consumers and the industry at large due to the sort of lack of research and lack of understanding about the planet?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I think it’s become unclear what the terms mean because the industry has operated in a clandestine fashion for so long and underground. So there haven’t been the kind of controls and policies and strict protocols in place that you would see in other crops. For example, in a strawberry, when they release a strawberry to the public from a breeding program, you can’t just say that it’s this kind of strawberry. I mean, it has to be that kind. You can’t put in a bottle of wine a bunch of Cabernet Sauvignon and call it pinot noir. That’s not allowed, and you can’t get away with that. But in the cannabis world, in the underground cannabis world, you can get away with a lot if you want to sell the stuff and the person walking in, they like indica, all of a sudden your stuff is indica. So I think it’s been kind of co-opted and got a little messy, even though cannabis sativa and cannabis indica originally are kind of terms from botany where that described the structure of the plant its use today is arguably not a very good indicator of the genetics or the chemistry of the plants is what we found in our research.

TG Branfalt:

So tell me about the results of the 2021 paper. Cannabis labeling is associated with genetic variation in terpene syn genes. I’m probably mispronouncing that penultimate word there. And additionally, 2015 genetic structure of marijuana and hemp study. Tell me about each of these and it is one sort of link to the other in some way.

Sean Myles:

Yeah, so I think we’re trying to address similar questions in these studies, and the very first study in 2015 was one of the very earliest studies of a genetic analysis of cannabis. And in that study we took a look. We got samples from one of the earliest licensed producers in Canada who were growing cannabis for the new burgeoning industrial market that was opening up in Canada because it’s been legalized. So that was early days. And all of these licensed producers, they were like, okay, where are we going to get our seed? Where are we going to get our plants? And it was basically find people who are growing it underground and bring it into the legal market. There wasn’t some gene bank they have in other crops that you can just go order up a whole bunch of seed and start out. So this one collaborator we had, they had a decent amount on the order of a hundred samples or so, or 80 to a hundred samples of various lines, and they were named.

So you can see in the paper there’s the lemon skunk and white widow, Alaskan Ice, Bubba Kush standard strain names with, and each of them, they have a reported percent indica or percent sativa. So I think they were either like a hundred percent indica or 25% or 50 50 hybrid or the other way, a hundred percent sativa or 75% sativa. So we had a good number of samples, and then we had a bunch of hemp samples too. We wanted to see if hemp was different from the cannabis. They were growing for the legal market here in Canada. So we did that genetic analysis and what came out was that the genetics don’t really align very well at all with whether they’re labeled as indica or sativa. So whether something, if you look at how closely related things are, for instance, a cannabis strain that is labeled as a hundred percent indica is frequently more closely related to something that’s labeled as a hundred percent sativa than it is other indica labeled strains.

So we know that then the labeling isn’t matching up with the genetics so that the label of indica or sativa is a very poor indicator of what the genetics of the plant are, which suggests that it’s also a poor indicator of what the plant actually looks like when it’s grown, which means that this isn’t really telling you much. So that’s the first indicator we had of like, okay, this whole legal market is going to explode in Canada here coming up. And one of the main things these marketing departments are using is this label of indica and sativa because it’s so widespread its use in the underground world. That’s how people identify their stuff and they have strong beliefs about whether sativa is uplifting and indica is supposed to give you couch lock and a lot of that. So we wanted to see does that really line up?

And unfortunately from our sample, we can’t say for everyone, but from our sample, the genetics were not a good indicator of the indica and sativa labeling was a very poor predictor of the genetic identity of the plants. So then we thought, fine, maybe labeling them as indica and sativa doesn’t tell you much, but does it tell you much if they say it’s lemon skunk? Does that tell you anything? Is white widow really a unique genetic identity, which in the other worlds, like a Honeycrisp apple is a unique genetic identity. Every single honey crisp apple tree is genetically identical to every single other one. And that’s what we do in horticulture. This is the way it works in strawberries, peaches, pears, plums, apples, cherries, all of it, right? You breed new varieties, you release them to market. And the ones when they end up on the shelf, if it says Pinot noir on the bottle, it’s pinot noir grapes in the bottle, and we’re finding that we’re getting white widow from one producer and we’re getting white widow from another producer and we’re looking at their genetics and they’re not the same at all. They’re not even closely related. Often one of them is more closely related to a strain with a different name than it is to a strain with the same name. And about a third of the cases we saw, so the strain names, the strain names are also not reliable indicators of what you’re getting. So you think you like white widow, but every time you’re getting white widow, you’re getting something different. So it is not really telling you much. Basically the conclusion is it’s a goddamn mess.

The whole thing is a mess. People are telling you things that are not true, and as a scientist, it’s our responsibility to say, okay, this is how not true it is. This is the degree of untruth in here and for an agricultural crop, it’s through the roof. With cannabis, there’s no bigger mess of any crop on the planet.

TG Branfalt:

There’s no sort of effort by the Canadian government, which has federally legalized cannabis to fix this at all. In your knowledge?

Sean Myles:

No, my words are generally ignored and that I’m not a policy pusher. I’m not the guy who goes and stands before parliament and tries to get things changed. Look, if people want to call it indica and sativa, whatever, naturopaths give you all sorts of sugar pills too, and then people believe in that. So I think you got to pick your battles. And we’ve published in the literature, we talk about it on podcasts, we’ve let people know that the evidence so far suggests that these labels that we’re applying to products are highly misleading when we talk to the marketing. I’ve had conversations with people who work in marketing and promotion in these cannabis companies too, and off record, they’re fully willing to admit, it’s like when we come out with a new strain, we just ask the breeders, just ask the marketing department, should we label this one incar or sativa?

What do we need more of? Right? There’s no holy shit. Yeah, there’s very little. So we wanted to see whether this was really the case across the board. In science, we always have a sample and we make an inference, but that doesn’t mean that it applies to everything in the world. So if you go and you measure how much people like bananas and you’ve got a sample of 12-year-old kids in Hawaii, it’s going to be different than how people like bananas elsewhere. So was our sample representative. So we got another set of samples in the 2021 paper. We went and worked with Bedrocan. It’s the biggest medical cannabis producer in Europe, and they’ve been collecting strains from the Dutch coffee shops for ages and propagating. And so that they would have this sort of base of genetic variation to breed from, and they were great to work with.

And so we also had over a hundred different strains, and they’re all, not only did we look at genetic information, but we also chemically analyzed them so that we could see, especially for these terpenes and these aromatic molecules, what kind of differences are there among all these strains? And so the same conclusion comes out in general that indica and sativa labeling are not good predictors of the genetics. They’re also fairly poor predictors of the chemical identity of the plant. But there are a few things that are correlated with the labeling, and they do line up with what people believe the differences are between indica and sativa. So generally people believe that indica strains are a little more sort of dank and skunky, little more forest floor kind of aromas kind of stuff. And we do find actually that on average the indica strains had higher levels of mercene, and that’s a molecule that’s often there’s an earthy aroma attributed to high mercene content.

And there’s also some evidence that there’s a sedative effect to mercene, which would go along with the couch lock that people talk about when it comes to indica strains. So there’s a little bit, the signal’s not strong. Look, there’s lots of sativa strains, things labeled as sativa that had high levels of mercene, and there’s lots interesting, lots of things labeled as indica that had very low levels of mercene. But on average, in our sample, we did find that the things labeled as indica, the more indica you had on average, you had more mercene. So that does line up with what people believe is also like indica labeling was correlated to with the amount of guil, gamma ol and beta ol. So if you had more of these, and those are also, they’re associated with plants from Afghanistan actually in original botanical literature, which is considered the region of origin cultivars.

So that kind of lines up too. Then on the sativa side, we looked at the sativa ones tended on average to have more bergin, and they have sort of tea and fruity aromas. They’re associated, those molecules are associated with fruit and tea, which is also in line with what people believe sativa cultivars to possess. So the first study basically said, this is a big load of hogwash and everybody should ignore the labels. The second study was like, ah, you know what? There are a few chemicals that are associated with whether you’re indica or sativa, the signal is not strong, but maybe that’s driving people to label the cultivars in the first place. You’re breeding stuff, mixing stuff up, like doing crosses. You get one that smells pretty skunky, you’re going to call it indica.

That’s basically what we’re saying is that the labeling is probably driven by a small number of aromatic molecules and their concentrations and what people associate with that. But it’s not the genetics of the plant in general. It’s not like there are two populations of plants, indica and sativa and never will the two mix, or that’s not the way it is. It’s probably that we’re labeling them because you sniff it, you go, whoa, man, this is skunky. I’m going to call this indica. Or Hey, this has got a bit of both. I’m going to call it a 50 50. So that’s what came out of those.

TG Branfalt:

Did the findings surprise you? Because for me, as somebody who’s come to the industry for 10 years, it’s not surprising to me. I did a podcast one time with a guy who went and did mass spectrometer analysis of cultivars, found blue dream in one dispensary in Las Vegas, Nevada, and then another dispensary in Las Vegas, Nevada, and found these are not even close to the same plant. But for you did, was it surprising to you?

Sean Myles:

No, I think it lines up with what we understand from the history of cannabis breeding. It was interesting though. I did present these results at CannaCon in 2020 maybe or something like that. I was at this cannabis conference, and of course there’s a whole bunch of people there have been involved in breeding cannabis for a really long time, and I got one of two responses. The one response was from people like you who were reasonable, rational people who were like, yeah, of course. I mean, we’ve been shuffling this stuff all over the place forever, and this indica sativa thing is probably, there’s not much to it. And then there were the others, or strain names too. They were like, ah, strain names. I wouldn’t trust them. But then there were quite a few people who found that the results of our study upsetting or disagreed with it so much that they approach you afterwards and they’re like, dude, I have the real white widow man. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I have the real white widow, and was like, that doesn’t make any sense, man. White widow isn’t a thing. We just demonstrated. I just showed you that the name white widow is associated with all sorts of different genetic profiles. So there is no original white widow. I don’t know. Maybe there was at some point or something, but you wouldn’t be able to prove it. There’s no plant breeders rights. There’s no patents. There’s no way of verifying this stuff. There’s no genetic marker that you can use to go and say, this is that we do in other crops. So I found it funny, and I don’t think that also indicates that it makes sense that the amount of confidence they have in their breeding material is inversely related to their ability to keep track of their material.

You can’t, as a breeder, if you don’t really keep track of things very well, of course you’re going to come out and say you’re super confident about what you have, and it almost goes the other way. The people who are the best breeders in the world and tracking huge corn breeding programs and stuff, you talk to them and they’ll be like, yeah, no, we expect about 5% error rate. We get things mixed up sometimes, for sure. Of course you do. So I found it funny that there was such an enormous amount of confidence about not mixing things up, and you’re like, dude, you’ve been breeding in your basement for 25 years on your own smoking weed. I figure you’re probably making some mistakes, right?

TG Branfalt:

Are you a cannabis consumer?

Sean Myles:

Yeah. Yeah.

TG Branfalt:

So when I go to dispensary and they say, do you look in? I really look at them and go, string names of bullshit. Give me something that smells like this. Right? So how do you sort of buy cannabis with this knowledge?

Sean Myles:

It is disappointing. I mean, the first thing they ask you every single time you go to a dispensary here, it’s sold by the government. So we have government stores. You walk in and there’s someone there, and the first thing they say is, do you indica or sativa? And I’m like, man, there’s no difference. You just wish you could say, I was like, so it would be nice. And some of them do do this. They’re starting to put on the packaging what the quantification of those compounds. I was talking about those monoterpenes, like mercene and guil and different things that people care about bergamot and farine so that you have an idea of like, is this a fruity tea like one or is this a dank kind of earthy one? And that’ll give you an idea. But then there’s that next step they take, which is all about this one is uplifting and this one is sedative, and the jury is definitely out on that. There’s no strong evidence anywhere from the literature that is the case

TG Branfalt:

Isn’t it all individual brain chemistry as well.

Sean Myles:

Pardon me?

TG Branfalt:

Isn’t it all individual brain chemistry as well?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, I mean, there’s differences between human individuals in the way that we’re going to metabolize these different compounds and have experiences that differ in the population. So yeah, it would take a lot of work to figure that out. And it’s true. You’ve pointed out that we are a little behind, right? With cannabis as a given that it is a medicine and it’s consumed for recreational use, our understanding of the plant is still lags far behind plants that are of equivalent economic value worldwide. This is a huge economy. It is just that it’s been underground for so long that we haven’t been able to pay as much attention to it as scientists and government scientists or university scientists because we don’t have access to it and we don’t have, or it’s been challenging to get access. So this is all opening up now, and I think over the next decade we’re going to learn a lot more. I guess the challenge is going to be whether this ever translates into any kind of policy change or any kind of change on the ground, because we know already that indica and sativa labeling is not a good way of labeling cannabis, and we also know that the old strain names are also not accurate, but we’re still using ’em and they’re still out there.

TG Branfalt:

So what could a post- indica/sativa marketplace look like to be more accurate in your opinion?

Sean Myles:

No, I think it could mimic the wine industry, except that these breeding programs would come up with new strains. These new strains would have a name. They would vegetatively propagate them, clonally propagate them properly, so that when you get a package and it says it’s this strain, it really is that strain. So when you buy a bottle of pinot noir, it really is pinot noir. I think it would also be helpful to, I don’t think you really need to quantify the amount of guile and mercene and all that kind of stuff on the back of a bottle of Pinot. It doesn’t tell you how much of these particular aromas there are. They just describe it, right? They say, this pinot exhibits nice aromas of earthy aromas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and fresh fruit on the nose. You’re like, okay, great. And I could see the cannabis world moving in that direction where let’s not worry about the indica sativa thing. Let’s just focus on what does it taste like and what’s the name of the strain? And if they can get the strain sorted out so that give them new names from these new producers, new breeding programs that can keep track of their material and actually verify that it is really that strain, then that would be a big step forward, I think, for the industry.

TG Branfalt:

Going back to broader research, how is cannabis research different from the other agricultural research that you’ve done, or even just different from more non-cannabis agricultural research in general?

Sean Myles:

Yeah. I mean, a lot of agricultural genetics, research and breeding, it ties in with the breeding, a lot of the breeding targets. What you want to achieve as a breeder in a lot of crops is shelf life ability to be shipped long distances. Rarely is it, it’s almost very rarely is it aroma, right? Whereas in cannabis, it’s like cannabis has a fascinating profile of aromas. If anyone who’s had the opportunity to go and actually smell diverse strains of cannabis at flowering nice and fresh, it is unbelievable how different they can smell. And it’s not that different from grapes. If you taste a muca grape, a fully ripe muskat grape and compare it to a fully ripe Shiraz, oh, they’re just worlds apart. It’s just completely different. And these are all these metabolic pathways that differ because of the genetics of these plants that breeders have sort of been mixing and matching over time.

It’s really fascinating. So aren’t a whole lot of crops in the world where such an enormous amount of attention is paid to that fine sort of aroma bit where the breeding target is actually an aromatic profile and not just how do we make it last on the shelf longer, which is kind of a more boring kind of thing to target. So yeah, I think that’s what attracted me to it, is that it’s a little bit like we work in apples and grapes and apples and grapes are kind of those kind of crops, right? It’s got to be something special about the crunch of the apple or the taste of the apple or the smell of that wine, that kind of thing. And cannabis, it’s highly similar, right? It’s unlike a carrot. The thing is, there’s really only three crops in the world where we actually name varieties.

And those varieties or that variety names are well known to the public. When you buy a carrot at the store, you don’t know what variety of carrot it is. Nobody tells you, oh, this is the Caesar carrot. Nobody cares. It’s a carrot. And in potatoes, you’ve got a little bit like you’ve got the Yukon potato, you got the russet potato. There’s a bit in tomatoes, they have shapes and sizes, but you really don’t go with the, you got the cherry tomato in the Roma tomato, but you don’t have names of tomatoes. But in wine, you definitely have names. And Pinot noir has been grown for a thousand years. Clonally propagated for a thousand years, Cabernet, souvignon and convert, and Riesling and so on. All of these names are named varieties. In Apple, we have ’em, honey Crisp, Macintosh Gala, so on. And in cannabis we do, but name another crop in the world where we’ve got that it belongs to a very special subset of things that are so intimately tied with our culture and that we have associated names to specific genetic identities. Unfortunately, that all got screwed up in cannabis where it’s not actually really associated with the genetic identity, but we want to, there’s a desire to, and that’s really unique. It stands on a platform with only a couple of other crops in the world where people really do care which variety they get. That’s something to tap into. That’s amazing. It sits in a very, very unique group of crops, for sure.

TG Branfalt:

A lot of people that I’ve spoken to have sort of projected that the cannabis industry should, and as you sort of mentioned already does in many ways mirror the wine industry. There’s cannabis sommeliers now, for example. Is it the estimation as well that this will ultimately be the look and feel of a sort of mature cannabis industry, especially in Canada, which is obviously going to be decades ahead of the US?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, I think I have a very poor ability to predict the future, but if I were to express a hope, that would certainly be my hope that it would move in that direction. So that strain names were reliable indicators of what’s inside your package, and that the description of the kinds of experiences that you would, or the aromatics and the type of flavor that you would get from a cannabis strain are accurately depicted on the package as well.

TG Branfalt:

And I want to ask you, did broad cannabis legalization in Canada change the landscape for cannabis research in the country?

Sean Myles:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No. If you think about how cannabis research gets done in the United States, in fact, I was in the United States when I started investigating the potential of doing some cannabis genetics research and quickly discovered that it was going to be impossible to do anything in

TG Branfalt:

Was at Cornell.

Sean Myles:

I was at Stanford at the time, actually, and that was impossible to do. And so I contacted a Canadian up in, at the time was in Saskatchewan doing research on hemp, and they said, yeah, no problem. I mean, we’re growing the stuff here in our federal research station, and it’s going to become legal soon, so this is going to blow everything up. This is the perfect time to get into this. So since then, yeah, I mean, when you want to do research, especially as an academic, like me, a professor at a university, you want to do research into a crop. Generally, your first step is to go and develop a relationship with industry. And previously you couldn’t do that with Gs, right? You couldn’t say, oh, yeah, well, the new sponsor of my research on this next project is the guy down the road.

You can’t do that. So now that there are real industrial players on board, there’s a lot of industry academic research collaborations that leverage government funding. So the government is putting money into investigating all sorts of things about cannabis, a lot on the medical side too, and the effects that it has, and on the public safety side. So at what age, when should people be consuming? What does it really do to your brain? What levels are dangerous? These sorts of things. And this is all necessary. This is good. So I think it’s good for an industry to do that stuff to get ahead of the ball and make sure that you’re the ones pushing that agenda of, we want to know more about this crop, and we want the public to be aware of what it is. And I think that will all lead to more precise information being given to the consumer, which is, that’s the goal.

TG Branfalt:

What are some of the holes that still persist when it comes to the agricultural side of cannabis research?

Sean Myles:

I think better sampling for sure. We’ve done a couple of these small studies. There’s a couple of other studies that have been done on diverse samples of cannabis to get an idea of what the genetic structure really looks like. How well does the labeling actually reflect the genetic identity of the plants? And these sorts, do strain names make any sense anywhere. Just because we do it in a couple of samples, one from the Netherlands and one from Canada doesn’t mean that it’s the case everywhere. So I think just more broader sampling for sure. And then the next step is to implement those kinds of insights that we’re getting from breeding to generate novel varieties that perform better, that require less chemical input to grow. So one of the big things is to try to introduce powdering mildew resistance into strains. There’s a lot of disease damage in cannabis and a lot of challenges growing in indoors like that and spider mites and things like some kind of resistance to some of the main pests. And then there’s also like auto flowering and things like that. But could we get a better generation time? Could we get more energy in the plant going into the bud rather than vegetative growth? So all these things, those are going to be like the breeding targets of the future going to be how, because it’s become industrial, it is going to be very much, how do we generate more cannabis per square foot?

And I think that’s going to be aided by a lot of this genetics research that’s being done.

TG Branfalt:

And finally, what advice do you have for researchers interested in exploring some of these cannabis topics?

Sean Myles:

I think talk to industry members and find out where the need is, right? It’s nice to be able to do academic research for the sake of doing research, and that’s great. If you got money to do it and it’s all from the government, that’s great, but really, you got to find where the itch is and then go try to scratch it. So if you talk to industry members and they say, look, our biggest problem right now is X, then what can you do to go and try to address X? And that’s the next steps are going to, that’s where the big wins are going to be over the next decade.

TG Branfalt:

It’s really fascinating stuff. There’s, again, not a lot of people really on the forefront of answering these questions, so I really do appreciate you taking the time to come and explain some of these things and really sort of enlighten people. I think about this sort of dichotomy, as it were. Where can people find out more about you and more about the research that you do?

Sean Myles:

Yeah, we’ve got a website for the lab. We’re cultivatingdiversity.org. Dot org. You can check us out. We’re a small lab just doing our thing up here in Canada, and all of our publications are listed there. Most of what we do is work on apples, you’ll see. But it’s good to dip our fingers in the cannabis every once in a while. I mean,

TG Branfalt:

The studies that we’ve done have been cited hundreds and hundreds of times.

Sean Myles:

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s obviously it’s a popular plant to work on. If I did this stuff in quinoa, I don’t think anybody would be very interested. So when you do something, you do research on cannabis and reveal something that’s of interest to the public, then it inevitably produces some public interest. Right.

TG Branfalt:

Well, this has been Dr. Sean Myles. He’s an associate professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University. I really, really appreciate your time coming onto the show, man, and can’t wait to see what else you produce in the future.

Sean Myles:

Yeah, thanks, Tim. Thanks for the chat. I appreciate it.

TG Branfalt:

You can find the episodes of the Ganjapreneur.com podcast in the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com or wherever you get your podcast. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs Daily, daily, along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play. This episode was engineered by Way Sound Studios. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

 

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