Author: corvad

 

This post is reproduced in its entirety from the Umpqua Cannabis Association Facebook Page

[Editor’s note: Longtime Oregon community organizer John Sajo consistently produces well-reasoned analyses of Oregon issues, especially as they relate to the impact of legal cannabis on medical cannabis policy. We are grateful to amplify his voice, which gets significant play in Oregon but deserves a wider audience.]

by John Sajo, Umpqua Cannabis Association

The Senate Committee on Implementing Measure 91 just voted to pass SB 964 which is a major rewrite of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act. On the one hand this bill would require every patient to report to the Oregon Health Authority every month exactly how many marijuana plants and how much marijuana they have on hand. Oregonians who agree to grow marijuana for a sick friend would have to do the same reporting and would also be subject to inspection by the health department. The idea behind all this new government intrusion into patients’ lives is to “regulate” medical marijuana and lessen the diversion of medical marijuana to the black market. Oregon Legislators are probably trying way too hard to honor the Cole Memo, which outlines the conditions for the federal authorities to defer to the state on matters of marijuana enforcement. The U.S. Congress voted last December to defund Justice Department enforcement of medical marijuana in states where it is legal, further complicating that federal/state conflict.

But on the other hand, Section 70 of SB 964 allows local governments to prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries and processing sites within their jurisdiction. Counties can’t prohibit marijuana because Oregon voters legalized marijuana last November. Every household will be able to grow four plants. But in some counties patients won’t be able to buy medical marijuana. If these patients need vape pens or edibles so they don’t have to smoke, they will be out of luck. Banning dispensaries means qualified patients have to drive to the nearest county without a ban just so their anti-marijuana neighbors don’t have to ever see the marijuana store. Sounds like bigotry to me. Prohibition always stimulates the black market so counties that ban dispensaries will be promoting their local black markets.

Another problem with allowing county bans is the revenue the state will lose. Taxes and license fees will not be collected where stores and processing are prohibited. If a significant number of counties, particularly big ones, opt to ban, the state could lose tens of millions of dollars in marijuana revenue. Those counties, mostly poor rural counties, will also lose their share of the revenue.

Local bans on marijuana commerce are just plain wrong. Dispensaries serve the public that wants them and have minimal impact on the people that don’t. Dispensaries will not exist anywhere unless there are enough patients that benefit from shopping there. Making it harder for patients to get their medicine should not be tolerated. The law clearly allows local governments to impose all sorts of reasonable regulation to control where and how marijuana businesses operate. Oregon now has hundreds and they are not causing problems.

Allowing local governments to continue prohibition by banning dispensaries undercuts the voter mandate to legalize marijuana. It will undermine implementation of the law. The legislature should reject this bad idea.

This bill may be a wake up call to Oregon voters who legalized marijuana. We may not be able to implement that choice unless we also defeat the local officials who choose to undermine the law.

 

Photo of John Sajo at the 2014 International Cannabis Business Association in Portland

From The Jamaica Observer, Clovis Toon, April 19, 2015

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Every day I find new assemblages for approaching the human-cannabis relationship. This cartoon is lifted from the Facebook group “The Coffee Model – Sensible Cannabis De-ILLegalization.” It’s an example of what we mean when we say discourses of cannabis legalization differentiate previously coherent notions of what it means to be legal, and what it can or should mean to be legal. In this case, our incipient class divides in the post-legal landscape enunciate a post-colonial problem, continuous with histories of imperialism, race and class in Jamaica.

Who gets to profit from “legal” cannabis, is the question. Privateer Holdings’ partnership with the Bob Marley family to create a global brand doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Laws have to be changed, and how they are changed will determine who gets to profit from ending the prohibition approach to cannabis regulation.

Profiting from prohibition’s end is different from benefitting from prohibition’s end, to be sure, and that’s the crux of the class warfare question. The singular common ground — prohibition’s end — is being broken up into a thousand loosely connected islands of relative policy liberalization, but we are still in general operating in the context of a Global Drug War.

Washington — and Colorado, and anywhere else concentrated financial capital is beginning to be able to infiltrate without fear of State intervention — provides the Privateers of the world footholds from which to leverage their financial power on behalf of ending absolute and punitive prohibition.

That’s positive. But instead of opening up possibilities for democratic human-cannabis relationships — the right to home grow, for example — the centralizing forces of financial capital may force those relationships into soulless, commodifiable choices brought to you by whoever has the most money to shape conditions for legalization.

That’s negative. But it’s also how the rest of our economy works: consumer rights to choose what brands they want to buy, rather than how humans want to relate to a plant, are the shield behind which transnational corporate financial interests advance the interests of a profoundly undemocratic economy.

Ending the drug war, it seems, has a price. This is the beginning of a conversation about that price, and whether there’s any room for non-financial value to speak. There’s lots of common ground to work on, but it’s time to stop pretending that the end of the drug war is the end of the conversation.

 

Photo by unknown, from February 2014 talk at the University of Arizona Department of Geography

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Lately I’ve had occasion to consider what a cannabis curriculum might look like. Although the occasion requires more “thinking like a trade school” than thinking like a popular educator, I want to start a series of posts dedicated to the consideration of the latter.

While have had the opportunity both at the University of Washington and at Sarah Lawrence College to develop elements of a curricular cannabis literature, events have conspired to significantly broaden the scope of such consideration.  What should people read to gain a foundational understanding of the place of cannabis in society?

This kind of question is belongs to a population of questions that make up what Western educators call the liberal arts tradition. That tradition nominally stands for the development of the human capacity to answer questions by situating the human condition in an historical (and geographical) contexts. The literatures that populate those contexts are, again nominally, subject to peer-informed debate and evolution. Academic institutions have distinct sets of literatures that constitute a “core curriculum” for their educational subjects. These vary across time and space, but not that much: Sociology 101 courses always are going to involve Max Weber, for example. Econ 101, in the U.S., Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In the U.K. Karl Marx would be paired with Smith and Ricardo.

I’m not trying to do that for Cannabis Studies (just invented that, I think). Rather, I want to think in terms of 1. information credibility 2. information that develops critical thinking not just content upload and 3. information communicability. Let’s mis-appropriate Deleuze and Guattari here to play with the relationship between major and minor. I want a Minor Literature for Cannabis, as opposed to a literature in demand as or in service of Authority, which would be a Major Literature.

Number 1 is easy for me to deal with methodologically, as I get the luxury of deciding unilaterally, at first, which authors or texts are most credible, according to my standards. I will need to work on those standards but let’s try a few out in no particular order, brainstorm-fashion:

…

Credibility: Authors (the Peer Review question) and Texts

Do I know this person/text and have I seen them work/successfully used them to work

Do people I trust (eg., Dr. Sunil Aggarwal) know this person/text and have they seen them work/successfully used them to work

Credibility: Texts

Publication context — who by, with what explicit political agenda?

Theoretical influences — how are the arguments framed and with help from what prior literatures/conversation?

Methodological transparency (my favorite, you see me try to do on the web site with varying degrees of success)

Credibility and Critical Thinking 

Evidence quality is a relative concern: I’m much more interested in transparency with respect to evidence quality. All evidence is suspect, for the critical thinker. All hypotheses are subject to falsification, including popular hypotheses that have settled into the fabulous garment of Received Wisdom.

To falsify a hypothesis takes methodological rigor but this happens in a Political Context, so some Social Problems are more resistant to professional inquiry than others. This is especially true for cannabis.

In fact, because of this a Minor Cannabis Literature has to constantly deal with Drug War Politics, in an historical and recurring fashion.

Therefore, some candidates for Minor Cannabis Literature don’t deal with cannabis explicitly, at all. Eg.: Michel Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended, or Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.

The Proper Subjects of a Minor Cannabis Literature are relations of power in society through which human-cannabis relationships are defined, produced and managed.

Communicability

Do they have a clear focus/thesis statement/statement of purpose?

Are they accessible — that is, can different publics understand that they are being spoken to for a reason that matters to them?

…

I need to get on with my day. Next up will be a consideration of specific Minor cannabis Literature candidates in future posts, informed by the criteria of this brainstorm.

For now, if you are interested, you could start here. Explanation and link to actual document below the image.

It’s my publication “Requiem for a CAMP,” published a few years ago now in the International Journal of Drug Policy, a journal that apparently ranks 5th out of 34 possible “substance abuse” journals according to Elsevier’s advertising widget. How does it rank with Policy journals? I have no idea, but probably not very high because it’s a journal that labors on the radical edges of drug policy. And by “radical edge” I mean tends to produce content that is highly critical of the drug war, by publishing literatures that share an interest in harm reduction — political, economic, cultural, biophysical, and other kinds of societal harm.

Feel free to email me recommendations of texts for consideration. I also welcome any efforts to write about your recommendations, and if they match the mission of this post and its criteria I would be happy to publish them.

 

 

 

 

 

https://youtu.be/YAHgnRh1Cm0

Video by Steve Hyde

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

It was my pleasure last week to host a conversation with Christian Hageseth, Colorado “Green Man” entrepreneur, and Bruce Barcott, Guggenheim-awardee nonfiction author out of Whidbey Island, Washington State, at Seattle Town Hall. CASP videographer Steve Hyde filmed the event and we are happy to host the footage of the event on our web site.

I chose to conduct the event as a meta-conversation with the authors, occasioned by key similarities and differences in what they each chose to write about. They are two very different books united by a common effort to demystify what we talk about when we talk about cannabis legalization. I have no interest in passing judgement on either book on how they fail or succeed as books. Both books grapple with broad historical context, both are inaccurate in different degrees from my perspective as a specialist, but in general neither are seriously wrong. Hageseth’s account is strongest when it represents what happened in Colorado, whereas Barcott’s narrative — as one might expect from a professional nonfiction writer — is strong everywhere, so when he gets it wrong occasionally it stands out a bit more.

That said, I want to focus on how they constitute “popular historical geographies” of the cannabis present from standpoints unique to each author. Both are mass-market media events for which each author is doing a book tour, and both seek — sometimes more implicitly than explicitly — to nuance the national popular discussion about cannabis legalization. This is clearly not the case, for example, in the process of choosing book titles. It’s all about keywords, Barcott told me, and so unfortunately both of these book feature “Weed” as the preferred nomenclature for cannabis.

That’s how I want to define “popular” here, but those of you who understand the concept and practice of “popular education” should also think about it that way — each book struggles in the face of a public that can’t handle the truth about cannabis or its criminalization. What both authors have to say about how we got here and what the consequences have been for our society is absolutely true, but if accepted as such by the public would require a totally different justice system to address the crimes against humanity committed by most of our elected officials for the last 40 years. Barcott for example highlights the closure of the Federal Cannabis Investigative New Drug Program to all new applicants in the early 1990s as it became swamped with HIV/AIDS applicants into the program. Robert Randle’s glaucoma was acceptable as a condition requiring exceptional legal space, but HIV/AIDS bore so much stigma that the entire program had to be closed to new applicants rather than allow access to life-saving cannabis for HIV/AIDS patients.

That was a genocidal policy decision. To understand how that happened as a society, we would have to accept that our government is capable of genocidal social policy, with impunity. We might have to re-think our faith in democracy, the presumed wisdom of our leaders, and the nature of our health care system. In this way, these two books offer degrees of radical popular education.

Both books are very attentive to what we called in graduate school “positionality” (or “standpoint”). The author’s autobiographies are a constant presence in the books, establishing a mode of relative objectivity with the subject of their inquiries. The authors are embedded in the historical geographies that they map out, and the evolution of their own consciousness with respect to their own self-consciousness at large is an important part of the story. In this way, both books move us way out of the binary discursive rut common in media accounts: pro-cannabis legalization or anti-cannabis legalization. This is absolutely vital. That said, both deal seriously with cannabis which, like everything else but statistically less so than say peanuts, is not always good for everybody. This was especially clear in Hageseth’s discussion of edibles and Barcott’s discussion of cannabis use in populations with predisposition towards mental health issues.

Hageseth seems to have always had a positive relationship with cannabis and cannabis consumption, and is clearly much more of an “insider” to cannabis culture even as he discovers (and participates in) the reconstruction of cannabis as part of the formal economy. The initiation of the latter is occasioned by a Social Event in this country: the financial crisis ruined Hageseth’s financial situation, as it did so many other Americans. Like so many other Americans, however, his positive prior relationship with cannabis allowed him to consider and evaluate potential social harm and social risk in a forward-thinking manner. This is how he found himself able to participate in and profit from Colorado’s experiment with medical cannabis regulation. It’s helpful to remember, of course, that Colorado’s medical cannabis regulations — however loosey-goosey they are in practice — meant that their experiment in legalization was allowed to move forward while Washington’s stagnated and fell into dysfunction.

Barcott’s journey involves much more conscious self-evolution as he struggles with accepting the legitimacy of cannabis first as a medical cannabis consumer, then as an I 502 voter, and then as an observer of some of the early growing pains. That evolution is worked out especially through how he communicates with his children about the subject of his book project. One of the most successful drug war-positive discourses in this country is the one that asks, What about the children? Barcott addresses this personal struggle throughout the book, and offers nuanced ways not only to discuss cannabis issues with children but plenty of evidence that the drug war has been waged relentlessly against children and other vulnerable populations — that legalization makes our children safer.

That message, of course, returns us to our organizational philosophy at CASP. If cannabis policy is only thought about as cannabis, the public has been raised to understand and participate in a very limited conversation, in which cannabis is a threat to society because it is a threat to children. If cannabis policy is instead thought about in terms of social policy, we have to come to terms with the social construction of that threat, and how (some people’s) children are mobilized as human shields against a healthy social policy in which everyone’s children –everyone’s lives, everyone’s health, everyone’s dignity — matter.

It is simply not in the best interest of society to remain addicted to the drug war.  These two books are profoundly successful at making this point. I thank the authors for the conversation and Seattle Town Hall for putting on the event.

 

 

 

 

 

Infographic obtained through Spokane City Council WSLCB public records request. Many thanks to Blaine Stum for sharing it with us.

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Two weeks ago, the WSLCB released a massive raw Biotrack data dump to CASP and many other individuals and organizations that have been trying to track the emergence of Washington’s legal cannabis landscape. To my knowledge we are all — even private information organizations — still attempting to organize the data into coherent parts. In the mean time, CASP has been receiving requests for updates to publicly available information from the WSLCB “Frequently Requested Lists” site. This post is an effort to provide the best information we have right now, in response to rising public interest on the one hand and pending raw data processing on the other.

The infographic above is the only known document of its kind, possibly representing a document that will in fact be released on a weekly basis from the WSLCB to the public at large. While the licensing numbers are of particular interest and continuous with previously known data, I want to draw the reader’s attention to flower harvest and useable marijuana produced in this fiscal year.

According to the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges,  the state fiscal year is defined as follows: “State Fiscal Year = A 12-month period used for budget and accounting purposes. The state fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30 of the following year, and is named for the calendar year in which it ends (e.g., July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014 is state Fiscal Year 2014).”

Thus, the fiscal year to which this document refers runs from July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015. This time period encompasses virtually all of the possible Washington State cannabis harvests and sales so far. Therefore, the numbers in this worksheet, if they are accurate, represent the best picture of the Washington State legal cannabis landscape to date. There are three items of particular interest.

1. The numbers represented here render all of the previous calculations done on this site and others obsolete, in terms of accuracy. According to this infographic, only 15,865 lbs of usable cannabis, which I am interpreting here as salable flower, has been harvested to date, meaning that the fall 2014 harvest flower glut could not possibly have been the product of a 30,000 lb outdoor harvest. Instead, it would seem the exaggerated volume from harvest reflects total cannabis produced (including raw material for extracts).

2. We are producing approximately 688 lbs usable flower /month, if we take this “April 6” update to represent March’s “MTD” rather than the six days of April. This seems like a reasonable conjecture, but can’t be taken as gospel at this point. That number should be taken as the current indoor capacity of the I 502 system, since we assume zero outdoor or greenhouse production this time of year (even though it’s possible and in fact likely that there are some hybrid greenhouses out there that have continued to produce through the winter).

3. The ratio of buds to raw material produced per plant was initially assumed to be 1:1 per WSLCB statements. But from these numbers we see that ratio is 43,002 lbs raw material to 15,865 lbs buds, or approximately 3:1 raw material to buds. This supports CASP’s insistence that processing for extraction (as opposed to making pre-rolls) is the name of the game and if your producer/processor license’s business plan ignores this basic fact then you aren’t maximizing your chance for success in what will be an increasingly competitive market.

We will go much further into the data when we figure out how to extract it from the files provided to us through our public information requests. I want to tip my hat to the WSLCB, which has had to deal with what appears to be a truly messy Biotrack reporting system, for deciding to go ahead and let the rest of us have a crack at it.

 

 

 

 

Map by Dr. Richard Morrill, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of Washington

Database architecture by Steve Hyde

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

As the Washington State Legislature prepares to shut down medical marijuana access points by July 2016, it is helpful to begin to think about how many more I502 retail access points with medical cannabis endorsements will have to open to ensure the same level of geographic access Washington medical cannabis patients currently enjoy. Although available data is difficult to come by, this post is a first attempt at clarifying this picture for the public and policymakers.

The map above represents county-level shares of approved (not necessarily currently open) I 502 retail points and DOR-identified registered, tax-paying medical cannabis businesses. There are many problems with this data. I 502 approved retail points are growing in number at a rate of approximately 3-4 a week: the rate of openings is unknown. On the medical side, we are not sure how many of the 450+ medical marijuana businesses registered with the Department of Revenue (DOR) are retail access points (brick and mortar or delivery) and how many might be taxpaying producer or processor businesses.  The largest medical cannabis producer/processor-only business in the state, SODO-based New Leaf Enterprises (DAMA products), converted to I 502 status last month, so this number is also in motion.

“Patient access” is significant policy concern in the state of Washington, and the subject of much debate. Critics of the medical marijuana system, including I 502 business interests that have bulldozed the state’s longtime medical cannabis policy approaches in this legislative session for competitive rather than ethical reasons, have used the Seattle Times editorial board and anonymous “Staff” ( see here, here, and here, for starters) repeatedly over the last year to question the basic validity of the medical cannabis patient category. Medical marijuana advocacy organizations such as Americans for Safe Access [CASP’s fiscal sponsor is the federal 501(c)(3) sister organization, Americans for Safe Access Foundation – ed.] have spent a great deal of time and money pushing back against “cannabiz” strategies during this legislative session but with almost nothing to show for it.

So the question of access has been successfully framed as a question of the fundamental validity of cannabis as medicine, with zero efforts by anyone to collect real data on either patients or access. This post is agnostic on the question of “how many patients are real patients” because there is simply no data either on what constitutes authentic medical need, on the one hand, and what percentage of existing medical access point consumption is “valid.” Instead, we posit that absent real data about patients, we can instead provide real data about geographic access for however many existing and potential “real patients” are out there in the State.

Our ethical grounding point is the observation that if a single “authentic” patient loses access of any sort — geographical or socioeconomic — then bulldozing the medical cannabis landscape so that I 502 industry can gain competitive advantage is bad social policy. Medical cannabis policy originating from voter will through the 1998 initiative has had zero complaints from patients, wherever they are in the state, and instead has been accused of social harm by everyone but patients and doctors. Instead, accusations of social harm have demonstrably come from I 502 business interests that have lined the pockets of state lobbyists and legislators who have no knowledge of cannabis as herbal medicine; how cannabis products have evolved considerably from flower through the state’s medical cannabis system; and how this has been facilitated by the lack of punitive regulation introduced this legislative session.

As a result, the above landscape tells us something about ease of geographic access to (some kinds of) cannabis via the I 502 system for adult users, at the county level. The good news appears to be that in some rural counties, I 502 retail access points appear to provide access to cannabis for the first time (keep in mind our medical n only includes DOR-registered, taxpaying businesses). This is indicated by mostly blue circles.

But where the state’s population is concentrated, up and down the I-5 corridor and in Spokane to the East, and in some rural counties, patients will demonstrably lose access to retail medicine absent several changes over the next year and change.

First, I 502 stores are forbidden by law to include medical or therapeutic information through customer service or product packaging. This is substantially different from medical access points, most of whom provide some, admittedly sometimes accurate, information about therapeutic aspects of different varietals and “strains.” The paucity of accurate information in both systems is a significant policy concern, but it is not addressed by shutting down the system that actually provides some useful information, and legislating “medical endorsements” for some unknown number of I 502 retail points, some unknown number of which may be existing dispensaries that applied for but did not win favorable retail lottery placements in March 2014. In order for the state to provide as much geographical access for patients as is currently available according to DOR data, it will need to ensure that each of those circles represents the same number of medically-endorsed I 502 retail stores — some 430 across the state by July 2016.

Second, although cannabis testing standards and best laboratory practices in general are extremely problematic, the I 502 system has clearly exacerbated tendencies to reward labs that produce higher THC results. THC percentages are up 5-10% over previous ranges for medical markets. It’s quite clear that the I 502 system equates commercial “recreational” value with THC levels, reversing trends in medical markets to favor whole plant characteristics: varieties of cannabinoids especially CBD; and terpenes that may have as much or more therapeutic value than cannabinoid ratios. This is partially the result of stringent “security theater” regulations in I 502 that (a) keep the consumer from evaluating the product they are buying by smell and (b) severely limit visibility by requiring pre-packaging. Cannabinoid listing and “strain” name are pretty much the only things the I 502 consumer have to go on when it comes to purchasing flower. In order for the state to provide as much geographical access to diversity of flower terpenes and cannabinoids, as as is currently available according to DOR data, it will have to relax those packaging rules and police lab practices and standards set forth in the American Herbal Pharmacopeia that are currently being flouted widely in the interest of capturing lab market share. Recent statements by WSLCB indicate that they are aware of the problem and are taking promising steps.

There are many, many more problems with patient access that will be exacerbated by proposed changes to I 502 and medical cannabis policy, but this particular post is agnostic on these. Instead, it uses real data (with transparent limitations) to provide evidence that Washington state cannabis policy changes proposed in the legislature are bad social-geographic policy. The interests of Washington citizens — “society” at the state level — are poorly served by limiting geographic access to herbal medicine for patients, however many of them there are.