I’m deeply unsatisfied with the ways we talk about cannabis legalization right now. Policymakers talk about it as a technical problem, opponents talk about it as a social threat, proponents talk about it as an end goal in itself, businesspeople talk about it as a financial gold rush, progressives talk about it as a social justice fix, and public health officials talk about it as a health risk, to name a few ways of talking about it that strike me as serving particular agendas that are different from mine.
I want to talk about legalization as a social problem. Not because legalization as a general idea is a social problem, but because the way we are doing legalization isn’t making a clean break from prohibition. And prohibition has always been a really big social problem. This is why I want to talk about postprohibition: legalization with, not after, prohibition.
This makes things difficult, because I don’t think we really understand prohibition very well. This applies across the spectrum, including people who fight against prohibition as well as neo-Prohibitionists.
I think we understand prohibition as a legal problem pretty well, but not as a cultural problem. Laws reflect and institutionalize cultural values about what, and who, must be controlled by the State’s monopoly on violence in society.
The authority of the State to use that monopoly against people who use the wrong drugs the wrong way, in a liberal democracy, requires a fairly liberal tolerance of authoritarian attitudes throughout the population: a willingness to conduct war without end.
So to me, prohibition is one expression of authoritarian culture in a “free” society. It’s politics as the extension of war by other means. I’m not big on war, and I certainly object to the open-ended militarization of society against elements of its own population that aren’t hurting anyone else because they grow, distribute, or consume a plant.
I like plants. I think they teach us a lot about being a part of a living ecosystem, especially if we co-exist with them in ways that are more than commodified.
So if our current round of “experiments in democracy” that we call legalization are hamstrung by cultural attitudes about how dangerous a plant is; and how deferential we need to be towards still-actually-existing Federal Prohibition laws despite their really obviously political, rather than scientific, origins; then I have a problem with what legalization means and therefore how we talk about it.
There are many many ways to disagree with me about my problems with legalization that are really problems with democratic authoritarianism. But the demonstrably correct observation that new State and local legal frameworks exist alongside and in tension with National, Global, State, and Local cannabis prohibitions isn’t one of them.
So let’s start there, with the empirical fact that we are dealing with a complex legal landscape with conflicting and/or badly aligned elements. This observation does not lead necessarily to agreeing with my cultural analysis of postprohibition, but it does establish a common sense ground for talking about cannabis legalization beyond whether it’s good or evil.
The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP) is proud to announce that we are partnering with the 2018 International Cannabis Policy Conference (ICPC2018) in Vienna, Austria. A previous post covered Dr. Tony Silvaggio’s invitation to present. Since then, the organizers also reached out to arrange a formal partnership at this international event that will take place on December 7-9, 2018.
The event’s location and time frame parallel the United Nations (UN) Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting where the World Health Organization will present its scheduling recommendations on cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabis in all forms (December 5-7, Vienna). These organizations are Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGO), which means they represent interests developed by individual UN member countries in contrast with global civil society.
The CND gathering will be the last global meeting before the March 2019 High Level UN Session on Drug Policy, which will address the UN’s 2019-2029 agenda on drugs, and cannabis scheduling for it.
The ICPC2018 web site describes three purposes for the event. The first purpose is directly relevant to the CND meeting, the second is relevant to a “more-than-cannabis” global social issue, Sustainable Development, and the third is to provide a forum for attendees and presenters to learn from each other about what’s going on in their respective fields of action:
“The International Cannabis Policy Conference, December 7-9th 2018 is the last opportunity for external inputs from key stakeholders: researchers, NGOs, students, public officials, policymakers, private sector businesses, investors, and all other interested parties – on this very crucial issue.
Besides scheduling controls, this event presents the contribution of cannabis & industrial hemp markets and products innovations relevant to the achievements of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a global framework for sustainable societies.
The International Cannabis Policy Conference includes sessions with top research, industry and policy leaders and an exposition hall showcasing related food, products and services.“
The CASP Role
My role at the event will be to carefully observe presentations and panels in order to present takeaways at the end of the day. Dr. Silvaggio will still be presenting his research on the environmental impacts of post-prohibition in California, as well.
The ICPC2018, similarly to its main organizer NGO FAAAT, is a partnership of global drug war reform organizations — an assembly of international non-governmental organizations (INGO) that represent elements of civil society around the world that have as their common ground dissent to the global war on drugs.
We at CASP are proud to be a part of this process, as a US-based NGO for influencing cannabis policy and markets on behalf of ending the drug war, not just carving out a market exception to it.
The ICPC is an overlapping and parallel conference at the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (UNCND). It is organized by FAAAT, For Alternative Approaches to Addiction Think and do tank. FAAAT is what we in the social sciences call a global civil society organization, or a Transnational Advocacy Network, or sometimes even an “alter-globalization” social movement organization.
The UNCND produces a “World Plan of Action” report on the subject of drug control every 10 years. It is part of an ecology of what we call in the social sciences “global governance institutions” that form the “top layer” of legal frameworks for prohibition worldwide. The UNCND is a fairly old global institution. It was established in 1946. It has been a central node for the creation of prohibition’s global frameworks, along with other United Nations (UN) institutions like the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
That “top layer” is responsible for worldwide prohibition, but it has been changing in the last several decades. This process has been documented by the Transnational Institute’s (TNI) Drugs and Democracy program, another global civil society institution. Two of their academics, political scientist Martin Jelsma and historian David Beweley-Taylor, have been publishing for more than 20 years on how the drug war consensus has been destabilized in that top layer.
Anyway, although it’s short notice, Tony may be able to represent CASP in early December, given that his invitation specified his affiliation with us in particular, which is pretty cool and evidence of CASP’s global reach.
Last May, I received an unexpected request for feedback from The Federal Commission for Addiction Issues in Switzerland. Well, sort of unexpected, more like extremely occasional. I’ve been invited to meet with and provide feedback on cannabis legalization before to and with Germany officials; the City of Montreal, Canada; and the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Given that our Senior Research Associate Dr. Tony Silvaggio has been invited to present at the December International Cannabis Policy Conference by the same people, I thought it would be a good moment to publish my answers to their questionnaires. So here you go.
Markets, products and consumption modes of cannabis in the US
Dominic Corva
The purpose of this interview is to understand how cannabis regulation in some US States has impacted cannabis markets, cannabis products, as well as consumer segments and consumption models.
Could you help us understand the mechanisms of the current US cannabis market? What are the main sub-markets (medical, retail, other) and how are they separated/linked?
Please develop here:
The markets have three legal dimensions and a hyper-differentiated policy geography, where local policy matters more than anything, including legal dimensions.
“Legal” by state refers to adult use state policies that always have local control options, which at this point are mostly opting out, even in legal states. The state legal frameworks are extremely different from each other (homegrow availability, license restrictions, out of state investment allowance, etc.)
“Medical” refers to a lot more than it used to. In addition to the early, unregulated, quasi-decrim initiatives, we now have varying degrees of medical cannabis regulation and in one instance, Washington State, a medical cannabis program controlled by a recreational cannabis program. Medical also now refers to “CBD-only” statutes; international investigational new drug programs such as Epidiolex; and people buying CBD products like herbal supplements in grocery stores (totally unregulated).
“Illegal/Informal/Illicit/Black/Unregulated” are all terms that are applied to the third market sector, although there are many ways in which the first two are directly connected to this third market sector. It is clearly the largest type of cannabis market. Most of these commodity chains originate inside the U.S. at this point, as opposed to about 15 years ago when domestic consumption of domestic product became dominant over international product. International product is still a significant chunk of the unregulated market, but it is not the majority and is mostly from Mexico.
They can be connected formally (the “15 day window” for bringing genetics into legal production licenses in Washington, for example, as well as any transition window for the implementation of a “legal” market). So, genetics are a huge common denominator for all the markets.
They can be connected informally, through diversion from legal markets to other markets; and the legal plasticity of unregulated cannabis supply for medical markets (untracked origins for products going in both a regulated and unregulated direction); this includes aforementioned CBD markets.
They are connected by geographical commodity chains, starting in one kind of market in one place (usually the North American West) and heading elsewhere.
They are connected by consumer demographics and consumption trends — older people tend to participate more strongly in legal markets, younger people in unregulated markets.
They are connected by investment money, especially these days the Canadian stock exchange.
They are connected by ancillary services across all markets, such as lab testing, grow medium, and real estate markets.
And they are connected by the knowledge and activities of workers and owners exercised in time and/or place depending on the desired outcome of their market activities.
What were the main recent developments in the US markets and what is their impact on demand and supply of cannabis?
Please develop here:
The main recent development in US markets are supply floods, which California legal market is not yet at but will be soon (they are still in legal market formation mode, five months after licensing began).
It’s important to understand that the West Coast flower glut began in 2010, when wholesale prices dropped in half after several decades of steady but slow decline. 2017, however, saw another 50% price drop, probably due to overproduction in southern Oregon.
The flower glut feets the concentrate glut, as prices for wax, oil, and hash are dropping precipitously in every market characterized by a flower supply glut.
Closed State legal markets have different dynamics, but certainly Washington and Oregon are experiencing parallel price drops for flower and concentrate.
And then there’s edibles. The edible market is a fairly large, fairly recent legal and medical cannabis market development, as those demographics are more inclined to consume cannabis by eating or vaporizing it. Unregulated markets basically allow consumers to make their own edibles, so historically it hasn’t been a big part of unregulated markets.
Of course there’s also the recent phenomenon of cannabis vape pens, which are somewhat adjunct to the edible market.
On the production side of things, the big development in medical and unregulated markets has been the shift (back) to outdoor production, as prices fall low enough to be fatal for energy-expensive indoor production. In legal markets, the incentive is different and lots of investment cash goes into large indoor warehouse production, but that again is unsustainable as prices drop.
Distribution developments include more and more distribution any way you could imagine, from the United Postal Service to planes, automobiles, and cyber marketplaces. There is no way to control cannabis movement except to create regulated markets that provide better quality at lower prices, with wide retail spread and sanctioned mobile distribution.
On the horizon: production in the Global South, especially in places that are adopting medical and regulated models like Uruguay and Colombia. I expect commodity chains to re-globalize fairly quickly once the current UN infrastructure crumbles from defection.
In your view, how will the US cannabis market look like in ten years from now? Will it still grow and diversify?
Please develop here:
US cannabis markets will be commercial, but probably not yet global in 10 years. The U.S. remains prohibitive at the local level, where cities and counties that opt out of regulated frameworks for cultural, political and industrially competitive reasons outnumber localities that opt in. In about 10 years I can see that hitting a tipping point, but not tipped.
The range of cannabis products (edibles, concentrates…) has developed over the last decade. Can you tell us what are the main product families and what approximately are their respective market shares?
Please develop here:
Please see above comments, with a special note: CBD-infused products have the biggest, fastest growth potential as they are being treated in policy (not law) like herbal supplements. And they can be added to just about anything.
Do you see other type of products coming to the market in the next years? If yes, what type of products and for which type of customers?
Please develop here:
Pharmaceutical medications (as opposed to herbal medicines) have enormous growth potential and will be used to treat everything from PTSD to anxiety to epilepsy, so the demographic reach of products will widen from birth to death. Products that cater to hospice patients — both pharmaceutical and herbal/complementary medicines — will proliferate extremely fast.
Young people will consume less cannabis as it loses its “rebellious” appeal.
What is known about the demographics of cannabis users? Has the legalization and regulation of cannabis markets changed the profile of cannabis users?
Please develop here:
Please see above comments.
Looking at the current cannabis regulations in US States: What are their main strengths and weaknesses?
Please develop here:
Their main weaknesses are their attachments to prohibition culture and control. As a result, most new laws and regulations reflect very little understanding of cannabis markets on the one hand and the power of local control to render State (and national, in the case of Canada) frameworks irrelevant. Taxes are too high, barriers to entry are too high, and authorities grapple poorly with the contradictory desire to create markets on the one hand and limit their spread, on the other. Age limits are a problem: in the US at least a third of cannabis is consumed by college-aged and younger people, meaning that at at least a third of current demand will always be met by unregulated markets. Canada allows provinces to set their own age, and many of them are choosing 18. That’s more realistic.
Smoking regulations are another major weakness: in the US, smoking anything at all in cafes, public places, and private residences has been zoned out. This presents a major challenge for legal consumption access for anyone that does not own their own home.
On a related note, cannabis retail and consumption is currently restricted or banned for public events, where lots of people consume cannabis (such as music shows, for example). California will be an interesting exercise in seeing how this can play out, since there is some room for permitting cannabis consumption at fairgrounds with special permits.
In the US, cannabis businesses are burdened not only by taxes that are too high to be competitive with unregulated cannabis, but also 280e Federal tax code that does not allow them to deduct costs of doing business. That means most of the new regulated cannabis industry has very little to no profit margin. So, the US Federal Schedule is a huge weakness for new cannabis markets.
Regulated cannabis markets also lack access to banking — ownership has to be surrendered to investors to raise capital, instead of having access to loans. This is also a strength, though, since it limits the flow of speculative capital that could inflate what is already an unsustainable market bubble.
But the biggest weakness of new cannabis markets is real estate, where rents command a huge premium and are controlled strictly by local zoning.
Popular Anxieties: Controlling Cannabis and Other Markets at the End of the World
by Dominic Corva, Political Geographer
This post is a preview of the talk I will give in Portland on September 27, 2018, hosted by the Commune PDX and the Initiative. The one hour lecture will include time for gathering before and after, between 6:30 and 9. Suggested donation at the door is $10, though anyone for whom this amount is a hardship is welcome regardless. Conversely, since the lecture serves as a fundraiser for The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy, we are grateful for folks who can give more. The paragraph in bold serves both as a general abstract and introductory paragraph for an extended preview of the talk.
It is more important than ever to differentiate populist anxieties from ones grounded in real social problems for which we have plenty of evidence but weak individual and institutional capacity with which to deal. The liberation of a plant and its people from prohibition law and policy must contend not only with the persistence of prohibition culture, but broader anxieties about the way things are now, at large, for which legal cannabis markets may seem like adding fuel to the fire. This talk identifies the landscape of post-prohibition as embedded in wider anxieties about the world in which we live and what to do about it, as a political and economic history of the present.
The liberalization of cannabis control has arrived rather late to conditions of modernity that have been broadly characterized in the social sciences as “neoliberalism” for the last several decades. The second stage of cannabis prohibition, dating from 1971, emerged as a reaction against the people associated with the New Left of the 1960s, rather than scientific evidence that the plant itself posed a substantive public health threat to the population. The political and economic conditions that gave cannabis prohibition new life were part of the “culture wars” of the New Right — the generalization of anxieties about security in society at large.
That reaction was materialized as an extension of the welfare-warfare state, a massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex that fit uneasily alongside neoliberal tendencies to marketize public policy, deregulate financial markets, and, from the center-left, otherwise expand cultural freedoms. It was a security exception to the politics and economics of freedom, consolidated as a bipartisan consensus during the Clinton administration. Anxieties about public health are the cultural building blocks of prohibition culture, never mind the total absence of scientific evidence that formed them.
Anxieties about cannabis as a threat to public health and social order now form the institutional barriers to liberating, rather than liberalizing, cannabis from deeply institutionalized politics and policies of control. Alongside these hoary obstacles to sensible public policy, though, the general political and economic winds that shape public policy at large have shifted against the direction of progressive change. Generalized economic, political and ecological crises — the “end of the world,” so to speak — inform popular anxieties about political and economic change that are quite different from the crises that gave rise to neoliberal consensus.
As a result, the liberation of cannabis from the politics of control must contend not only with the “dead” labor of deceit and ignorance at the root of prohibition culture, but with entirely reasonable contemporary anxieties about what 40 years of neoliberal governance has wrought: industrial-pesticidal agriculture; hydrocarbon-fueled ecological crisis; corporate, pay-to-play democracy; the pharmaceutical marketing of better living through chemistry fueling opioid dependence and generalized mental health crises; the triumph of the military-industrial complex through permanent warfare; and so forth.
We are clearly not making much progress towards evidence-based public policy, in general — otherwise it wouldn’t seem so much like the end of the world. Why would we expect post-prohibition cannabis policy to work any better than public policy tendencies, at large? If another world is possible, the struggle for sensible cannabis policy must be linked with the struggle for political and economic conditions that make space for social peace and resilience rather than economic and political warfare.
Simple concepts are pretty good for marketing, branding, and advertising, but they aren’t much help for engaging with complex problems. In today’s post, I want to explain the concept of “cultural economy” so we can engage with the possibility that cannabis markets and policy might be shaped towards social peace, not just selling products.
If your central concern is how to maximize revenue, then this post might not be very useful for you. The audience to whom I write desires a more peaceful world and is willing to give up a little bit of short-term material gain to make that possible.
Markets and Society
What do we mean when we say that we live in a capitalist society? It depends on who is answering, but perhaps an uncontroversial starting point might be that a capitalist society creates and allocates social opportunities predominantly through the movement of money value. Money capital, or exchange value as political economists might say, provides a universal means for particular individual or social ends to be realized. No home? If you have money, no problem.
Of course, if you have a healthy social ecology, you may not need money to at least be housed. You might be able to rely on a family member or friend to sleep out of the elements. The people who can house you in such circumstances aren’t rewarded by money, but perhaps by love or compassion. Love and compassion are cultural values — they mean something different in different places, but nonetheless are important strands in the webs of meaning that hold societies together.
This example helps us understand that we don’t live in a society that is exclusively shaped by capitalism, even if capitalism is the primary means through which housing happens.
In fact, social relations are determined by many, many other values besides money. Friendships, for example, aren’t (hopefully) relationships that one buys and sells. Certainly, it is much more rare to purchase one’s parents, children, lovers, and communities, than not.
Thus we can understand that living in a capitalist society does not mean our society exclusively depends on the movement of capital. Many entrepreneurs in society, in fact, get off the ground and even thrive by incorporating “more-than-capitalist” values into their business plans.
This is most obvious with businesses that cater to “ethical consumers”: people who pay more for products that are associated with fairness and sustainability. “Fair trade,” “non-GMO,” and “organic” products line the shelves of our grocery stores, and of course corporations like Patagonia and Whole Foods exist on the range of more-than-capitalist business plans.
Where does the legal cannabis industry fit, is the question at hand. Are there “more than capitalist” values that cannabis entrepreneurs desire to accompany the flow of capital?
Cannabis Cultural Economy
In the U.S., cannabis culture comes from the 1960s, associated with two very particular forms of social movement: counterculture and the antiwar left.
Counterculture was not necessarily a “left” meaning system, although the overlap was pretty strong and certainly well-advertised. The hippie phenomenon was fairly libertarian and rejected centralized solutions to social problems. It had a well-developed critique of the State as a culturally conservative institution, aimed at preserving cultural values that made a lot less sense in the context of the “square” industrial capitalist economy. Rejecting social norms didn’t lead to a different set of central values: it opened up space for individual freedoms that ranged the gamut from free love to the pursuit of self-interest untethered from social obligation.
The antiwar left wasn’t monolithic either. It may be a reach to even attach the “left” to “antiwar” because plenty of cultural conservatives weren’t too keen on the draft nor the Vietnam war. It’s even an open question whether it was the hippies or the soldiers that really brought cannabis consumption into Western culture, given the extent to which Vietnam soldiers and vets adopted cannabis use as way to cope with existing in the middle of a war that didn’t make sense as well as the trauma of living through it and coming home — yes, often with suitcases of hash and opium for entrepreneurial reasons. The hills of Southern Humboldt were full of veterans that found they couldn’t manage their PTSD by re-entering normal society, as well as veterans of student organizing and Haight-Ashbury that sought to go “back to the land” and live a sort of pre-industrial existence in communes and on cheap land available after the postwar timer economy went bust.
The existence of a cultural market for cannabis led, eventually, to the commercialization of that market when the U.S. government got the Mexican government to use Paraquat to eradicate the fields supplying urban veterans of the counterculture and foreign wars. Suddenly, California’s sinsemilla growers found that they had a cash crop in their food gardens, and the wholesale price per pound in the late 1970s shot up to about $11,000/pound adjusted to 2011 prices, the last time I made that calculation for a journal article.
That’s when the modern cannabis cultural economy was mixed, when producing cannabis for profit slid in — fairly easily — with the rural spaces inhabited by the remnants of the counterculture that were already hybridizing with rural values and people. Rural libertarianism and countercultural values teamed up to object to the Federal government as an invading force, helicopters and all.
This was an alliance that protected cannabis production and consumption for everyone, not just hippies, vets, and people that rejected the characterization of cannabis as a threat to society. In particular, it protected and nurtured commercial values as important to the central value of the cannabis cultural economy: overgrowing the government.
Cannabis, Values, Capitalism
And it won, sort of. The wave of legislation behind the creation of regulated cannabis markets has certainly crippled the prospects of total cannabis prohibition around the world. But we are facing a split that was really there all along, between the value of those for whom cannabis markets are an end to themselves; and the value of cannabis markets as a means for creating a more just and peaceful world. These values are not inherently left nor right.
Libertarian entrepreneurialism has a problem with over-regulation that constructs new barriers between the cannabis haves and have-nots, for different reasons than the progressive peaceniks. Similarly, corporate cannabis interests support artificial, non-market-derived barriers to protect their returns on investment, while progressive liberals support regulations to protect consumers and non-cannabis culture stakeholders whose support was necessary to accomplish legalization-with-prohibition.
This is the great difference dividing the cannabis cultural economy today. In one direction, “normalized” cannabis markets that pursue profit and tax revenues for their own sake. And in the other, “normalized” cannabis markets for erasing stigma and including communities affected by the drug war in the imagined peace dividend.
The realist in me says that regulated cannabis markets are likely to be dominated by the former value, exchange value, rather than other values like compassion and restorative justice. But the mission of CASP is to make space for more-than-capitalist values to live on and perhaps thrive, through compassionate industry practices, post-prohibition policy education, and socially oriented academic research agendas. There may be no end to this struggle, but it’s worth struggling for in the interest of social peace. The cultural economy of cannabis is evolving, and we are too.
Cassiano Teixeira, founder of ABRACE. Photo courtesy of ABRACE
by Stephen Charles Flohr
5/29/18 – Paraiba, Brazil
In an unprecedented decision, the Brazilian Federal Court has granted a nonprofit entity with the right to grow and manipulate cannabis for medicinal purposes. ABRACE, meaning “give a hug” in Portuguese, is also an acronym that signifies the Brazilian Association of Cannabis Hope Support, the nonprofit association which has received official authorization to cultivate the medicinal herb in order to carry out its mission of treating patients and conducting research in the field of medicinal cannabis. In a country still suffering the dreadful effects of prohibition, stigma and misinformation with regards to cannabis, the developments taking place in the wake of this federal nod of approval are truly groundbreaking in every sense of the word.
From Underground to Breaking Ground
Cassiano Teixeira, 45, is the founder and president of ABRACE. When asked regarding his mission, his response is simple yet profound: “Saving lives.” From the very beginning, Cassiano’s approach has been one of compassionate care. Seeing his mother suffering from serious lung ailments and severe depression, he turned to cannabis as a means to alleviate her suffering. With the rudimentary knowledge he had at the time, he acquired some cannabis and managed to make some homemade oil. Reluctant at first due to the negative stigma surrounding the “drug”, she eventually obliged to sample her son’s concoction. “Within hours of her first dose she was out of bed and on her feet washing dishes”, notes Cassiano. “Now its something she can’t live without.” Emboldened by his mother’s recovery, he began sharing his experience with others in his social circle and noticed that there was a growing interest in using cannabis for therapeutic application. In 2013, he began helping desperate mothers of children suffering from a rare form of epilepsy in their efforts to import CBD oil into Brazil from USA-based suppliers Hempmeds and Life Enthusiast. He began using Facebook as a means for organizing groups of families in need and before he knew it, he was carrying out mass importations of nearly 100 shipments per month. It wasn’t until 2014 that the National Sanitary Surveillance Agency (ANVISA), officially approved the importation of CBD for medicinal use.
Patients in increasing numbers were experiencing the benefits of treatment with CBD oil when sudden fluctuations in the value of the U.S. Dollar soon rendered importation all but impossible for the majority of families in need. They were suddenly faced with an insurmountable cost that often exceeded $1,000 ($4,000 reais)/month at a time when the country’s minimum wage salary was around $800 reais/month. “We were faced with a difficult situation. We knew that the oil was cheap to make, so I decided to take the initiative myself.” He began by making tinctures using alcohol as a solvent, yet the strong flavor proved to be unpalatable for many patients, especially children. He then experimented with glycerine. Owing to its natural sweetness, the kids quickly took to the application and Cassiano knew that he had found the perfect recipe for a potent extract. He then focused on packaging, labels and even set up a website, daring to promote and deliver his medicine despite the high risks posed by federal prohibition. “Of course I was scared. But I wasn’t really worried about the personal cost of going to prison. I was just worried that if I went to jail, I would leave my patients without their oil.”
His work was making a difference. Patients, mostly suffering from cancer, were seeing remarkable results and the word spread, eventually garnering the attention of prominant community representatives, lawyers and government officials in the Public Ministry. Through community support, patient and family testimony and relentless legal advocacy, ABRACE soon gained official status as a non-profit association in the civil registry. In November 2017, their petition to cultivate cannabis was officially awarded, allowing Cassiano and his team to shake off their fears once and for all. “Days before the decision, they [the Feds] were flying drones over our facility. I had to leave and was worried that the police were going to come down on us at any moment. But now that’s past. We did it. There’s no more fear.”
On The Grow
Organic methods and high-CBD genetics are used in this pioneer medical grow. Photo:Abrace
ABRACE now has 18 employees working at 3 facilities in 3 different cities, all in the the northeastern state of Paraiba. Full-time staff includes a professional grower, pharmacist, chemist, and a team of knowledgable customer care representatives. Currently, a total of approximately 600 patients are being served. Patients are welcomed and served in a dispensary where they can purchase t-shirts, literature and cannabis extracts, in addition to receiving consultation in a safe, welcoming environment. Patients are eligible to obtain their medicine through the referral and prescription of a licensed physician. They pay an annual association fee which confers them the title of official “partner” of the association. They are then able to purchase their medicine at an affordable price which doesn’t reach 10% of the cost they would incur had they sought to import the product themselves. Roughly 20% of patients are exempt from any fee whatsoever. “Its important that we avoid a conflict of interest”, notes Cassiano. “This isn’t a financial issue. This is a life issue. It’s about saving lives. We put life in front. The plant is a means to an end.”
That’s not to say that they overlook the plant. In fact, very painstaking measures are taken to ensure that only high quality cannabis is grown and fit for medicinal extraction. Sergio Vidal, 39, is ABRACE’s grower and cultivation expert. His academic research in the field of growing cannabis for personal use eventually led to the publishing of his book, “Medical Cannabis: An Introduction to Indoor Growing”. With nearly 20 years of grow experience, Sergio travels the country giving workshops on cultivation and met up with Cassiano back in 2015 to discuss the possibility of drawing out a cultivation schematic. That’s back when it was all still illegal. Now, he is growing full-time within legal parameters. And here’s how he does it:
High CBD seeds are provided by Medical Marijuana Genetics seedbank (England) with varying CBD/THC ratios of 20/1, 1/1, 2/1 and 3/2. Other strains grown include Supreme CBD Kush, Euphoria CBD, and Royal Highness. Other non-pedigree seeds will be grown and tested for cannabinoid composition in order to stabilize and prepare them for eventual production.
The plants, currently numbering 400, are grown in an Indoor/Outdoor combination, utilizing 3 main tents for supplemental light. The region receives 12 hours/day of sunlight all year round.
For fertilizer, Sergio uses Fatcrystal, a national brand of organic and mineral nutrients. Insect control is accompished through the use of beauveria bassiana, predator mites, and azadirachtin, as well as with homemade tobacco “teas”. Probiotic plant nutrition, such as lactobacillus, and compost, are added whenever possible to the soil, a mixture incorporating 3 equal parts of vermiculite, rice husk and worm humus.
ABRACE is looking to expand their grow to another facility in hopes of reaching their ambitious 2019 goal of providing for 10,000 patients. Continued collaboration with universities and physicians in order to conduct scientific research is a key component of the association’s mission. Teams of physicians are accompanying patients and studying their experience in using cannabis remedies. Since ABRACE is an association, they are currently barred from seeking loans from a bank. Therefore, it seeks donations of funds and equipment through campaigns and working relationships with local and international institutions that are sympathetic to their work.
Approximately 90 percent of the patients receiving medical cannabis treatment at ABRACE are children. Photo: ABRACE
While the question is still a political conundrum and social taboo for many, ABRACE is evidence that Brazil is inching along towards a greater understanding, acceptance and practice of medical cannabis. Since ABRACE focuses exclusively on whole plant medical extracts, nobody is actually smoking cannabis flower for medical benefit. That issue, along with the right of the individual to grow for personal use, is being fought on various fronts by other activists and groups throughout Brazilian civil society. However, the groundwork being laid by ABRACE will surely serve to increase public awareness with hopes of generating a broader and more humane public policy at the national level.
Yesterday, the WSLCB invited public comment hearing in Olympia to receive testimony on whether the state should allow regulated (not civil liberty) home grow in the State of Washington. There were two kinds of testimony presented that I have not previously identified in my recent writing on the subject: the mobilization of the financial industry against democracy, and the “big picture” stakes of home grow as a step towards making peace with the plant, which several speakers mobilized but none so movingly as the former Deputy Director of the WSLCB, Randy Simmons.
Banking against democracy
The first, chronologically, was testimony by representatives of the I-502 banking industry. Salal Credit Union and Numerica Credit Union — representing the west and east sides of the State, respectively — both testified against home grow of any kind, suggesting that both institutions would withdraw their services from I-502 if the State went for home grow, because they considered Federal intervention on the basis of the Cole Memo to endanger their ability to do business. Given that 7 other States and the nation’s capital aren’t being threatened for having home grow, this argument seems either ill-informed or nakedly political.
In any case, it represents the first time I have seen a threat of extortion by the private sector against even the consideration of what might be in the public interest. It gives opponents of home grow in this State another political reason not to fairly consider whether prohibiting home grow is optimal as a social policy. Other States would do well to heed this development going forward: if banking opens up, which is necessary and desirable for legal cannabis markets, banking is going to favor the continuity of prohibition, which is unnecessary and undesirable for ending the drug war.
Home Grow as Free from Regulation as Possible is a Small Step towards Normalization of the Plant
Former Deputy Director Simmons’s testimony can be found at 1:01 of the archived video. It was remarkable to hear from someone who played such a positive role early in the I 502 implementation process, as the Board’s Deputy Director. More remarkable, to me, was the way he described the issue at hand as being about far more than home grow. I present his testimony transcribed below.
“Good morning Madam Chair, Members of the Board, my name is Randy Simmons. I am the former director of the Liquor and Cannabis Board, and I was the implementation manager of I-502. I know you’ll hear a lot of different opinions today and I want to let you know I respect all those opinions and am aware of the difficulty you have to make.
I’d like to present to you that I am in support of home grows as free of regulation as possible.
It’s been a long road I’ve been on since I left here. I watched as some of the best doctors in the world filled my wife with poison intended to kill cancer. I watched as she went through multiple surgeries, and then was burned to kill whatever was left. And that was done by what is probably doctors at the cancer center in the world. At the same time I watched this cancer research in London and Madrid and Paris find ways to slow this breast cancer disease in women, and we do nothing here. We need our universities and our scientists and frankly our pharmaceutical companies involved in this research, and we can’t do that unless this is removed from the Schedule I substance.
And I have no illusion that allowing home grows in Washington is going to remove this as a Schedule I substance.
But I do see it as one small step in the normalization of this plant that has beneficial medical treatment for people, so that one day the research finds not just the cannabinoid profile that slows the growth of cancer but can actually cure it. I never want to watch my grandchildren — my granddaughters — to have to deal with being told they have to deal with an aggressive Stage 3 cancer, and in order to give you the best chance to live, we have to poison you, mutilate your body, and burn [inaudible] …
All journeys begin with a small step, and I think allowing this normalization of home grows is a small step. Thank you.”
Analysis: Home Grow as a Small Step
Mr. Simmons’ testimony addressed home grow as a step towards “normalizing” the plant, a process of cultural change necessary for vital “big steps” to happen. He specifically refers to cancer research, which in his analysis (with which I agree) is being blocked by far more than legislative or Federal (in)action. He identifies the source of those blocks as cultural — we can’t get to the Big Steps of cancer research in this country until people understand cannabis as a plant, rather than an immanent threat to society which must be controlled.
It’s not enough to change laws. The work to be done is cultural, and what legal change can do is either open up avenues for cultural change or block them.
The refusal of a nominally rebellious State against Federal policy that dehumanizes its citizens (on immigration, on LGBTQ rights, on climate change, and so forth) to take “small steps” against the dehumanization of its citizens that want to grow a plant blocks broader cultural change towards peace instead of war, research instead of no research, banking instead of no banking, participation instead of bans or moratoria, parenting instead of policed parenting, and yes, in my opinion, consumer participation in a regulated market instead of what we have today, declining levels of participation int he regulated market.
The “small step” of home grow would signal a cultural change towards accommodation of the regulated system, and would actually increase banking profits, producer profits, retail profits, and sustainable taxation revenues. I argue here that the political forces using empirically unsupportable arguments like the fear of federal intervention are shooting themselves in the foot, because they do not understand the long term benefits of broad cultural acceptance of the plant upon which their industry is based.
The normalization of cannabis as a plant rather than a threat to society is the endgame, and I sure wish that politicians, industry, and banking understood how much it would be in their best interest to facilitate that, instead of contributing counterproductively and short-sightedly to the politics of fear.
This year, the International Drug Policy Reform Conference (Reform) will be taking place next week in Atlanta, Georgia. This post lets our readers know about CASP’s presence at the Conference and what I will be doing there, as a participant in a panel titled “How has the Drug War Reshaped Space, Place, and Relationships?”
There are three kinds of public events CASP gets invited to speak at. Industry events provide a platform for addressing cannabis policy and markets in a way that reflects our commitment to optimizing cannabis legalization as a strategy for ending the drug war. Academic events provide a platform for reflecting on and improving the models of the world I work with and encounter. And Policy events provide me with a platform for direct intervention into ongoing discussions of policy formation.
The Reform conference is a bit of a hybrid between Academic and Policy events. It’s an international NGO (nongovernmental organization) production, hosted by the Drug Policy Alliance and the ACLU, which often partners with the DPA on domestic efforts. You can see from the title of the panel how academic the conversation is to be on my panel, which could be the title of a panel at the annual Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference I presented at for most of my academic life.
As a result, it’s probably the sort of panel that I feel most comfortable in. I’m not industry, and in Policy conferences where bureaucrats and policymakers dominate I’m usually the most radical voice in the room, since my central concern is ending the drug war rather than doing politics. Or bureaucracy.
This panel is especially cool because it’s a conversation, rather than a group of individual presentations. The moderator for the panel recently reached out to prepare for the conversation by posing three or four questions with which we would like to engage. I offer the questions I sent back, and the reasons for doing so, here:
What is the relationship between legalizing cannabis in certain places and ending the drug war — in those places but more broadly?
This question places CASP’s mission into the context of an international drug policy framework. Cannabis legalization to this point has until recently been “sold” –and funded — on the assumption that cannabis legalization is an important step towards ending the drug war. These days, it seems that it’s now being sold as an engine for economic growth and associated tax revenue. As a result, the policies being called for, designed and implemented don’t seem to be all that interested in removing criminal penalties altogether for cannabis-related activity. On the other hand, there is no doubt that significant room for exception to criminal penalties is opening up, especially from the perspective of say, the Philippines, where drug war crimes and outright genocidal State policy continue with the support and funding of the U.S. government. There also doesn’t seem to be much carry-over from ending the war on cannabis to ending the war on drugs, full stop. Is cannabis being carved out as a militant particularism, an exception that allows the drug war to continue unopposed? If it is, and key voices and actors in the U.S. are “co-opted” by letting them have theirs, does cannabis legalization mean the continuation of the drug war? These are difficult questions, but they must be considered given the evidence so far.
What is the relationship between (neo)liberalizing space and demobilizing the drug war?
This is a question that has to do with the relationship between economic governance and prohibition. My interest in the relationship between the drug war and economic liberalization was sparked by trying to puzzle through the tension between the promotion of liberty, via “free market” governance, and the promotion of authoritarian control on certain populations, during the latest period of pretty intense economic globalization (since the 1970s). Whose liberty matters, politically, under conditions of intense economic inequality that is supposedly being remediated by neoliberal market governance? The hollowing out of State (this term refers approximately to governments at large, not just to Federal States) revenues under conditions of privatization absolutely blew up during the financial crisis of the last decade. U.S. federal States like Washington want and need cannabis tax revenue to replace budget shortfalls that used to be covered by income taxes and Federal transfers. As a result, policy discourse about cannabis legalization explicitly condone the punishment of informal sector markets and actors to protect State-designated monopolies. That’s how we lost medical cannabis in Washington State.
How are processes of creative destruction associated with drug war zones?
“Creative destruction” is a political economy term I learned about from studying Karl Polanyi, the Austro-Hungarian economic historian. It means that there’s a cost to market formation — that previous market and social orders are destroyed to make way for new engines of growth. It’s usually associated with urban gentrification or crisis profiteering. Under conditions of prohibition, the whole world is a drug war zone, as anthropologist Howard Campbell observes, but some spots are hotter than others: borders, inner cities and so forth. This is a broader question for which cannabis legalization provides some insight, particularly with respect to who can own the means of cannabis production in highly controlled markets with high barriers to entry. Headlines splash how many jobs are created by such markets, but what goes unsaid is to whom the gains accrue. The democratic aspect of informal cannabis markets was that everyone could be an owner or take a much better margin of the flows than they could as a $15/hour waged laborer. This spread the economic benefits of market development much wider than under conditions where you need half a million or a regulatory job to make much of a living. At the same time, however, there is a lot of truth to the claim that legal cannabis displaces the ability of highly organized crime to make much off of cannabis, any more. Cartel profits don’t accrue to the little people so much, and while I insist that cartel profits have been dwindling under conditions of medical cannabis (with a far more democratic and widely shared economy), I can’t ignore the truth that in general, we want to destroy the ability of those who use violence to manage risk to make anything.
So, that’s it. Those are my questions for the panel, and my preliminary thoughts about them. It will take place next week, Thursday, in Atlanta, Georgia. I am grateful to the Drug Policy Alliance for covering my flight and hotel room, for full disclosure.
How has the Drug War Reshaped Space, Place, and Relationships?
Thursday, October 12th, 4:30-6:00pm | Dogwood B Room, Floor M1
From prison towns to million dollar blocks (where more than a million dollars is spent to incarcerate men from one city block), drug policy is shaping what our communities and relationships look like. This session will explore: How has the drug war reshaped geography in the U.S.? What impact do these changes have on individuals and families? How does spatial shifts over time affect communities most impacted by the war on drugs? What are some current projects and solutions underway to address these shifts in geography?
