Category: Medical Cannabis

Why Postprohibition?

corvad

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

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.


Cannabis and Cultural Economy

corvad 1 Comment

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

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.

 

 

ABRACE: Sowing the Seed of Brazil’s Medical Cannabis

corvad

 

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.  

 

Former Deputy Director of WSLCB : Home Grow is a Small Step

corvad

https://www.tvw.org/watch/?clientID=9375922947&eventID=2017101007&autoStartStream=true

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

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.

 

Barriers to Understanding, Barriers to Change (Spanish translation)

corvad

Many thanks to our Colombian reader, Ramiro Borja, for providing this translation to us! The original article in English can be found here.

Translated by Ramiro E. Borja / Colectivo Nueva de Abril

Dominic Corva, Director de Investigación en Ciencia Social Center for Study of Cannabis and Social Policy

En la presentación de ayer conté cómo empecé a explorar los mercados de cannabis y la política pública, y cómo se configuran entre sí. Mis amigos académicos reconocerán esto como un “marco teórico” -una técnica consistente en construir un modelo de mundo para que podamos entenderlo e intervenir.

Es un modelo de “economía política”, lo que significa que el usuario de esta técnica -el analista- necesita considerar cómo es que nuestra manera de ganarnos la vida y gestionar recursos conforma y está conformada por el poder que circula dentro de la sociedad. Eso es muy distinto de los modelos de la ciencia económica que suponen que todo ocurre por eleccion racional y utilidad marginal, modelos que aprendí cuando recibí mi grado como profesional en Economía.

También son distintos de los modelos de mundo que tiene la ciencia política, los que suponen que el Estado tiene en mente los intereses de cada quién cuando hace leyes y políticas públicas, y que distingue con claridad la seguridad de sus ciudadanos de la de los enemigos de éstos.

Mi audiencia ya no es pesadamente académica. Pero es importante que usted entienda cómo es que mi modelo de mundo es la base de mi modelo de la cannabis en el mundo. Como la mayoría de las aproximaciones académicas, debo equilibrar qué tan significativas quiero que sean mis explicaciones con el rigor analítico, para que tengan un efecto en la manera en que la gente piensa y actúa en el mundo. Quiero escoger batallas que pueda ganar, en vez de simplemente tener la razón y sentirme bien por eso.

Esto es especialmente difícil cuando se trata de responder a las preocupaciones que tienen las personas que hacen las leyes y las políticas públicas. Sus modelos de mundo simplemente no reflejan las realidades de los mercados y las políticas del cannabis, que sí entiendo mediante mi modelo. Ontologías inconmensurables, de verdad. Ellos no entienden qué tanto ha durado esto, no entienden de dónde sale la compulsión de prohibir, o quién está siendo prohibido; lo más importante es que no aceptan un modelo que dice que nuestra sociedad ha estado en guerra contra sí misma, una guerra real en la que se han perdido millones de vidas ante el complejo industrial de la seguridad, que es claramente peligroso y anti-paz, lo que mi modelo del mundo muestra.

El problema no es lo que ellos saben, sino cómo lo saben. Su modelo de mundo mira a la guerra contra las drogas como una metáfora, no como una realidad. Su modelo de mundo piensa que la peligrosidad de las drogas prohibidas está dada históricamente, y proviene de decisiones racionales hechas de buena fe por los representantes de la voluntad pública. Su modelo de mundo piensa que solo necesitamos reducir el daño de las drogas, más que considerar la guerra de la sociedad contra sí misma, la que causa no solo los daños de las drogas (que sí existen, parte de un problema social más amplio llamado sobreconsumo), también causa de Cosas Malas que no tienen nada que ver con los daños de las drogas, como hacer de la guerra perpetua una condición de bienestar económico.

¿Será que el problema aquí es una falta total de consenso entre nuestros modelos del mundo? Piénselo: para que la guerra contra las drogas termine de verdad, por razones que reflejen la realidad más que la política, nuestros políticos y formadores de política pública tendrían que admitir que nuestras leyes prohibicionistas y nuestro sistema de justicia penal no corresponden a un modelo de mundo en que suponemos que vamos mejorando en todo -que la Modernidad está venciendo la Barbarie, siempre mejorando nuestra seguridad en vez de presentar a cada paso nuevos modos de destruirnos. Que somos herederos de la tradición de la Ilustración. Que nuestro instinto es apoyar a los que son vulnerables entre nosotros y que las personas que actúan de buena fe pueden apropiarse de éste. Que se conoce el Bien y el Mal y que nuestras instituciones son diseñadas y operadas para hacer que las cosas sean mejores y no peores.

La situación contemporánea de la legalización de la cannabis ilustra este concepto a su modo, y puesto que afecta un segmento tan pequeño de la población que sufre de muchas otras maneras el hecho de que la modernidad resulta una fábula, y no una historia, de progreso e Ilustración, parece que tenemos que dar un paso atrás para seguir avanzando. Los políticos y los intereses económicos, quienes no tienen compromiso alguno con evaluar seriamente qué es lo que ha salido mal y cómo arreglarlo, son los que se están apropiando de las propuestas de legalización de la cannabis que han tenido éxito y de su radicalidad.

En cada Estado esto se da distinto, pero hasta ahora la promesa de legalizar la marihuana como estrategia para acabar la guerra contra las drogas está siendo reemplazada por intereses políticos que todavía están obsesionados -sin fundamento científico- con supuestos daños de la cannabis. Intereses que piden reformar nuestras leyes y políticas públicas pretendiendo que la guerra contra las plantas -y contra las personas cuyas vidas han sido un largo acto de desobediencia civil y de autonomía frente a los destrozos de la guerra racial y clasista- sea más suave y amable.

Las propuestas de legalización estatal son absolutamente revolucionarias frente al orden político de este país, donde la Ley de Sustancias Controladas centraliza en la autoridad Federal la decisión de dónde y cuándo ejercer violentamente sus prerrogativas contra la población, pasando por encima de la autoridad del Estado y la libertad Local.

En cada caso, sin embargo, las legislaturas Estatales están reconfigurando la legitimidad de la prohibición más que haciendo la paz con una planta que ha sido, a lo largo de toda la historia humana, una de las sustancias terapéuticas más seguras para el hombre. Ya es claro que luego de una era de marihuana médica caracterizada por la desmovilización política, la era de la marihuana legal estará caracterizada por un creciente pánico moral frente a la producción y el consumo de cannabis que se colorean por fuera de las barreras tan restrictivas puestas por los marcos legales. Pregúntele qué sentido tiene esto a las comunidades Hmong del norte de California.

¿Qué hacer? ¿Qué batallas escoger? Depende de su modelo de mundo, no solamente de su modelo de lo grandiosa que es la cannabis para el recaudo público y las arcas empresariales. Esto último puede ser una estrategia productiva al momento de apelar a los políticos y las poblaciones dedicadas a mantener el orden económico y político vigente -la gente que piensa: ‘sí, hay cosas malas que están pasando pero no hay que cuestionar hasta el fondo nuestras suposiciones, sino mejorarlas y reformarlas’.

En mi modelo de mundo, esta aproximación alimenta un complejo industrial de la seguridad que está destruyendo a la mayoría de nosotros, para beneficio de unos pocos y de las carreras políticas de muchos. Y lo hace no porque haya gente Mala haciendo cosas Malas (aunque la hay), sino porque hay gente completamente normal que trata de ayudar. Pero como su modelo de mundo no puede acomodar la realidad histórica o presente -o solo una parte- entre más quieren ayudar, más van siendo reemplazados los guerreros culturales como motor de la prohibición por el capital.

Lo que estamos viendo acá, compañeras, es la continuidad de la prohibición más que su fin. El apremio por castigar y estigmatizar ciertas poblaciones se renueva y reempaca para reproducir el orden de cosas vigente. Un modelo de economía política honesto cuestiona este Problema Social.”

Barriers to Understanding, Barriers to Change

corvad 2 Comments

by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Yesterday I introduced a trailhead to exploring how cannabis markets and policy help shape each other. My academic friends should recognize this as a “theoretical framework” — a technique for building a model of the world so we can understand and intervene in it.

It’s a “political economy” model, which is to say that it requires the technique user — the analyst — to consider how power in society shapes and is shaped by how we mobilize resources and make livelihoods. It’s distinct especially from economic science models of the world that assume everything is happening because of rational choice and marginal utility, models I learned to get my undergraduate degree in Economics.

It’s also distinct from political science models of the world that assume that the State has everyone’s best interests in mind when they make law and policy, and that there is a clear distinction between the security of its citizens and the security of its citizen’s enemies.

My audience is not terribly academic, anymore. But it is important for you to understand how my model of the world informs my model of cannabis and the world. Like most academic approaches, I have to balance analytical rigor with just how much I want my explanations to mean something, to have an effect on how people think and act in the world. I want to pick battles I can win, rather than just be right and feel good about it.

This is especially difficult when it comes to addressing the concerns of people who make laws, who make policy. Their models of the world simply do not reflect the realities of cannabis markets and policy that I understand from mine. Incommensurable ontologies, really. They do not understand how long this has been going on, they do not understand where the compulsion to prohibit comes from, or who is being prohibited; most importantly they do not accept a model of society that says ours has been at war with itself, a real war with millions of lives lost to what is clearly a dangerous and anti-peace security-industrial complex, in my model of the world.

The problem is not with what they know, it’s how they know it. Their model of the world looks at the drug war as a metaphor, not a reality. Their model of the world thinks that the dangerousness of prohibited drugs is historically given, and comes from rational choices made by in good faith by representatives of the public will. Their model of the world thinks we only need to reduce the harm of drugs, rather than considering the harm of intrasocietal warfare as the cause not only of drug harms (which do exist, part of a larger social problem called overconsumption) but of Bad Things that have nothing to do with drug harms, like making perpetual war a condition for economic health.

Is it too much to say the problem here is a total lack of common ground in our models of the world? Think about it: to truly end the war on drugs, for the reasons that reflect reality rather than politics, our politicians and policymakers would have to admit that our prohibition laws and criminal justice policy don’t belong in a model of the world that assumes we are getting better all the time at everything — that Modernity is stamping out Barbarism, always making us safer rather than introducing new ways to destroy ourselves at every turn. That we are heirs to an Enlightenment tradition. That our instinct to help the vulnerable among us can be appropriated by good people acting in good faith. That Good and Evil have been worked out and that our institutions are designed an operated to make things better instead of worse.

The contemporary situation of cannabis legalization illustrates this concept in its own very specific way, and because it affects such a tiny segment of a population that is suffering from so many other ways in which the Modernity is a fable, rather than a story, of progress and Enlightenment, that it appears we must go backwards to go forward. The radical nature of successful cannabis legalization initiatives is being appropriated by politicians and economic interests who have no compulsion to seriously assess what has gone wrong and how to fix it.

It varies from state to state, but so far the promise of cannabis legalization as a strategy for ending the drug war is quickly replaced by political interests still obsessed with the scientifically baseless assumed harm of cannabis itself, that requires reforming our laws and policy to reflect a kinder, gentler war on plants and the people whose livelihoods have been one long act of civil disobedience, on the one hand; and autonomous from the ravages of the racial and class warfare on the other.

State legalization initiatives are absolutely revolutionary with respect this country’s political order, where the Controlled Substances Act centralizes Federal authority over State and Local freedom to decide when and where to exercise its prerogative on violence against its population.

In every case, though, State legislatures are reconfiguring the the legitimacy of prohibition rather than making peace with a plant that has been, in human history, one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man. It’s clear at this point that after a medical marijuana era defined by policy demobilization, the legal marijuana era will be defined by increased moral panic about cannabis production and consumption that colors outside the incredibly restrictive barriers to access put up by legal frameworks. Ask the Hmong communities of Northern California how this makes sense.

What to do, and what battles to pick? It depends on your model of the world, not just your model of how great cannabis is for public revenue and corporate coffers. The latter can be productive strategies for appealing to a politicians and populations invested in maintaining the current political and economic order — people who think yeah, some bad things are happening, but the assumptions we have don’t need to be fundamentally challenged, merely improved and reformed.

In my model of the world, this approach nurtures a security-industrial complex that is destroying most of us, for the profit of a few and the political careers of many. And it does so not because of Evil people doing Evil things (though there is that), but because of totally normal people trying to help. But because their model of the world can’t accommodate historical or present reality — or only partially accommodates reality — the more they help, the more money capital takes over from the culture warriors as what props up prohibition.

What we are looking at here, folks, is the continuity of prohibition instead of its end. The urge to punish and stigmatize certain populations gets rewired, retrofitted into the reproduction of the present order of things. An honest political economy model presents some challenge to this Social Problem.

 

 

Field Guide to Cannabis Markets and Policy: A Starting Point

corvad 1 Comment

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

How are cannabis markets and policy experiments changing society? The first thing to understand is that cannabis markets, like all markets, exist in relation to State policy. We understand State policy through the lens of prohibition: the total ban on some drugs and drug plants. Clearly, there’s a radical transformation going on that means we really need to understand how prohibition is being transformed — radically — by State “experiments in democracy” associated with the paradox of States choosing to opt out of Federal law without leaving the Union itself.

This assertion, or axiom, or assumption, depending on one’s point of view, contradicts a lot of what you read in the headlines. Isn’t legalization changing cannabis markets by creating regulations and licensing schemes at a rapid rate? The answer is yes, but not as fast as media advertisers would have you believe. There are three up-and-running State-supervised legal cannabis markets right now — Washington and Colorado, who were first; and Oregon, which chose to fast-track its market development by taxing first and regulating later.

In the grand scheme of things none of these states are particularly significant relative to California consumption and production, for example –or, I would argue, New York City, where cannabis delivery services have been effectively decriminalized for decades.

The first question to ask for this introduction is, what are cannabis markets and how have they changed over time? Let’s narrow down our field of inquiry by time and place, focusing narrowly on the United States and the last 40 years or so. But let’s also start with the present.

At the present, there exists three discretely identifiable categories of cannabis market: black markets, medical markets, and taxed adult-use markets. Let’s simplify by using a color spectrum: black, gray, and white. Please note this is a spectrum, with both with and black bleeding into gray and vice versa. Later on perhaps we will try to think three dimensionally by looking at how white and black markets are more integrated than you might think.

It’s important to note that these colors, as I deploy them here, reflect a stigma-free taxonomy. None of these are assumed to be morally superior to the other, in my analysis here or at any time. This is a sharp difference from the way most people talk about them. I’m not trying to convince anyone to desire or not desire one over each other — in fact I insist that given their interdependency, it is not useful to do so.

I also reject arguments that using a color spectrum for taxonomy is inherently racist, since to accept that argument would mean applying it to all sorts absurdity, like the meaning of “black boxes” or “black operations.” We can argue about that later if readers insist.

The next thing to understand is that state policy is also a (possibly circular) continuum, from extremely punitive to bureaucratically regulated. This way to think about it is indebted to sociologists Harry Levine and Craig Reinarman, who insist that we think about prohibition as a continuum that reflects State interests that generally have to do with controlling undesirable populations; or geopolitical arrangements; or many other things that have nothing to do with drugs.

Levine’s framework accomplishes two things especially useful for figuring out current dynamics in landscapes of cannabis policy reform and market transformation.

The first has to do with understanding State Policy as an outcome of complex politics, rather than rational review or reformist attempts to improve the governance of free societies. This insight, drawn from the history of prohibition, helps us understand how cannabis legalization remains subject to highly political dynamics, to the exclusion of rational policy consideration.

The second has to do with understanding punitive prohibition, usually in the form of authoritarian policing, carceral fundamentalism, and sentencing policies, as a form of regulation. That is, prohibition doesn’t succeed in prohibiting. Instead it creates landscapes of risk of exposure to enforcement that are capitalized on by illicit (and now licit) market actors. Plenty of people do get caught! But those that get caught simply territorialize, or make real in the landscape, the value of avoiding getting caught. At times of high intensity, where lots of people or product get caught, the resulting market scarcity raises prices which make not getting caught far more profitable. Punitive policing creates more high risk, high reward markets, reflected in the trajectory of commodity prices at different parts of the value chain.

This insight helps us understand how current efforts to govern cannabis legalization are being pulled in many different directions, because they drastically shift the landscape of policing by introducing a much more robust and extended “other side” of punitive prohibition, that is marked by State efforts to regulate a market that was already being regulated (through policing); and remains in a sort of schizophrenic, bipolar relationship with different scales of government trying to do different things, from local municipalities that ban or zone out legal policy to an overarching Federal framework for which legal cannabis remains eligible for punitive prohibition, even if it isn’t being acted on right now.

This gets us to the highly volatile and dynamic contemporary phenomenon of cannabis legalization and market evolution. Or phenomena, since the policy geography of policy change is highly decentralized, while the new market processes are also highly decentralizing, as a tendency, because they create new spaces for cannabis production, processing, and distribution that are highly circumscribed by state borders.

We have two “axes” of analysis, State Policy and markets, that shape each other dialectically rather than being independent variables. And we have several dimensions of each to grapple with, since State Policy combines regulation and punishment even in the context of legalization; and since black-gray-white markets co-exist in the same territories of policy formation. Now we can begin to unpack the material realities to answer the question “how are cannabis markets and policy changing society.”

Saying Goodbye to Dr. Michelle Sexton

corvad 2 Comments

 

Dr. Sexton and Dr. Corva at 2013 Seattle Hempfest , Seattle Washington

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

I first met Dr. Michelle Sexton when my friend from graduate school, Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, pulled us into an application for a team job. The three of us and California attorney SaraLynn Mandel, who was the catalyzing force for the effort, teamed up to apply for the State of Washington’s cannabis consulting team for creating an architecture for I 502, the legalization initiative that passed in November 2012. We finished fifth out of 200 applicants, grouped with about seven other application teams that were all scored within formal interviewing distance from each other, but BOTEC’s massive application (which exceeded the application material guideline considerably) was scored significantly higher than our competitive group. So, the then-Liquor Control Board brought in BOTEC for a sniff test and hired them on the spot.

That didn’t end our interest in helping shape legal cannabis policy in Washington State. I am a political geographer, and rarely has such a discrete, unique, and utterly undeveloped research field opened up so invitingly. So I finished the spring semester and registered the Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy at the end of May 2013. Sunil was on board, but it took only a couple of months getting to further develop our intellectual rapport in person before we asked Michelle to join us.

That first year was exploratory, and it was the most fun I’ve had in my life. A huge part of that was teaming with Michelle to meet and talk to so many people in the middle of being so creative and so optimistic about the way things could go. Once a month, we met for our Board meeting, a three-way video conference at which we could put our minds to play together with the possibilities. We brainstormed and explored a landscape of opportunity that ranged from low hanging, realistic fruit to fantastical ideas about community gardens, cooperative research, and even a cannabis-friendly adult playground.

Things began to settle into place a year later, when Sunil left to do his one year fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. We collected a Board, completed the process of registering as a 501(c)(3), and Dr. Sexton started an analytics lab here in Seattle. The I 502 industry itself, labs included, began to find itself on a roller coaster ride of regulatory volatility, real estate quagmires, unworkable business partnerships, and with the passage of SB 5052 two years in, a sudden and unexpected amputation of medical cannabis, the revenues of which bootstrapped smaller, established businesses and people into the sinkhole of I 502 startup. When her lab closed down, Michelle moved back to San Diego to be with her partner Dr. Daryl Bornhop, who continues to successfully battle cancer.

One of the great things that came out of Dr. Sexton’s time with Phytalab was our popular education event, the Annual Terpestival. The first year we did it, it was a huge success as a fundraiser for our organization. The medical cannabis community embraced it as the first event of its kind, expanding popular education about whole plant cannabis by focusing on the importance of terpenes. The name “Terpestival” itself came from Michelle’s daughter, Naomi Woodruff.

The following year, in the shadow of SB 5052 and coinciding with Michelle’s move back to San Diego, we chose to host the event in Hopland California, with the help of our friend Martin Lee. That event was a lot more difficult to organize, and lost money, but was again an immense success in terms of content provided, attendance, speakers, and the incredible ambiance of the Real Goods Solar Living Center. Our third event was held in July, and although once again a success as an event, we barely broke even.

In the meantime, Dr. Sexton developed a great relationship with the University of San Diego, and began to collaborate with them in her private practice as a naturopath. Understandably, she began to feel like her desire to focus on patients, her partner, and her quality of life was really rooted in where she was now. At the same time, CASP benefitted mightily from the professional regard in which she is held as a medical cannabis naturopath and expert. Her contract reviewing applications for the State of Maryland injected a year’s worth of salary for both of us. And her contract earlier this year with the Puyallup tribe to help develop an opioid substitution study contributed further. She has represented CASP at numerous national and international conferences, and published her research with the CASP byline. In short, she has produced tremendous value to our nonprofit research organization in every capacity she has held: Board Member, Executive Medical Research Director, Clinician, Researcher, and all-around cannabis person at large.

So it is with oceans of gratitude, respect and love that we accept her decision to move on from CASP. More than a professional collaboration, Dr. Michelle Sexton has been my best intellectual playmate, influence, and caregiver for more than four years. I started this as a social scientist without much knowledge of whole plant science, culture and values — now, I’m not who I am without them. And neither is CASP. But she’s created us that way, and we will continue to be that way in her wake. It is a fundamental part of our organizational identity. I look forward to being close friends and intellectual playmates the rest of our lives.

This goodbye is a celebration of my dear friend and confident hope for her path forward to be clear and beautiful. Thank you, Michelle.

 

 

The Chemovar and the Cultivar

corvad

by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director and Terpestival Producer

Our popular education panels and keynote talk by Dr. Ethan Russo at the Third Annual Original Terpestival represented an advanced seminar in whole plant education. I am incredibly grateful to and proud of our audience, who came to listen, learn and participate as well as any university seminar I have taught. I want to reflect on the complex whole after the fashion of a reaction paper, which in the formal educational setting is a method for making a short conversation about a substantive and often intense volume of readings or material on a particular topic that is rich with avenues for further exploration and engagement. It’s a way to dip one’s toe in one part of the pool, not to summarize the whole but to represent a recurring theme that has sparked the curiosity of the student.

As the organizer of the popular education content (the seminar leader, if you will), I was especially interested in listening to what people “got,” given the complex information presented, that they can apply to their industry and cultural practices around the whole plant. I have the advantage of having been present and paying attention not only to all of the speaker content for the day, but also our event’s “prologue” — Kevin Jodrey’s Thursday evening talk at the Vashon Grange organized by Shango Los and VIMEA. Seen this way, Kevin and Ethan provided “bookend” lectures for shorter and more collective conversations in the panels. It’s pretty clear that there are two ways of thinking about the plant around which industry evolution will happen: the cultivar and the chemovar.

Before explaining, I want to amplify the response of panelist Rick Pfrommer to a terrific question from the audience, on how to map new terms and better information into a consumer landscape that is already confused by older, less accurate information. In particular, I’m going to allow myself to use the term “strain” in this reaction piece, even though so much of our information throws the viability of the term into question. In his years as the lead wholesale buyer for Harborside Wellness Center in San Francisco, Rick is especially tuned in to the need to be understood, and he emphasized the importance of retaining familiar words in conversation with patients and other kinds of consumers.

The cultivar is the plant, the reality behind the branding that up till now has been problematically assumed to equal “strain.” It’s more than the phenotype, or physical expression of a plant’s genes from seed or clone to processed product. Kevin’s themes were about propagating and growing for terpenes, but perhaps the most eye-opening element for even the most advanced folks who heard him was the assertion that the the cannabinoid and terpene content of a plant is shaped especially by the environment in which it’s grown. This has tremendous implications not only for research on genetics and “strains,” but on the production, branding and marketing of terpene configurations. Your nutrient line matters. Your lighting matters. Your physical geography, if your plants are grown in the sun, matters considerably. A Banana OG “strain” grown in one environment can differ considerably if grown in another. It can even differ considerably if it’s fed a different nutrient line.

The cultivar is the domain of the grower. What we know about it today is what growers communicate about it. In the informal market historical context, that knowledge was highly classified and shared in secret, for obvious reasons. It was limited by the imperative to NOT record, because doing so could catch you a much bigger case, as Kevin found out in the early 2000s. As a result, it’s mostly a matter of oral history, found and lost in the memories of the growers over decades, with few exceptions. Kevin’s decades of expertise are unique in his drive to network together knowledge about cultivation of the plant especially through “strain” hunting, propagation, and crucially, functioning as a nursery from which the identification of cultivars could be matched to market opportunities across the globe.

The chemovar is the molecular composition of given cultivar. It’s the terpene profile plus the cannabinoid profile plus every element of the whole plant that is not inert, like lipids and waxes that give form but do not interact with human physiology when ingested. It’s what Dr. Russo talks about when he talks about the whole plant and how research on it evolves. The research scientist looks into the plant, literally, to engage with the consistency and variability of how people are affected by it. He needs a laboratory and lab equipment — in fact, the chemotype is the snapshot of the chemovar that analytics laboratories produce, with raw material created by the producer and processor. The chemovar is an ensemble of numbers about which considerable possibilities for branding emerge, especially in the Washington legal context where the consumer is not permitted to experience the product’s smell or effect before buying it.

The chemovar is the domain of the scientist. What we know about it today comes from an extremely small number of licensed researchers on the one hand and the databases of cannabis analytics labs, which are absolutely exploding under conditions of legalization but remain really small in comparison of what’s to come. Pioneering researchers like Dr. Russo were able to produce this knowledge under very specific and limited historical conditions.

In Ethan’s case, it was his position as Senior Medical Advisor for GW Pharmaceuticals. GW itself was created out of a perfectly legal arrangement between UK entrepreneurs, outlaw botanists with a legal cannabis genetics bank in the Netherlands, and philanthropic seed money from the late Peter Lewis, arranged by his nephew Don E. Wirtschafter, the moderator of our panels last Saturday.

The basic concepts here are not new, and this way to think about the Terpestival’s popular education elements was not planned, but the cultivar and the chemovar frame a conversation about the cannabis plant that will shape the branding evolution of the craft cannabis economy represented at the Third Annual Terpestival.

The question itself is important not just for scientific knowledge and better education, but to reconcile the marketing of cannabis with its botanical reality. The marketing of cannabis to this point has predominantly mobilized the discourse of “strains,” usually typologized as indica, sativa, and hybrid. You can see this most prominently in the ubiquitous Leafly posters hung up in most dispensaries and retail outlets in existence.

These two plant identities reflect advancement in the understanding of cannabis as a plant and as a delivery mechanism for entourage effects loosely grouped under the notion of “high” — more properly understood as a highly variable consumer experience than includes therapeutic effects rather than simply recreational drug consumption.

The frames here — from the scientist and from the grower — aren’t contradictory, but they can be confusing for an industry that is already reeling from the reconstruction of knowledge about the plant under conditions of lab testing, a vast and growing array of nutrient lines, and methods for producing cannabis. Under conditions of legalization, knowledge about the cultivar can at last be recorded and advanced considerably with knowledge about the chemovar, outside the barrier to entry posed by global cannabis prohibition. That information is going to be incredibly useful for consumers of all stripes — patients who need to know which chemotype is likely to come from which cultivar so they can get consistent and effective medicine; and adult-use consumers who need to know which chemotype is likely to come from which cultivar so they can choose what kind of experience works for them; and so on.

But it will take an industry that is paying attention to these advancements to deliver the plant itself to the people. The Third Annual Terpestival made a space for that to happen, one which I hope will grow leaps and bounds in the coming years. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who made it possible — the popular educators, the budtenders, the sponsors, the Terpene Tournament entrants, the volunteers, the paid staff, my incredible friends and Board members, and the City that worked with us to make it possible.

 

Terpestival Winners with Confident Cannabis and Medicine Creek Analytics

corvad

by Tony Lewis, President and Co-founder, Confident Cannabis

Confident Cannabis are excited to partner with the Cannabis and Social Policy Center, Cannabis Alliance and Medicine Creek testing lab to present the winners of Terpestival 2017! With our Terpestival website you can see the winners and understand terpene data by comparing the competitors to different strains and classifications in the Confident Cannabis Universe. The Terpestival Site linked is HERE.

The Terpestival website opens with a gallery of all the competitors. From this page you can click to see more detail for each entrant including a full cannabinoid and terpene profile from testing laboratory Medicine Creek.

How to Use the Terpestival Website

On the Flower Winners page you can select any competition category using the first dropdown menu. This shows green dots for all the competition entrants. The winner in that category is highlighted in gold, for the Myrcene category the winner was North Coast Grower’s Fruity Pebbles with 1.49% Myrcene of dry weight, congratulations! You can also select a comparison universe to learn more about how common myrcene is in different classifications and strains. In the Comparison Universe dropdown you can select different universes, different classifications or different strains. You can look at the terpene profile for strains like Blue Dream, OG Kush, Sour Diesel and others. The universe shows on the chart as a green boxplot which represents the full range of terpene levels for whatever you have selected.

By changing the chart scale you can also see the data on the chart as a % of dry weight or as a % of total terpenes so that you can see how much myrcene there is in the flower compared to other terpenes in the same flower product. To see even more about the mix of terpenes you can go to “Explore Flower Samples”. On this page you will see a radar chart showing all the terpenes for a competitor and compare them to the same universe. Below you can see North Coast Growers Gorilla Glue which won four awards, congratulations! This competitor has very high caryophyllene and humulene which tend to occur together in cannabis flower. In the chart below we can compare this to Trainwreck which is a very different strain. Trainwreck usually has more Terpinolene and more Myrcene but lower Caryophyllene and Humulene. You can explore yourself to see more!

About Confident Cannabis

Confident Cannabis is the leading software platform for cannabis testing labs and their clients to track and share their products’ quality. When your lab uses Confident Cannabis, so can you! You can then get access to many of these tools and more including embeddable product gallery, labels, shareable test results and fraud-prevention tools. Check confidentcannabis.com to find labs in your region.