Tag: cannabis

The Routledge Handbook of Post-Prohibition Cannabis Research and CASP developments

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About three years ago, I was asked by Dr. Josh Meisel (Sociology, Humboldt State University) and Routledge Senior Editor Dean Birkenkamp to co-edit a Routledge Handbook of cannabis research. Next month, the hardcover and e-book editions will be published and available for sale with the title “The Routledge Handbook of Post-Prohibition Cannabis Research.”

Routledge is a global academic publisher and this collection is intended to stimulate research agendas across disciplines but especially those that intersect with “Law and Society” as an interdisciplinary field. The key characteristic of this field is that it takes law as a subject of foundational critical inquiry. The Handbook centers cannabis prohibition as a social problem, but embeds that critique in drug prohibition more broadly. Neither of these approaches is especially robust in most of the current research about cannabis legalization today, and so this book is a fairly major intervention in discussions about cannabis and its place in drug policy.

The book has 30 chapters, more than 50 authors, and is divided into five sections: Governance; Public Health; Markets and Society; Ecology and the Environment; and Culture and Social Change. There are five short framing essays for each section. Both CASP co-founders, Dr. Sunil Aggarwal and Dr. Michelle Sexton, contribute chapters to the volume.

In the coming month I’ll reflect on the process and outcomes that led to this particular collection of authors from many, mostly social science, disciplines and interdisciplinary collaborations.

For now, it’s important to note that this project and others that developed because it happened have been the main use of CASP time for the last three years, during which we have published very little on the web site. I want to review what those projects have been and are in order to catch our audiences up with our work. We will be unpacking descriptions of that work in future posts, but briefly:

  1. In order to access institutional academic resources that helped with the Handbook, mainly library privileges, I became affiliated with the Humboldt State University Sociology Department.
  2. I continued to work gathering information, hosting panels, and presenting talks as CASP Executive Director in Humboldt County, a body of work stretching back to before we founded CASP in 2013. Given my knowledge of the cannabis landscape and participation in key moments like hosting now-Governor of California Gavin Newsom’s Blue Ribbon Commission tour of the County’s cannabis people and places in 2015, I was asked to co-direct the Humboldt Institute of Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research (HIIMR) in 2019.
  3. Being co-director of an academic institute counts as service for teaching faculty, usually used as currency in the promotion process. Since I am not on the professorial professional path, and the post is unpaid, the CASP Board accepted this service position as aligned with our Mission and on behalf of a public institution, and included it in my annual duties as official CASP work.
  4. Dr. Meisel and I were approached about two years ago by a Humboldt State University Provost to develop an undergraduate degree proposal in Cannabis Studies, since we were the co-directors of HIIMR. This work became an extension of my CASP duties. We delivered that proposal in May 2021, and I look forward to sharing with our audiences the things I learned about creating the world’s first liberal arts undergraduate degree curriculum relating to the subject of cannabis. There are a few industry-oriented cannabis degree programs at private universities; a few “medicinal plant chemistry” degree programs; and many, many extended education certificates focused on cannabis industry training out there. None of them, however, have a liberal arts core curriculum dedicated to the history and geography of cannabis, and none of them have the concentrations we designed toward professional outcomes in environmental stewardship and community change. The proposal is winding its way through the California State University process for approval, and there is no guarantee it will make it through, especially by the proposed start date of Fall 2022. But it is one of three pilot degree programs that HSU is pitching as the first phase of its transition to a Polytechnic University, for which it received about $450 million recently.
  5. Around the same time we (Dr. Meisel and I) were asked to develop the Cannabis Studies degree proposal, CASP was subcontracted by the California Center for Rural Policy (CCRP) to help Humboldt County apply for a Cannabis Equity Grant. Future posts will reflect on that process, but it was successful and led to more work with CCRP. This work involved researching and writing Equity Assessments for local jurisdictions in California, work that continues to this moment and at least through the rest of 2021.
  6. I will also be working on two California Cannabis Research grants for the next several years, which we will update once they officially begin. So far, the state has not finished disbursing the grants.

There’s a lot more to report on, and unpack from what’s been presented here. But the main takeaway is that our celebration of the Handbook’s publication marks a regenerative moment for the Center for the Study of Cannabis Policy and its mission. Looking back, our four Terpestival events marked a key phase when we served our mission primarily through popular education, though there were academic and policy-oriented projects and events as well. These days, our mission is robustly served through academic work and equity policy engagement.

That said, we have always been open to creative, on-mission collaboration with popular education. We are especially excited to point our audience toward the LIT Project, a collaboration with Humboldt consultant Nicole Riggs, who wears a number of hats in the County but wanted to partner with us on grassroots education, since we are a Research and Education 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Nicole’s passion for lifting up grassroots cannabis culture and history in Humboldt County led her to us several years ago when she was working on a marketing strategy for Humboldt County’s cannabis with the Humboldt County Grower’s Alliance (HGCA). The LIT Project that is actively underway is a research project that studies Cooperation Humboldt‘s efforts to promote cooperative business models for small cannabis cultivators in Humboldt County: how they go about it, what the challenges are, and what results they achieve. Dr. Tony Silvaggio, our longtime Research Affiliate who is now Chair of the Sociology Department at HSU, will be collaborating with Dr. Corva to provide feedback on Nicole’s research design and execution, and we will publish her results right here on the CASP web site.

We look forward to updating the CASP web site much more regularly. For now, we are pleased to announce that co-founder Dr. Sunil Aggarwal has rejoined the Board as Vice President, and 2014-2015 Board member Joy Beckerman has also returned from Advisory Board status as President. She will help us re-launch our public education efforts and contribute her vast expertise in hemp history and present developments to our information network and web content. We thank AC Braddock and Alison Draisin for their tenure and note that they were both especially involved in the 2018 Terpestival, which was our last major popular education event and fundraiser. Perhaps if cannabis regulations come around in the right place at the right time, we will bring it back. For now the four Terpestival events stand as major accomplishments and we are grateful for their contributions.

CASP feedback to Swiss Advisory Commission on Addiction Issues

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by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

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

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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.

Cannabis and Cultural Economy

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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.

 

 

Spicer’s Press Statements on Legal Cannabis: Don’t Panic

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by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Yesterday’s White House press conference comments about the Trump Administration’s approach to legal cannabis sent the cannabis press into a frenzy of fear, anger, and a little hysteria. A superficial reading of Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s comments signaled the first clearly negative tone about Department of Justice (DOJ) enforcement against State-legal cannabis/marijuana experiments, but let’s take a closer look at what he actually said and add some context to defuse some of the hysteria about a “crackdown” while pointing towards what it actually might mean.

The first thing to notice is that Spicer said nothing about enforcement against State legal cannabis based on Federal conflict. Rather, Spicer echoed Jeff Sessions’ earlier comments about whether the 2014 Cole memo itself was being enforced, and consistently referenced existing policy structures at the federal level. Further, the question he was responding to was from an Arkansas reporter concerned about Arkansas’ recent medical cannabis legislation. It’s clear this response was meant to reassure Arkansas, which is why Spicer really didn’t say much new about recreational cannabis.

He begins by making a distinction between medical and recreational cannabis, highlighting a general Administrative perspective that not only favors medical cannabis in principle, but respects the existing Congressional appropriations rider that forbids DOJ enforcement against medical cannabis businesses that are compliant with State law. The link I provide here not only describes the legislative directive, but reports on the Court victory that gives it more legs than just a directive. This means the DOJ has already lost an effort in the judicial branch to overturn it. The DOJ doesn’t like losing money and court battles, so we can read this as doubly-armored protection for existing Federal medical cannabis policy.

Arkansas, Spicer is saying, is safe to proceed with constructing a medical cannabis regime. A second reporter jumps on the distinction he made, which was meant to highlight how Arkansas medical cannabis isn’t in danger, between recreational and medical cannabis. And he punts it to the DOJ.

At 2:35: “that’s a question for the Department of Justice, I do believe that you’ll see greater enforcement of it.”

The question is, what does he mean by “it”? In all likelihood, he means what Jeff Sessions clearly meant in his confirmation hearings when he discussed the Cole memo.

This is what he said: “”I think some of them are truly valuable in evaluating cases,” Sessions said Tuesday about the [Cole] guidelines. ‘But fundamentally, the criticism I think that was legitimate is that they may not have been followed. And using good judgment about how to handle these cases will be a responsibility of mine.””

The Cole memo guides DOJ enforcement policy, not against legal cannabis, but against legal cannabis diversion to other states, to minors, to double-dipping (using legal cannabis businesses as a cover for State-illegal market operations), drugged driving, and so forth. This means that the Feds reserve the right to enforce against legal cannabis businesses where State enforcement is deemed insufficient.

This is extremely different from “cracking down on legal cannabis.” My reading concludes that the Feds reserve the right here to supplement State enforcement of their own legal cannabis businesses that are not in fact compliant with State law.

The caveat here is that this is probably a much, much larger portion of the legal cannabis market than States would admit. Oregon cannabis organizer John Sajo has distinguished between “tightly regulated” and “tightly controlled” cannabis markets. The former is basically political theater, in which seed-to-sale tracking systems are effective because they exist, rather than because they work very well. Why they wouldn’t work very well isn’t hard to see from inside a legal cannabis business, but no one — especially not State regulatory agencies — has any stake in advertising the fact that there are simply not enough human resources to comb through thousands of hours of surveillance data before they can be destroyed in a 30-day window, for example.

“Tightly regulated” should be seen for the political theater that it is, reassuring key worriers (the Feds, State governors, legislators, the anti-cannabis culture that remains dominant even in legal cannabis states) that there’s nothing to see here because we are compliant with the Cole Memo. “Tightly controlled” is a prohibition fantasy, as it always has been especially with respect to a plant.

The take here is that Spicer, via Sessions, has indicated that the DOJ will do some enforcement of the Cole memo, against market participants not State systems, not that the DOJ will “crack down on” legal cannabis regimes wherever they might be. I would hazard to guess that Cole memo enforcement is probably more likely in Colorado, rather than Washington and certainly nowhere there isn’t even a legal system in place yet. It takes at least 2 years from initiative passage to market and oversight functionality, so Oregon is kind of the next closest in terms of viable enforcement logic, and they have recently passed the stage where Spicer’s comments would be particularly relevant (ie, when unregulated adult purchases were permitted at licensed medical stores).

Nothing in the press conference indicated that the Feds were coming after public officials or attempting to stop legal cannabis implementation in say California. This didn’t stop California and Washington from “signaling” right back, just in case. It should be noted that both of these States have been making political hay out of refusing to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, too.

The Trump administration, if it is consistent with anything, is consistently nationalist. Which means most of its political enforcement theater will be directed at issues that can be attributed to things that come from somewhere else, such as the greatly exaggerated supply of cannabis from transnational criminal organizations aka “Mexican cartels.”

Then there’s the matter of resources for a “crackdown,” which would be politically difficult. Trump’s DOJ is extremely busy doing other things that will undoubtedly take a toll on their prosecution budget as well as test the limits of the public’s tolerance of Executive freestyling. It’s an open question whether his base would support much DOJ activity that would run counter to state’s rights issues that don’t directly implicate cross-border trade and migration.

Cannabis politics are pretty diverse and often right-wing — there’s nothing inherently progressive about schemes to tax and regulate something that is consumed like a commodity by so many. After four years of ethnographic immersion, it seems to me that Whole Plant, Whole Society politics remain limited to legacy farmers, cannabis culturalists, and medical patients — none of whom are served very well by cannabis legalization.

From this perspective, the hysteria over Spicer’s comments yesterday is particularly flavored by commodity cannabis interests, on the one hand, and anti-Trump State politics on the other. Those who’ve been involved with cannabis policy longer than say two years aren’t particularly fazed by what the Feds do or what the States say, primarily because we recognize how this is not so much something new as an organic evolution of Prohibition culture and democratic authoritarianism at large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Ethan Russo: Cannabis Popular Education at the High Dive

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by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Dr. Ethan Russo deliver a “Cannabis 101” talk at the High Dive in Fremont. The talk was part of a regular “Nerd Nite” series that caters to Seattle’s tech culture, rather than the crowd of Seattle and Vashon-area cannabis enthusiasts that have discovered the engaging charm of perhaps the most accomplished and knowledgable cannabis researcher out there. A good teacher plans their talk around the audience they will encounter, so it was especially interesting to see how the humble scientist managed to introduce so many nuances of cannabis science — ones that often escape the cannabis industry itself — to an alcohol-oriented audience that was warmed up by a reconfigured marriage proposal about how he mined his own engagement ring. That the warmup show included stale comments about stoners made the brilliance of his talk shine all the brighter.

Yes, there were molecule diagrams in the slide show, but the man has a knack for delivering technical information with a “it’s not as complicated as it looks” tone that helps his audience keep chewing on the rich substance of his talks. As someone who’s done his share of instruction, it’s always impressive to me to see a subject matter expert remain aware of and engaged with his audience. It’s not easy, but the proof is in the sustained attention of his audience. In institutional settings, we “cheat” by structuring the audience for professional students in a professional classroom setting. But popular education has to reach a more diverse and less structurally focused crowd, whether it’s a hundred stoney people packed into the Vashon Grange or dozens of tipsy nerds some of which know something about cannabis. Ethan comes off as a natural in front of a popular crowd, and has been developing a palette of talks that allow him to be himself. I think that’s why people respond so well.

If you missed the talk, and you probably did given that it wasn’t shared through ubiquitous local cannabis media outlets, I recommend his recent podcast interview with Shango Los.  The 90-minute interview allows Ethan to “translate” his 2010 Taming THC article from The British Journal of Pharmacology for a popular audience, with a special focus on major terpenes and their potential therapeutic effects. Russo’s work de-emphasizes cannabinoids while delivering research-grade information about them, which allows him to describe their role in producing “whole plant” effects widely misunderstood as the function of problematic strain names and the useless sativa/indica binary still subscribed to by most of the emerging legal cannabis industry.

Since leaving his long term position as chief scientist at GW Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Russo has been freed from contractual obligations that severely limited his ability to share what he knows. Over the last several years, he has enjoyed a blossoming friendship with Shango, his fellow Vashon Island resident and organizer-in-chief of the Vashon Island Marijuana Enthusiasts Alliance (VIMEA). His public talks at the Vashon Grange and, last month, at the Vashon Theater, have drawn interested attendees from neighboring states.

Beyond the content of his talks, the community vibe that infuses his students and how they come together for them is especially welcome. His organic audience may include cannabis industry, but there’s a humility with respect to knowledge that owes a great deal to the humility and authenticity of the man himself that simply opens up space for conversations that are sidelined at industry events. The best educational outcomes are ones that the students themselves sustain and take with them — perhaps you’ve experienced a class or class talk that couldn’t be contained by the time period or space it happens in, but simply has to spill outside and keep going, because it has connected to the relevance of everyday life in a way most boring lectures can’t.

The mission of our organization is popular education about whole plant cannabis science, culture and politics, and Ethan has been a tremendous ally along the way. He is the headline speaker for our annual Terpestival, the third iteration of which will take place in Seattle on July 15, 2017 at Dockside Sodo. We look forward to amplifying not only the content but the spirit of his work, grounded in a Whole Plant, Whole Society ethic that seems to be in short supply these days when it comes to cannabis policy and markets.

 

I-502 Rural residential producers correlate with rising property values; question “emergency” nature of moratorium

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by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Our strategic partner, Washington Bud Company’s Shawn Denae, is leading the struggle to reverse Snohomish County’s emergency moratorium, and has been gathering evidence to demonstrate the positive economic impact of rural residential I-502 license applicants in the County.

She writes, “I searched for property values trends in Sno Co in R5 heavy zip codes.  Results prove that values have increased double digits since the passing of R5 zones for MJ farming:  Read More: