A grassroots effort to decriminalise cannabis in Finland has taken a step forward this week, with a citizen’s initiative exceeding the required 50,000 signatures to submit it to parliament.
Rather than legalise cannabis, the initiative proposes decriminalisation which would discharge the penalties for using cannabis; owning a small amount of it for personal use; and growing a few plants at home.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg says he’s used marijuana and thinks Americans should be able to do so legally.
The Associated Press reports the confession came out when the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana and military veteran spoke to reporters outside a legal pot shop in Las Vegas.
“I have. A handful of times a long time ago,” he said, adding that people stigmatize the industry because of antiquated beliefs.
More layoffs in Canada’s cannabis sector this morning. Embattled grower Canntrust Holdings Inc announced last night that it was laying off 140 workers, a quarter of its workforce, between late October and the end of the year. Canntrust lost its licence to produce and sell cannabis in September, months after Health Canada found it was growing pot in illegal spaces.
Lawmakers in France, one of few European countries to still ban medical cannabis use, approved the budget Friday for two years of patient experiments that advocates hope will pave the way for a change in the law.
The National Assembly voted for the tests, already given the green light by France's ANSM medicines regulator, to be paid out of the social security budget for 2020.
"I sincerely hope that the experiments can begin in the first quarter of 2020," junior health minister Christelle Dubos said after the vote.
On Thursday, presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his proposal for legalizing cannabis within three months of taking office.
Unlike many cannabis game-plans to date, including those of many of the industry’s hottest players, Sanders’ proposal puts the issues of full legalization, criminal expungement, and community reinvestment front and center, where they should be.
Today, the U.S. Senate hosted a hearing titled “Marijuana and America’s Health: Questions and Issues for Policy Makers.”The hearing featured an array of expert witnesses and included input from the U.S. Surgeon General himself. Much of the conversation focused on repeating the dangers of cannabis consumption — particularly the “extra potent” forms of THC lawmakers fixated on — though there were a few moments of clarity around concrete policy steps forward.
The hearing was hosted by the Senate’s Caucus on International Narcotics Control, which is co-chaired by Senator John Cornyn of Texas and California Senator Diane Feinstein. Both Cornyn and Feinstein have expressed anti-cannabis perspectives on the past, with Feinstein in particular working to block pro-cannabis legislation for decades. Earlier this year, however, she did take the small step of introducing a bill to encourage medical research on cannabis and CBD.
Cornyn started the hearing saying he and Feinstein have been looking to have a forum on the public health consequences of marijuana legalization, saying he believed the U.S. lacks the short- and long-term science on a variety of marijuana topics.
“What type of evidence is conclusive enough to make a policy recommendation on?” he asked.
“It’s critical for people like Senator Feinstein and I to understand these things.”
Feinstein agreed with her Republican counterpart and noted “the point of today is to better understand marijuana’s impact on public health.” She added: “I’m told much of what we know is anecdotal.”
Feinstein said it is her belief that science should inform policy, and that’s why she introduced legislation to help remove some of the roadblocks to research. “It’s important we learn more about appropriate dosing and delivery mechanisms,” she said.
Dr. Jerome Adams, Surgeon General of the United States, kicked off the testimony on what he called a complex issue that demands our attention and our action.
“I’ve spoken with health department officials across the country, my friends, many of them reluctant overseers of an enormous and poorly informed public health experiment,” Adams told lawmakers. “Over and over, I hear rapid escalating concern about the normalization of marijuana use, and the impact of a false perception of its safety is having on our communities, and specifically our young people and our moms-to-be.”
Adams was followed by Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She talked about standard issues like cognitive performance and the impact of marijuana on the developing mind. Then her testimony skewed a little darker, as Volkow noted serious mental illnesses and suicides in this country are on the rise. “And while multiple factors are likely contributing to this rise, it is imperative to understand if exposure to high-potency cannabis during adolescence is one of them,” she said. “High-potency marijuana can trigger acute psychotic episodes, which is one of the main causes for emergency department visits associated with cannabis use. Which are also rising.”
Throughout the testimony, both Volkow and Adams compared cannabis to tobacco and alcohol, relevant comparisons for the fact that while both substances have negative health consequences, both are federally legal. (Neither Volkow nor Adams ever intimated that they supported federal cannabis legalization.)
At one point, Cornyn asked the panel if the current cannabis landscape reminded them of what Americans learned about Big Tobacco before.
“Sir, we’ve seen this play before,” Adams replied. “Cocaine was thought to be an effective medicine and harmless. Once upon a time, opioids were thought to be good for whatever ails you, and to not have any negative effects or a higher dosage limit. Not that I am in any way, shape, or form comparing marijuana to those substances, but from a policy point of view, I think the lesson we should have learned is that we have to make sure the science is leading the policy and that the tail isn’t wagging the dog.”
Adams said many of the things people are using marijuana for are unproven and overstated, “and in my opinion we are downplaying risk.”
In late August, Adams put out a Surgeon General’s advisory about the consequences of marijuana use on the developing brain.
Cornyn later asked Adams to go further, and to state if cannabis use would be damaging to a developed adult brain and if he would advise adult-use cannabis.
“As the Surgeon General of the United States, the first thing I would way is absolutely not,” Adams replied. “There are plenty of substances out there which adults can partake of that are not only not harm free, but my office had a long history of trying to reign the horse back in on. You mention tobacco, alcohol is one of the top killers in our country… I think, again, we need to be careful about the normalization of behavior.”
Adams said of the other dangers of marijuana usage is that “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Both Adams and Volkow mentioned that the Schedule I status of cannabis inhibits productive federal research on the substance.
Of course, the vaping health scare also earned some air time. Feinstein asked about the safety of vaping, citing the 33 deaths reported by health officials. The Surgeon General replied he was very concerned and spoke of collaborative efforts with the Center for Disease Control and Department of Health and Human Services.
“A large number of these cases have been associated with vaping THC, particularly THC that has been obtained on the black market,” Adams said, before being cut off by Feinstein, who wanted him to explain what happens inside the lungs after a tainted vape is consumed.
In the second panel of the day before the same Senate caucus, Dr. Robert Fitzgerald, a professor of pathology at the University of California-San Diego, testified about the data around the impact legal cannabis has had on traffic accidents and related fatalities.
Dr. Staci Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, also testified, and quickly made a much-needed distinction that the conversation of the day had been lacking: most research focuses on high-THC recreational consumption, rather than what consumption looks like for medical cannabis patients. Gruber explained that, despite the country being in the middle of a “green rush,” it’s tough for people to navigate facts.
“Nearly all of what we know about marijuana comes from studies of recreational marijuana users,” Gruber said. “These studies typically focus on those with chronic heavy marijuana use. Data across studies is inconsistent but generally reflects on those who use marijuana and those who don’t spanning a number of areas that we’ve heard allusions to already including cognitive performance.”
Gruber argued later that CBD might have the potential to counteract some of the negative effects THC might have on your brain, “but it’s virtually undetectable in recreational products.”
Gruber went back to making sure the conversation separates medical users from recreational. She said in some cases medical patients showed improved cognitive performance.
“The Schedule I status of marijuana leads to a number of obstacles in conducting research,” she said. “Policy at this point has clearly outpaced science, and as the nation has warmed to the use of both medical and recreational marijuana, the need for empirically found data is critical in order to maximize benefit and reduce harm.”
Her testimony was followed by Dr. Sean Hennessy, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He was a member of the 16-person committee that wrote the 2017 National Academy of Science report on the then-existing literature about the potential health effects of cannabis-derived products, both therapeutic and harmful.
As Hennessey testified, the report recommended public health agencies fund a cannabis research agenda, federal agencies convene to create benchmarks for high-quality research and fund improvements to the public health surveillance system, and federal agencies should find regulatory barriers and think of strategies to create the infrastructure needed to conduct cannabis research.
Dr. Madeline Meier, an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, finished the panel by speaking on her research into marijuana’s effects on cognitive performance in 2012.
Economists have a bit of an image problem. People think we shamelessly massage statistics, overconfidently make terrible predictions, and are no fun at drinks parties.
Perhaps some of the blame for this lies with the man who, a century ago, was probably the most famous economist in the world - Irving Fisher.
It was Fisher who notoriously claimed, in October 1929, the stock market had reached "a permanently high plateau".
Nine days later, came the huge stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.
The federal Liberal Party of Canada was re-elected to power on Monday, demonstrating that it is not a political death knell for a party in Canada to propose and implement national cannabis legalization.
More interestingly, the Liberals only received a minority mandate this time–157 seats compared to the 184 seats it received last time.
When New Jersey lawmakers debated earlier this year whether to legalize recreational use of marijuana, the Garden State’s police organizations were adamantly against it.
The cops said that legal weed might lead to an explosion in the numbers of impaired drivers operating under the influence. And the police would be caught flatfooted trying to tell whether drivers they pulled over were high or not.
“With alcohol, if you have over 0.08% in your blood, there’s the presumption that you’re intoxicated,” said Christopher Leusner, head of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police.
“There hasn’t been a blood test or a breath test that can determine if you’re impaired by marijuana.”
Now there is.
It’s a breathalyzer device developed by Hound Labs in Northern California. It’s portable and can run tests for both alcohol and marijuana. It just may change the minds of many of those reluctant police officers, including in Pennsylvania as lawmakers consider several proposals to legalize recreational marijuana use.
Intrinsic Capital Partners, a Philadelphia growth equity fund, is so convinced of a “potential massive market” for the device that it led a $30 million Series D financing round to bring it to market in 2020.
Mike Lynn, a veteran emergency department physician from Oakland, Calif., developed the Hound in collaboration with researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco.
Lynn also happens to be a reserve deputy sheriff.
“It’s about creating a balance of public safety and fairness,” Lynn said. “I’ve seen the tragedies resulting from impaired driving up close. And I have a good idea how challenging it is at the roadside to know whether someone smoked pot recently. But I believe if someone is not stoned, they shouldn’t be arrested.”
Blood tests for marijuana can return a positive result even if someone has used cannabis within the last three weeks.
Lynn claims that his device can detect whether someone has smoked or ingested a marijuana edible within the last three hours.
A Canadian start-up, called SannTek, has a device in development with similar capabilities.
The Hound is comprised of a base station and a hand-held device that together will retail for about $5,000 a unit. The entire machine will be manufactured in the United States, Lynn said. Each test also will require a $20 onetime use cartridge.
“We have spoken with law enforcement agencies and large employers, and from our perspective, there’s a huge, untapped market and unmet needs for something like this,” said Howard Goodwin, principal at Intrinsic Capital Partners.
Dick Wolf, the creator of TV’s Law & Order, is also an enthusiastic Hound backer. So is Benchmark, the Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouse that put up seed funding to Dropbox, Snap, Uber, and WeWork.
“It’s a game changer,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively on marijuana legalization.
“I’ve been saying for years it’s only a matter of time before someone developed the technology and got the science right,” Hudak said. “That time apparently is now. And they’re going to make a hell of a lot of money selling it to law enforcement agencies across the U.S. and Canada.”
Goodwin said about 50 million drug tests are conducted each year. He believes the market for a THC breathalyzer may be worth well above $10 billion annually.
About 30 states have legalized cannabis. Pennsylvania and New Jersey are among the dozens with medical marijuana programs. The governors of both states support legalizing it for recreational use. And polls in both states show the majority voters would support full legalization.
But traditionally, law enforcement has been resistant to legalization.
Leusner, the head of the New Jersey police chiefs group, said prosecuting marijuana DUIs is costly and time-consuming.
Marijuana DUI cases hinge on blood test results. Traces of THC metabolites, the drug’s byproducts, can remain in the body for up to a month. Proving impairment is notoriously difficult. There is no “per se” standard, or legal threshold, of what constitutes intoxication. Often, cases get thrown out of court.
Officers who are qualified drug recognition experts and trained to spot stoned drivers can spend up to two days in court on the stand. “That’s expensive,” Leusner said.
John Adams, Berks County’s district attorney, serves on Pennsylvania’s statewide medical marijuana advisory board.
“DUI under marijuana is a huge, huge problem. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been against legalization,” Adams said. “I’ve heard about the breathalyzers. If the technology is out there, it would be a great tool. It would alleviate some of our fears.”
Police have depended on the skunky stench of burnt marijuana to provide probable cause to search a car or conduct a field sobriety test on a driver. But a recent court ruling in Pennsylvania maintained that the smell alone isn’t sufficient reason to initiate an arrest.
In addition, cannabis consumers in many states are slowly trending toward edibles — from pot brownies to infused beverages and lozenges — and, until the recent scare, vaping.
So both the Hound and the SannTek breath analyzers appear to be arriving at the perfect moment.
The Hound breathalyzer, which is about a billion times more sensitive than a standard alcohol breath test, can detect the incredibly low concentrations of THC that are transported through the bloodstream and subsequently exhaled.
“We wanted to be able to detect THC in people who have recently used it — either eaten the stuff or smoked a joint,” said Lynn. “Those are the people we want to discourage before they go to the workplace or get behind the wheel.”
Lynn said he envisioned the device nearly eight years ago when a car drove past him trailing a cloud of weed smoke. But the technology did not exist to create an affordable device.
“I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be.”
In about eight months, Lynn’s team was able to detect THC in the breath of smokers. It took five more years to consistently and accurately measure levels with a machine with a cost in reach of most police departments and employers.
“We could measure small amounts quickly, but it took considerably longer to do the science and complete the clinical studies,” Lynn said.
Though Lynn envisions the nation’s police departments as his first customers, he believes that businesses will adopt the Hound.
“Employers have the same fundamental problems as law enforcement,” Lynn said. “They need to maintain a safe workplace, but not have to worry about what their employees do in their free time. Someone can go home, smoke pot just like I’d enjoy a glass of wine, and not test positive.”
“Employers are facing a workforce now that has close to full employment,” Lynn said. “They don’t want to be firing valuable workers, especially for something that’s legal in most states.”
