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Alongside their more traditional grains and other crops, American farmers are harvesting a new crop this year.

Some growers are in the midst of the first legal hemp harvest.

The Hemp Farming Act of 2018, a piece of legislation found in the 2018 Farm Bill, removed hemp from Schedule I controlled substances, allowing farmers to produce it the same way they would any other grain crop without any legal issues as long as they have a permit.

Hemp is any cannabis plant with less than 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Any plants exceeding that amount are considered marijuana.

To grow hemp, however, producers needed permits from state ag departments.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, for example, issued 572 grower permits for more than 32,000 acres of commercial hemp.

Those individuals who received a permit are pleased with how the harvest is coming along.

“We started off with a really rainy season which put the crop behind the eight ball,” John Freeman, a grower and president of the Industrial Hemp Industry of Michigan, told Farms.com. “But we’ve got thousands and thousands of pounds of the crop right now.”

How the crop is harvested depends on the plant’s end use.

“People are harvesting for different things,” he said. “If you just want the seed, then you can use a combine but, if you want the flowers, then you might want to consider harvesting by hand.”

Farmers in Kansas are also harvesting their first hemp crops.

The state ag department licensed 260 grower permits for more than 2,300 acres across 57 counties.

Harvesting the plant in a timely manner is important to meet the legalities associated with it.

“We’re on a 10-day time schedule,” J. Bradley, a producer with Heartland Hemp Farm in Leavenworth, Kan., told KSHB on Oct 3. “We don’t want to be over the THC threshold, so we just cut it down.”

European cannabis has become a “prime investment target for excess cash” for North American firms emboldened by high valuations in USA, a sector expert says.

Ben Langley, chief executive of investment company Grow Biotech, said that a “steady wave of capital flowing to Europe” is starting to roll across the Atlantic from entrepreneurs and investors who have “cash to deploy, global ambitions, and experience operating in ‘legal’ markets”.

According to broker Liberum, cannabis sector fundraising in UK has only reached £45mln year-to-date, “a drop in the ocean” compared to the £30bn raised in North America.

There’s a feeling that North American companies have already had their windfall – with mega corporations forming such as Canada-based Canopy Growth Corporation (TSE:WEED) listed in Toronto with a market cap of $7.9bn and Aurora Cannabis Inc (TSE:ACB) trailing not far behind with its $4.3bn valuation.

British cannabis and CBD companies

Bolstered by a £7.8mln Series A funding round in September, British medical marijuana company Cannaray is now aiming for a £100mln float that would make it the largest cannabis business on the London Stock Exchange.

The funding round came from a group of private investors, of which 60% was from US.

Another major UK deal came in September when medicinal cannabis investment group World High Life announced the £9mln acquisition of Love Hemp, a UK company which already turns over £2.5mln a year selling their products in retail chain WHSmith.

London-listed Zoetic International PLC (LON:ZOE) has undertaken a major shift in direction this year, moving firmly into the CBD business in August with a CBD oil sales operation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Before the end of the year, Zoetic plans to begin production of its first feminised seeds, ie those that produce the buds that produce the CBD, with initial sales expected in the first quarter of 2020.

“As we expand the techniques we have been developing, we have every reason to believe that we have the capability to become a trusted supplier of significant volumes of feminised seeds on a monthly basis”, new chief executive Nick Tulloch said.

David Stadnyk, one of the founders of Toronto-listed Supreme Cannabis, set up World High Life with the “ambition to become a leading European medical cannabis and CBD investment company”, setting its sights on the German market for 2020.

“North American cannabis wealth and experience is currently an enabler of growth, rather than something to be feared,” maintained Langley.

Meanwhile others such as Canopy Growth this year made investments in production, with Spanish hemp producer Cafina and German medical marijuana firm C3 benefitting from investment, and its rival Aurora took over Portuguese pot producer Gaia Farm and also won a tender to produce and distribute cannabis in Germany.

A new study funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice sought to determine the effect of the change in legal status of cannabis on crimes rates.

Eleven states and the District of Columbia have legalised cannabis. The study, which looked at legalisation and sales of recreational or broad medical purposes cannabis in Colorado and Washington, found minimal to no effect on rates of violent and property crimes in those states.

The study, by researchers at Washington State University, Stockton University, and the University of Utah, appears in Justice Quarterly, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

The grand experiment

Ruibin Lu, assistant professor of criminal justice at Stockton University, who is first author on a paper about the study, said: “In many ways, the legalisation of cannabis constitutes a grand ongoing experiment into how a major public policy initiative does or does not accomplish its expected outcomes.

“Given the likelihood of more states legalising recreational cannabis, we felt it was important to apply robust empirical methods to parse out the effects of this action on crime in the first years after legalisation.”

Previous studies have reported mixed and inconclusive results on how legalising cannabis affects crime. Some politicians and advocacy groups have used these data to support their positions for and against legalisation.

In this new study, researchers used methods that they say are more rigorous than those used in previous research (i.e., quasi-experimental approaches that more closely emulate experiments and provide stronger evidence) to determine whether the legalisation of cannabis led to changes in crime rates.

Researchers chose Colorado and Washington because they were the two earliest states to legalise growing, processing, and selling cannabis commercially for recreational use.

Cannabis for medical and other purposes

Researchers compared monthly crime rates in Colorado and Washington to crime rates in 21 states that have not legalised cannabis use for recreational or broad medical purposes at the state level.

Crime rates came from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report from 1999 to 2016 for agencies that reported complete data during this period. The study calculated how violent and property crimes changed for Colorado and Washington after the legalisation and retail sale and compared the changes to what happened in states that had not legalised cannabis.

In general, the study found no statistically significant long-term effects of recreational cannabis laws or the initiation of retail sales on violent or property crime rates in either Colorado or Washington, with the exception of a decline in burglary rates in Washington. This suggests that the legalisation and sales of cannabis for recreational or broad medical purposes have had minimal to no effect on major crimes in these states.

The study also chronicled some increases in crime in the two states immediately following legalisation of cannabis – with property crime rates rising in Colorado and Washington, and aggravated assault rates rising in Washington. But in both states, these increases were short-lived and did not reflect permanent shifts.

The study’s authors note that because they examined changes in serious crime, they cannot address the effect of legalising cannabis on other types of crime (e.g., crimes related to driving under the influence of cannabis). In addition, they say they cannot rule out the possibility that cannabis laws might have different effects on different types of communities within a state.

Dale W. Willits, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University, one of the co-authors of the study, said: “As the nationwide debate about legalisation, the federal classification of cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act, and the consequences of legalisation for crime continues, it is essential to centre that discussion on studies that use contextualised and robust research designs with as few limitations as possible.

“This is but one study and legalisation of cannabis is still relatively new, but by replicating our findings, policymakers can answer the question of how legalisation affects crime.”

California’s hopes of reinvigorating the state’s longtime “compassion programs,” which for decades provided medical cannabis to the sick for free, now rest in the hands of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The bill in question, SB-34 or the “Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary Compassionate Care Act,” would create a mechanism to exempt compassionate cannabis programs from the hefty cultivation and excise taxes that the state started levying on all cannabis producers under new adult-use regulations in 2018. It would also allow licensed retailers and delivery services to facilitate donation programs for medical patients.

Under SB-34, the cannabis donated to medical patients would still face all the other burdens that marijuana products in California face, such as being in the track-and-trace system and passing strict lab testing standards. However, operators of those compassionate cannabis programs say the bill is a good start towards making their operations more feasible again. The programs currently have to pay about 25% taxes, despite the fact that they bring in no revenue.

The bill passed the California State Assembly and State Senate in early September. The vote was unanimous in both houses. The bill has now sat on the governor’s desk for over two weeks. Newsom has until mid-October to either sign the bill into law or veto it.

“We don’t know what the Governor will do, but we are making a strong case to him that SB 34 is critical to ensure people can continue to access their medicine,” the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Scott Weiner, told Cannabis Now in a statement. “Without a tax exemption, compassion programs will continue to shut down, and low-income people will either not get their medicine or be forced onto the illicit market. We need to ensure access.”

Last week, Wiener joined San Francisco medical cannabis activists at one of the greatest landmarks of the medical marijuana movement: Dennis Peron’s Castro Castle, where activists worked to pass California’s medical marijuana law, Proposition 215, back in 1996.

As Weiner took the mic, a small dog started barking with the applause. Weiner told the dog to bark at the governor and get him to sign the bill.

“An entire generation of activists” risked their own safety to provide medicine to people who were getting sick and dying of AIDS, Wiener told the crowd. “We owe them a huge debt of gratitude.”

Weiner went on to note that activists such as Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary, the bill’s namesakes, built the political momentum that led to legal cannabis. They did so by giving away cannabis to those in need for free, proving through generosity that they could not be equated to “drug dealers” and that cannabis could be healing.

Weiner said that he doubts any Californians who voted in favor of legalization realized they would be creating roadblocks to access to medicine for sick, low-income people.

The way California NORML explains how California’s compassionate programs came to face extinction: “Due to an oversight in how Proposition 64 [California’s adult-use legalization bill] was drafted, these not-for-profit donation programs that have been serving medical cannabis patients for decades are now being forced to pay taxes meant for businesses, which are forcing these charity programs to shut down.”

Cal NORML told Cannabis Now in an email they haven’t had any assurances that the governor will sign the bill and people should continue to contact his office.

Last year, a similar bill sponsored by Weiner passed both houses of the state legislature and landed on the desk of then-Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown vetoed the bill out of a concern that it would encourage illicit market distribution of cannabis.

One of the oldest compassion programs in the state belongs to its oldest dispensary, Berkeley Patients Group. BPG Vice-President Etienne Fontan has been a first-hand witness to giving sick people free marijuana for 20 years, but suddenly he says it’s harder than it’s been in a long time.

“We have dealt with years of setbacks post-Prop 64 for patients and the need for compassion is needed now more than ever,” Fontan told Cannabis Now. “We spent 20 years compassionately giving in our community and with cancer rates at 1 in 2, it’s a necessity for low-income patients in dire need, today.”

In reality, the delays in the governor’s signature are just making it harder for Fontan to provide for as many people as possible.

“We cannot await another politician’s cruelty, we need the governor to sign this legislation to put patients’ minds at ease so they can focus on their healing instead of worrying where they will have to go to find their medicine,” he said. “Berkeley Patients Group has the word ‘patients’ in the name for a reason and we will always stand for those who are most in need and we need the laws and politicians to reflect the will of the voters but also the compassion that Prop 215 was created for.”

Just 10% of users consumed a third of all the cannabis used in Canada in 2018, according to a study headed by a Northern Medical Program professor.

Dr. Russ Callaghan and his team looked at data from the 2018 National Cannabis Survey, which assessed patterns of cannabis use among Canadians at least 15 years old.

"The findings are similar to those in the alcohol field, where we have found that a small subgroup of drinkers usually consumes the majority of alcohol in the population," Callaghan said.

The team also found that males reported consuming 60 per cent of the cannabis consumed and males 15-34 years old disproportionately represented in the heaviest-using subgroups.

"This is the first study to identify this pattern, and it may be important for public-health strategies in designing interventions to reduce cannabis-related harms," Callaghan said.

He said future studies will look at characteristics of the heaviest-using cannabis user group, as well as assess how cannabis-related harms are distributed in Canadian society across individuals using different quantities.

In alcohol-related studies have found that five to 10 per cent of drinkers consume a majority of the volume.

There is also some evidence that most of the alcohol-related harms in societies are not found in the group of heaviest-drinking individuals, but rather in the much more numerous low-to-moderate-drinking groups.

The finding has been used as the basis for developing interventions for the entire population rather than on strategies designed for the heaviest-using subgroups.

"At this time, we don't know if the same pattern exists in relation to cannabis as it does for alcohol," Callaghan said.

The team was made up of researchers from UNBC, the University of British Columbia, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria.

Despite marijuana legalization in 11 states and widespread decriminalization, police still focus on arresting Americans for cannabis possession.

A new crime report produced by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program found there were 663,367 marijuana arrests in the United States last year. That amounts to one cannabis arrest every 48 seconds. More alarming, however, is that the FBI’s data shows the marijuana arrests have increasing each year for the past three consecutive years. There were 663,367 cannabis-related arrests in 2017, an increase from 653,249 arrests in 2016.

The data was compiled by the FBI after local police agencies shared their crime data with the federal agency. The numbers reported that more than 90% of these marijuana-related arrests were for possession alone. Furthermore, cannabis arrests outnumbered arrests for burglary, sexual assault, arson, fraud, and disorderly conduct.

“Despite cannabis being decriminalized in over half of the country, a growing number of states enacting laws to legalize adult-use and medical cannabis, and the reality that two-thirds of Americans support legalization, cannabis arrests continue to rise,” Steve Hawkins, the executive director for the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Fresh Toast. “This new arrest data is a stark reminder that cannabis prohibition is far from over.”

Hawkins noted that focus on marijuana arrests distract police nationwide from focusing on more serious crimes. The same FBI data reported that only 62% of murders, 33% of rapes, 30% of robberies, and 53% of aggravated assaults were cleared nationwide in 2018. A study published in Policy Quarterly last year demonstrated that clearance rates for violent crimes increased following marijuana legalization in both Washington and Colorado. Clearance rates for property crimes also rose in these states, while declining nationwide.

“Moreover, in the absence of other compelling explanations, the current evidence suggests that legalization produced some demonstrable and persistent benefit in clearance rates, benefits we believe are associated with the marijuana legalization proponents’ prediction that legalization would positively influence police performance,” researchers said.

As advocates like Hawkins emphasized, marijuana legalization impacts society in ways beneficial beyond eliminating negative impact from the War on Drugs. If nothing else, it allows police to focus on solving more important matters than prosecution marijuana possession.

“There are many reasons to support replacing prohibition with regulation, but as additional data from the new FBI report illustrates, arresting cannabis offenders prevents police from focusing on real crime,” Hawkins said.

Not seeing is believing when it comes to a new device for testing cannabis intoxication.

The Impairment Measurement Marijuana and Driving device — or IMMAD — uses a Samsung VR headset specifically designed to test a driver’s peripheral vision. Subjects are required to push a Bluetooth button every time they see a flashing stripe on the edges of their field of vision.

“Marijuana causes temporary paralysis of the cells operating in the retina,” Denise Valenti, an optometrist and lead developer of the product, told International Business Times. “So, when you have certain neurologic deficit in your retina, you just can’t see the stripes. If you can’t see, you can’t drive.”

Valenti, who developed the IMMAD alongside computer science professor Mark Pomplun at the University of Massachusetts, said that adding eye tracking technology to the device should increase effectiveness in determining intoxication from cannabis.

“The final version will be a quick, simple, objective, sensitive, specific test of marijuana driving impairment for law enforcement,” she said. “This test will be threshold related and have a number value compared to a large normative database. That test will take two minutes per eye.”

Marijuana has proven notoriously difficult to accurately test for in the human body. The presence of THC, the psychoactive component of the drug, does not necessarily mean a person is impaired. And higher levels of marijuana use do not necessarily mean higher levels of impairment. And because marijuana-impaired drivers might also be using alcohol, past tests have proven less than effective.

“We’re going to need more research and more help from the medical community, from medical researchers, to help us understand different products with different levels of THC, how different individuals are affected by that, how that relates to impairment, and ultimately how that relates to the ability to drive a vehicle and a potential crash risk,” David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), told Consumer Reports.

If cannabis investors were waiting for a sign that the beleaguered industry is turning the corner, Tuesday wasn’t that day.

Pot stocks came under pressure after U.S. cannabis operator MedMen Enterprises Inc. announced the termination of its all-stock takeover of PharmaCann LLC. The sector’s growing pains were also evident in Canada, as Aleafia Health Inc. ended a five-year supply agreement with Aphria Inc., citing a failure to meet obligations under the deal.

These developments come on the heels of a turbulent period in the cannabis space. Regulatory woes, disappointing earnings, ongoing problems getting pot stores up and running, and an emerging health crisis linked to vaping are casting dark clouds across the industry.

Legalizing cannabis has been “an unprecedented undertaking,” said David Wood, a Calgary-based partner at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, in a phone interview.

“We haven’t really chosen to compete with black markets by regulating them before. There’s no playbook here,” he said.

It’s a far cry from a year ago when exuberance carried investors into the cannabis sector after Canada became the first developed nation to legalize recreational use of the drug. Constellation Brands Inc.’s $5-billion bet on Canopy Growth Corp. fueled optimism that not only is legal pot here to stay, but will be a valuable commodity in the pharmaceutical and consumer-packaged goods industries.

Since then, cannabis company valuations have tumbled.

The closely-watched Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences Index ETF is down about 50 per cent over the past year and individual stocks have suffered similar, if not more outsized, downturns. Canopy, for example, is down 28 per cent since it received its investment from Constellation and 59 per cent from its peak a year ago.

In fact, MedMen directly cited the decline in Horizons’ cannabis-focused ETF as one of the “market developments” that led the U.S. cannabis operator to call off the PharmaCann deal on Tuesday.

Investors bought into the cannabis hype, rather than acknowledging its legalization was about ensuring public safety and not industry profits, according to Laurence Booth, finance professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business.  

“Fundamentally, cannabis is an agricultural product,” he said in a phone interview.  “We don’t go this crazy for wheat or soybeans.”