The FBI is investigating whether public officials in Sacramento, California accepted bribes in return for favorable treatment for applicants for licenses to operate cannabis businesses in the city, according to a report in local media. Three sources with direct knowledge of the probe have told the Sacramento Bee that the FBI has questioned several local cannabis businesses over the last three months about the potential corruption of city officials.

The sources of the information declined to be identified so that the identities of the marijuana businesspeople questioned by the FBI would remain confidential. The sources said that those interviewed by agents were asked if they had knowledge of any bribes paid to public officials in return for favorable treatment during the cannabis business licensing process.

Gina Swankie, a spokeswoman for the FBI, refused to comment on a possible investigation into public corruption in Sacramento related to the city’s cannabis industry.

“The FBI neither confirms nor denies such an investigation,” Swankie wrote in an email. “Who is making such a claim?”

However, only two months ago, the FBI said in a podcast that it was “seeing a public corruption threat emerge in the expanding cannabis industry” and asked for tips from anyone with knowledge of corruption among public officials and marijuana businesses.

City Officials Probe Ukrainian Connection to Local Cannabis Industry

City officials in Sacramento are investigating how cannabis business owner Garib Karapetyan and his associates have been able to amass eight licenses to operate dispensaries in the city, or about one-third of the permitted retailers. One of Karapetyan’s partners, Ukrainian businessmen Andrey Kukushkin, was one of four men indicted by federal prosecutors for involvement in a scheme to direct foreign funds into campaign donations and investments in legal marijuana businesses in Nevada and other states.

Two other men indicted in the case, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are also associates of Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, and have been implicated in a reported plot by the former mayor of New York City to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s spokeswoman Mary Lynne Vellinga said on Sunday that the mayor wanted to know how Karapetyan and his partners were able to obtain so many licenses under city regulations, which were designed to prevent a concentration of ownership in Sacramento’s cannabis industry.

“If this story is true, then our cannabis licensing process, which was designed to protect consumers and reward local law-abiding businesses, is being improperly exploited,” Vellinga said in a statement. “The mayor is calling for an immediate investigation and will lead an effort to add additional safeguards to the licensing process.”

Dale Gieringer, the director of the California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said that under state law, local governments have too much authority over the licensing of cannabis businesses.

“Corruption is always worse at the local level because there are so many more local officials and they aren’t under as much scrutiny as those in Sacramento,” Gieringer said. Sacramento is also the state capital of California.

State agencies, he added, “have been doing their best to expedite licensing, but too many local players have been getting their hands in the pie.”

Alcohol impairment is binary: You are either drunk or sober. But marijuana impairment might linger longer: You are still impaired even after intoxication. This is yet another hurdle for the trucking industry as it grapples with an evolving North America with more legal cannabis.

Adding to the complications of legal pot is the inability of science to accurately determine if a driver is currently under the influence with the same accuracy as alcohol detection.

Data on marijuana and its effects on U.S. roadways “is all over the place and you have people who manipulate that data to serve their own purposes,” Dr. Todd Simo, chief medical officer for HireRight, an employee background screening service, told a group of trucking executives and leaders during last week’s American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition in San Diego.

“The reality of the situation is impairing drugs are different in and of themselves,” Simo said, noting that alcohol impairment might be the most understood of all drugs. “You drink tonight, you’re impaired. When you sober up tomorrow morning, your blood-alcohol level is zero, you’re no longer impaired.”

“When you start looking at marijuana as a substance — and there are emergency studies out there in the occupational medicine world — that people when they go out and smoke pot, they’re intoxicated. And when they’re intoxicated, they’re high, they’re impaired, right? That impairment is an impairment where they know they’re impaired, therefore they compensate.”

“An alcoholic driver drives through the red lights, the intoxicated marijuana smoker stops at the green lights,” Simo said to a room full of laughter. “They are stopping there, wondering if they should go, right? Because they are so aware they are messed up. Well, the problem is that the studies are showing that the impairment of marijuana lasts longer than the intoxication window. So it’s different than alcohol.”

He added that the marijuana lobby has done a good job making the point that alcohol and marijuana are either the same or pot is better for you than alcohol. “Well from an occupational impairment perspective, marijuana is much worse than alcohol,” the doctor said. 

As more states legalize both recreational and medical marijuana, professional truck drivers are more likely to be sharing the roadway with car drivers operating under the influence of marijuana. Without an accurate way to test for pot-impairment, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) has been studying ways to deter these drivers from getting on the roads.

States shaded in light green have medical marijuana laws.

Twenty states have introduced legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, to join the first 11 states and the District of Columbia that are already there. This increase in legal recreational and medical marijuana is making it more difficult for trucks to find safe passage in the U.S, according to an ATRI study released earlier this year.

Tetrahydrocannabinol, the intoxicating agent in weed known as THC, is processed differently by the body than alcohol, “therefore different approaches are needed to identify and prosecute marijuana-impaired driving,” the ATRI report reads. Standard drug tests can show past marijuana use but it is not “generally indicative of intoxication.”

“As ATRI’s research identifies, a key tool for combating drugged drivers is deploying additional drug recognition experts,” said Mark Savage, Deputy Chief of the Colorado State Patrol. “A DRE can bring critical evidence to prosecutors that other tests simply cannot measure.”

The lingering effects of cannabis 

Marijuana was an illegal substance across the U.S. for decades. But now 33 states have legalized medical marijuana and 10 states have legalized recreational pot, spurring a new industry. While the states have made these changes, the U.S. federal government still considers the production, sale, possession and use of marijuana to be a criminal activity.

States shaded in dark green have legalized recreational marijuana.

While it may be legal to consume marijuana in various settings and scenarios, operating a vehicle on public roads while impaired is still a criminal offense. Issues associated with marijuana impairment, according to the ATRI study, are poor judgment, decreased motor coordination and decreased reaction time.

Citing some studies of marijuana smokers who are challenged to perform spacial-discriminating tasks 24 hours after using pot, they still struggle. “The people no longer feel intoxicated,” Simo said. “They feel fine.” But they struggle with challenges such as multiple object tracking, spacial determination and quick decision making. 

“Well, what job did I just describe?” he asked the crowd. “It’s all three of those tasks right away: It’s all of your drivers out there. And it’s also all of your warehousemen that are out there. People working in distribution centers, manufacturing plants. So again, when we look at this, you really have to look at it from a safety perspective: what is right for the company, what is right for safety, what is right for the safety of the public, the individual and their coworkers.”

Paul Enos, CEO of the Nevada Trucking Association, noted there is a lot of tension between state and federal laws about marijuana. “Not so much with drivers, but it is for a lot of those other categories like somebody working in a warehouse, maybe a dispatcher.”

Enos is co-chairman of ATA’s newly formed Controlled Substances, Health & Wellness Working Group, which is tasked with tackling marijuana’s effect on trucking. 

In Nevada, residents cannot be denied employment if they test positive for marijuana in pre-employment screening. But Enos said the NTA successfully pushed for that not to apply to drivers (it also doesn’t apply to first-responders and to other businesses that involve safety). The ATA last week officially took the same position as the NTA: “Maintaining that employer’s right to test if they believe that job can adversely impact safety,” Enos said. 

More companies in other industries are not testing for drugs these days. “I know a lot of casinos in Nevada have stopped testing,” Enos said. “They stopped testing because they couldn’t find anyone who could pee clean anymore. So we have businesses that are making some of those determinations. But that’s one that we don’t have the luxury of because safety is paramount to everything that we do. And I think that if a company wants to have a zero-tolerance policy, a drug-free policy, they should be able to do that.”

As marijuana becomes legal in more jurisdictions across the U.S., there are going to be civil rights challenges to companies that want to still test and not employ medical- or recreational-cannabis users. Enos said there is one argument that wins out for trucking: “We as an industry need to be prepared when we have this conversation, to always bring it back to safety,” he said. “Always bring it back to the safety, especially, on our roads and highways. We cannot change the conversation from that because every other one, I think, is a loser for us.”

Different jobs, different rules

While it's obvious that drivers need to be tested, Simo said, it’s more complicated for other fleet employees. 

“You have to craft a policy for your nonregulated workforce,” Simo said. “You can’t treat them like your regulated workforce, you have to craft a policy that says what we do with someone who makes the allegation of medical marijuana. Because of the states out there, there are 15 of them that have some sort of protection in place for medical marijuana users.”

“You have Nevada that has protections for the recreational user. Also, Maine has protections for the recreational user,” Simo added. “So as you go through that, you will have to look at your policy and say hey what do we do here? Because safety-sensitive employees may not just be drivers. They may be that person working on an assembly line, working at a distribution center, working on a forklift or doing something else.”

Simo said it’s important to think through how each position applies to safety because “marijuana is impairing in a different way. Do you want that person who no longer feels intoxicated not being able to spacially discriminate how far their forklift is away from someone? That could be a bad day for someone there.”

An example that Simo likes to use is an ammunition plant: Do you apply the same rules to the overhead crane operator at the plant as you do the receptionist? “So look at your policy and craft a policy that defines who’s safety-sensitive, who isn’t.”

“Just because a state says you have to consider accommodation, doesn’t mean that you have to accommodate. You just have to have a compelling business reason as to why you can’t accommodate,” Simo said, adding the regulations are somewhat similar to ADA laws. “Reasonable accommodation doesn’t mean you have to accommodate. You just have to reasonably accommodate. 

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Millions of Brits believe CBD oil is illegal in the UK, according to research.

The oil, said to help promote sleep, ease chronic pain, and reduce stress and anxiety, is legal in the UK as it doesn’t contain THC - a compound with psychoactive effects. But two thirds of people believe it is banned.

And eight in 10 think the effect of taking the naturally-derived oil is the same as smoking cannabis.

More than half also said they would judge a friend or family member negatively if they knew they took CBD.

The research of 2,000 adults, commissioned by CBD oil manufacturer Dr Ed found more than three quarters are confused by CBD.

And eight in 10 describe it - despite being perfectly legal - as ‘dodgy’.

Neuroscientist Dr Edward Jones, who formed the company, said: “Although cannabidiol was isolated as a compound decades ago, knowledge of its potentially potent therapeutic value is only now becoming mainstream.

“As with most emerging industries, regulation is loose, which has led to a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding CBD and an awful lot of mis-selling.

“Cannabidiol, better known as CBD, is a naturally occurring compound found in the resinous flower of cannabis.

“While cannabis itself is an addictive drug, once extracted from the plant, CBD is actually a safe and non-addictive substance, with none of the side effects associated with cannabis such as the feeling of being ‘high’.”

The study also found CBD is most widely used by women aged 45 to 60 - 67 per cent claimed to have taken or considered taking the oil.

At the other end of the scale, those age 25 to 30 were least likely to use CBD, with just 21 per cent open to trying it.

As well as confusion around CBD in general, the research also highlighted a lack of knowledge around the oil and its connection to cannabis.

Two thirds are wrongly under the impression its use is banned in professional sports.