Ricardo Monreal, the Senate leader of Mexico's ruling party MORENA, said lawmakers will vote on a bill to legalize adult-use marijuana by the end of October, according to Marijuana Moment.

“We’re thinking that we’ll bring the law out, approve it, at the end of October,” Monreal said. “That’s the schedule we have.”

The chamber is almost finished with creating a new reform bill that is based on open-session debates and public forums, and the Chamber of Deputies will be invited to weigh in on the bill, Marijuana Moment reported. 

Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled five times that the country’s ban on recreational cannabis is unconstitutional. Mexican law states that when the court rules in the same direction five times, it becomes a binding precedent. 

Last year, it said that the government must legalize the drug by October, Marijuana Moment reported. 

Last week, Mario Delgado Carillo, the chairman of the Political Coordination Board of MORENA, Chamber of Deputies, filed legislation to legalize and regulate cannabis, suggesting the government should run the market to avoid industry monopolization by big companies.

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.”

With the growing popularity of medicinal marijuana and legal hemp-based products such as CBD oils and creams, colleges and universities are seeing the wisdom of preparing students for this burgeoning industry.

Medical marijuana is now legal in 33 states and the District of Columbia, and recreational usage is permitted in 11 states. Because of these changing mores and the continuing destigmatization of cannabis, colleges and universities are seeing new opportunities for education.

The U.S. cannabis market, if legalized, could be worth $28 billion today and $41 billion by 2028 “on a pre-tax basis,” according to an analyst from Barclays. If taxed at the same level as tobacco, a $41 billion cannabis market could be worth nearly $28 billion in tax revenues.

Schools across the country, including Doane University in Nebraska, Minot State University, the University of Denver, Vanderbilt Law School,  and the University of California, Davis, are offering a variety of cannabis-focused four-year undergraduate degree programs, certification classes and even graduate degrees. Course topics include medical research, legal issues, dispensary operations and more.

Northern Michigan University’s Medicinal Plant Chemistry program was the first U.S. undergraduate major in the study of cannabinoids. Besides tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis, there are at least 113 different cannabinoids that exhibit various effects, notes associate professor Brandon Canfield, who launched the program in 2017.

Students who graduate from the program’s bio-analytical track can work in botanical medicine, and those on the entrepreneurial path might start their own medical marijuana facility.

“It is, essentially, a chemistry degree but with different emphases on business and entrepreneurial disciplines,” Canfield says.

According to Hemp Industry Daily cannabis businesses are watching this educational trend because there is a shortage of people highly knowledgeable about advanced cannabis business, technology and legal/compliance topics.

But four-year schools don’t have a monopoly on these studies. Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois, is one of a few two-year schools to join the trend. About 100 students at Oakton are enrolled in the program, where they learn about marijuana policy, the history of the plant, dispensary operations and which strains of marijuana could help with various medical issues. OCC also offers a Cannabis Dispensary and Patient Care certificate program, which trains students for jobs in medical marijuana dispensaries.

And, before anyone thinks this industry is merely a pipe dream, employment opportunities for this new field are growing as fast as, well, weeds. National and international brands are making, including Anheuser-Busch InBev, Constellation Brands, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Molson Coors Brewing—and even Estée Lauder, which has launched a line of beauty products containing cannabis.

Lately, there has been much discussion about water-soluble technology in the cannabis industry. Many companies, eager to convey a transformative milestone to the public, are announcing that they’ve developed their own water-soluble technology. Unfortunately for consumers, many of these claims are premature.

The technology being claimed is, in the vast majority of cases, a nanoemulsion. Put simply, a nanoemulsion is created when an oil is combined with functional ingredients and then blasted with energy, causing the oil particles to split into smaller pieces. When the particles are made small enough, it looks like they dissolve in water (they become “water compatible”). 

Nanoemulsions have incredibly useful applications – particularly in the cannabis industry where they solve key issues that plague derivative products. A well-made nanoemulsion will allow uniform dispersion of cannabis oils into water-based products such as beverages, gummies and some topicals. It will also increase the absorption, and reduce the onset time, of THC’s psychotropic effects. The problem, though, lies in whether a given nanoemulsion is actually commercially viable.

Just as you do when you’re thinking of buying a new vehicle, you need to ask questions about how well a nanoemulsion performs. There are a number of things you absolutely have to understand about a nanoemulsion before you can know whether it will actually work in your derivative product:

• Particle size, the type of testing used in measuring size: the ‘by volume’ test is far more optimistic, and less useful, than the ‘dynamic light scattering’ test
• Temperature stability
• pH stability
• Stability in the presence of artificial sweeteners
• The rate at which the active ingredient (e.g. THC) degrades

For example, if a nanoemulsion becomes unstable when used to infuse a citric drink like a lemonade, the oil particles will start to agglomerate, leaving the consumer with a drink that has an oil slick on top and no real reduction in onset time. This type of separation can be seen regularly in nanoemulsions that don’t have broad pH stability.

Another problem regularly encountered by nanoemulsion producers is instability caused by the introduction of artificial sweeteners as part of taste masking. Masking the bitter flavor of nanoemulsions can be done, but it usually requires the use of additives that can destabilize the end product, resulting in a cloudy appearance and eliminating the reduction in onset time. These are just two of many variables that can completely destroy the upside presented by a nanoemulsion. Creating a nanoemulsion solution that can handle all of the destabilizing conditions that are encountered as part of creating and manufacturing a commercially viable product is very difficult.

A leader in this field, Axiomm Technologies, has a nanoemulsion formulation that addresses all of these issues, making it a truly turnkey solution for businesses who want to incorporate this nanotechnology into their products. It has taken a complicated chemistry and engineering problem and reduced it to an easy process that anyone can do using Axiomm’s all-in-one nanoemulsion precursor, µGOO. Having partnered with Qsonica, a market leader in the design, development and manufacture of ultrasonic liquid processors, Axiomm is dedicated to removing the need for businesses to engage in expensive, time-consuming R&D efforts – with no guarantee of success – allowing them to instead focus on other key aspects of their business.

µGOO is a revolutionary precursor technology that enables anyone to produce a consistently best-in-class nanoemulsion. It is compatible with a wide range of inputs and purities and allows users to create a consistently best-in-class nanoemulsion with robust temperature stability, broad pH stability, stability in the presence of artificial sweeteners and minimal active ingredient degradation (less than 2% per month at room temperature, 0.8% per month when refrigerated).

More information on Axiomm and µGOO, including a step-by-step video on how to make a nanoemulsion, can be found at www.axiomm.com.