It’s Wednesday, August 11 and TRICHOMES.com is bringing you the top cannabis news from around the web. You can also listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify–search TRICHOMES and subscribe!
First up: A member of the board of directors for a medicinal cannabis company in the state of Georgia is a former leader of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Tom Price, who worked as Secretary of Health and Human Services under former President Donald Trump for seven months until stepping down in the wake of denunciation over spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs, is registered as a board member of Botanical Sciences, LLC, one of six cannabis companies that received permits under Georgia’s narrow medical cannabis system last month.
Price’s engagement in the sector is noteworthy in and of itself, as a former congressperson who consistently voted against cannabis policy reform. They voted six times against changes to funding legislation that would merely protect state medicinal cannabis systems from federal meddling by the Department of Justice. Despite their objections, such safeguards were successfully established.
They also voted thrice against budget bills that would have allowed doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs to suggest medical cannabis to military veterans. Furthermore, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, they had the authority to start steps to publicly acknowledge cannabis’s medical use and reschedule it under federal statute, which they opted not to do. Now they appear to be a part of a sector that generates billions of dollars in revenue annually.
Next up: Activists in the state of Nebraska this week presented a new plan for legalizing medicinal cannabis through voter measures next year, declaring that they will aim to qualify two complementing proposals on the 2022 state ballot.
The dual method is intended to prevent violating the state’s single-issue requirement for voter measures, which prompted the state Supreme Court to disqualify a medical cannabis legalization proposal that was meant to be on the 2020 general election ballot. This session, a different attempt in the legislature faltered when backers were unable to assemble adequate votes to override a Republican filibuster.
Following that, Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana announced that it was working on a number of ballot measures, as well as a very brief constitutional amendment that would clearly state that “people in the state of Nebraska shall have the right to cannabis in all its forms for medical purposes.”
However, the organization now says it will abandon that wording in pursuit of two distinct statutory measures that will “work in unison.” One would mandate legislators to enact laws creating legal safeguards for patients and physicians when it comes to cannabis, and the other would mandate legislators to enact laws permitting private businesses to manufacture and distribute medical cannabis goods.
Last up: As per a recent analysis, legal cannabis purchases in numerous U.S. states hit record levels in 2020 as COVID-19 spread through the country. Purchases in the four states studied, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, ”have increased more during the COVID-19 pandemic than in the previous two years,” according to the study.
A team of health analysts obtained pre-tax cannabis sales figures from state regulatory bodies and evaluated the statistics over time in this study. It discovered that, despite stay-at-home directives wreaking havoc on other major industries, cannabis purchases accelerated.
“Findings show a general increase in cannabis sales following stay-at-home orders issued in AK, CO, OR, and WA in late March 2020. In all four states, those increases were greater than the percent increases observed in the preceding two years,” reads the report, which was published last week in the International Journal of Drug Policy.
While the researchers didn’t try to pinpoint why sales were up, they postulated that it could be due to various considerations, including rising cannabis consumption among people dealing with stress, stay-at-home orders driving customers away from the black market and into certified shops, potential price hikes due to increased demand and/or the purchase of more pricey cannabis items.
