We don’t do many things well in the UK anymore but we can still commission an article that cuts through the bullshit.
Being the Spectator I don’t much enjoy their politics or argument(s) but it does highlight an unpopular reality in the sector
Here are a few snippets from Mike Adams piece
Pharmaceutical firms have pockets deep enough to develop cannabis-derived medications and get them approved for market by the US Food and Drug Administration. The cannabis industry doesn’t have that power. It cost upwards of $1 billion for a drug producer to bring a single product to market. Weed producers are still trying to pay the IRS. At the same time, the cannabis industry doesn’t necessarily subscribe to an intermingling between namaste and narcotics. These mammoth pill-slingers don’t care. They’re not exactly known for exhibiting scruples. And they already understand how to navigate the bureaucratic red tape within the FDA’s drug approval protocol. This is all in their wheelhouse. They know what it takes to move a drug from clinical trials to raking in hundreds of billions of dollars following nationwide distribution.
Many pot advocates believe Big Pharma is intimidated by legal weed (allegedly this is why these corporations have paid off politicians all these years to impede legalisation). Considering the ridiculousness of the drug prices that some Americans are forced to pay, Big Pharma doesn’t appear to be afraid of anything except a call for increased transparency and maybe a less than favourable quarter. Some advocates think that freeing the leaf at the federal level would render their lab-produced medications useless since everyone would just opt to smoke weed for whatever ails them rather than lean on prescription drugs.
It’s a laughable argument. If cannabis truly has medicinal benefits, the pharmaceutical companies were always going to be the first to snake their way into monetising it. The timing just hasn’t been right. Once the Schedule III designation becomes official, however, they will have the chance to not only become part of the cannabis conversation but potentially take it over.
This is the moment where cannabis and capitalism finally collide. It’s a nasty narrative that cannabis advocates have wanted to prevent since Britain’s GW Pharmaceuticals became the first drug company to successfully earn FDA approval for a cannabis-derived epilepsy treatment called Epidiolex. In their mind, this is their plant and should not be tainted by Big Pharma.
If the drug companies get involved, the concept of medical marijuana will begin to look very different in the US. But would that be a bad thing? An FDA-approved cannabis medication could be prescribed by licensed physicians nationwide (even in states where pot is not legal) and distributed to every major pharmacy.
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And let’s not forget that the US government holds the patent (Patent No. 6,630,507) on cannabis compounds. We could soon see a wild boom of cannabis patents as a result of the rescheduling initiative. Who is going to hold them?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6630507B1/en
US6630507The move to make cannabis a Schedule III drug was likely part of Biden’s campaign strategy, strictly a political move to appeal to younger voters. This is often an easy demographic to bamboozle with policy changes that hold very little benefit for the average citizen.
Read the full article
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-problem-with-bidens-soft-stance-on-cannabis/
also check out his book
“Marijuana Misfit: Two Years of Terror”
