American businessman, Chase Ergen and Greek billionaire, Alki David, have formed a consortium aimed at developing the cannabis business in the Eastern Caribbean nations. The duo has disclosed plans to purchase agricultural land and partner with farmers to create a cooperative entity modeled after the ones in Switzerland. The first plane load of hemp seed for a designated parcel of land totaling 300 acres arrived in St Kitts and Nevis, but focus will also be placed on Dominica and Antigua. Ergen and David intend on reaching out to business and government leaders across the region. The cannabis initiative is expected to create thousands of jobs and will also tap into the rich cultural history and cannabis know-how of the strengthening Rastafarian movement in the region.

Howard Marks made his name in the illicit drugs trade but the late drugs baron is making a posthumous comeback to cash in on a booming legal trade in cannabis-related products. Borrowing his most famous alias, the first Mr Nice store opened in London’s Soho district on Thursday, selling everything from upmarket bath bombs and face creams to hoodies inspired by Britain’s best-known drug smuggler. Mr Nice bills itself as a “modern cannabis destination” that sells “carefully curated cannabis accessories from around the world”. Xan Morgan, the chief executive of Equinox International, the international cannabis company behind the venture, plans to launch 10 Mr Nice stores across the UK.

The entrance of Constellation Brands in the cannabis industry has broken the insulation around cannabis companies — it is now incumbent upon the industry to embrace and prepare for the forthcoming wave of disruptive entrants that are better capitalized, more mature and better recognized than existing licensed producers. The cannabis industry is on fire. The combined market cap for public companies is over C$8.5B, provincial governments are preparing for the legalization of adult-use and, given that most governments are pursuing some version of a government-led model, licensed producers are identifying and securing supply agreement opportunities to lock in market share and stabilize revenues.

The common wisdom among investors and analysts in the cannabis industry has been that bigger is better. They predict that cannabis will follow the path of alcohol after Prohibition ended in the U.S., quickly consolidating to a few major companies. Or even become like the oligopoly of tobacco. Since obtaining one of Canada’s earliest licenses for commercial cultivation of medical marijuana about five years ago, Canopy Growth had built a global weed empire. The company employed more than 2,000 people and had more than 4 million square feet of marijuana under cultivation, an 80,000-square-foot warehouse stocked to the rafters with inventory, and $78 million (U.S.) in fiscal 2018 revenue.

In the past decade, 15 states have legalized a regulated marijuana market for adults over 21, and another 17 have legalized medical marijuana. But in their rush to limit the numbers of licensed vendors and give local municipalities control of where to locate dispensaries, they created something else: A market for local corruption. Almost all the states that legalized pot either require the approval of local officials or impose a statewide limit on the number of licenses, chosen by a politically appointed oversight board, or both. These practices effectively put million-dollar decisions in the hands of relatively small-time political figures — the mayors and councilors of small towns and cities, along with the friends and supporters of politicians who appoint them to boards.

The cannabis hype is about to come face-to-face with reality. After Canada legalizes recreational marijuana on Oct. 17, it will only take a quarter or two for clear winners and losers to emerge, according to investors and analysts who follow the sector. There may only be half a dozen major players left three years after legalization. The rest “are going to be bankrupt or out of business because their business models don’t work,” Eric Paul, from Ontario-based CannTrust, said. “This industry is far more brutal than most people understand.” So what will distinguish winners from losers? A meaningful presence in Canada’s recreational market combined with exposure to the international medical market is one key factor.

The official body that's overseen the legal cannabis regulatory process in Massachusetts has given the much anticipated "commence operations" notice. It has taken two years for the Cannabis Control Commission's rollout of this rather unique model for cannabis reform. On entering one of the new cannabis stores, customers are directed to either an express line, for experienced connoisseurs, or a queue for the "full service", where a "budtender" will educate as to the effects and assorted flavours of the products. Massachusetts has placed a firm emphasis on its "social equity" programme, which is designed to ensure that people from ethnic communities – most notably black people and those with Latin backgrounds – are not excluded from the new industry.

Altria, one of the world’s biggest tobacco companies, is well on its way to also being one of the world’s biggest and most influential cannabis companies. After spending $1.8 billion to buy a stake in a multi-national cannabis company in 2018, Altria is now applying pressure in the halls of Congress and at the state level to push cannabis-friendly laws, recent filings and reporting show. Whispers of a power play from Big Tobacco to capture the cannabis industry have swirled for years in marijuana legalization and cannabis-industry circles. And now it appears to be happening, albeit slowly, out in the open, and in form similar to other big-business techniques: acquisition, intellectual property, and lobbying for friendly regulation.

There’s a hint of disappointment in Courtney Betty’s voice when he talks about the present state of Jamaica’s legal medicinal cannabis regime. “I don’t think some of the companies coming in to do business here want to understand the social realities of Jamaica, or the real history of ganja in my country,” he said from his home in the country’s capital, Kingston. “I don’t think it is out of ignorance; I think this is just the way Western companies conduct business abroad.” By “Western” companies, Betty — the chief executive officer of Jamaican medical marijuana company Timeless Herbal Care — means Canadian. Since Jamaica legalized cannabis for medicinal cultivation and sale four years ago, a slew of Canadian pot companies have flooded the tiny island nation.

California’s marijuana market, which reached an estimated $4.4 billion in sales in 2020, has seemingly reached peak cannabis capitalism. But the overwhelming sense amongst the so-called “legacy growers” is that they’re at a breaking point, exhausted by the regulations of the industry that they largely created. Protecting existing growers was a pillar of Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana for adult use. Legalization advocates included a provision to encourage legacy growers to join the legal market, promising that no cultivation site would be larger than one acre until 2023, so that small farms wouldn’t face competition from multi-acre ‘mega farms’ for at least five years. But cannabis industry lobbyists persuaded the California Department of Food and Agriculture to change the provision.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has already issued several patents for specific kinds of cannabis and for more wide-ranging “utility patents,”  but so far they’ve gone unenforced and unnoticed. Today’s legal cannabis market is worth an estimated $11 billion. That could easily double within the next few years. Imagine holding a patent that required every grower of a popular strain to pay the patent holder a licensing fee. Biotech startups and Big Ag corporations aren’t imagining—they’re planning. With federal legalization looming, some are already filing patent claims on cannabis strains. The bigger players are waiting in the wings, ready to purchase patents and claim ownership of hugely valuable DNA. (See also: Legacy growers defend their strains against a Big Ag takeover)

With Canada the largest nation to completely legalize marijuana, the world’s most valuable pot company, Canopy Growth Corp., founded in 2013 and now worth about $6.4 billion, is one of the most controversial pot companies, the embodiment of Big Marijuana that critics contend uses size, market power, and lobbying prowess to accelerate the loosening of cannabis laws around the world and shoulder out competitors and smaller businesses. Already Big Alcohol, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma have bought their way into Canopy and other marijuana companies. And, like those longstanding giants, the new cannabis corporations are spending millions of dollars lobbying for laws that let them sell large volumes of potentially addictive products.

Europe's first cannabis exchange-traded fund (ETF), the Medical Cannabis and Wellness ETF, dubbed CBSX, launched in Germany. A joint project of Purpose Investments, a Canadian asset manager, and HANetf, a British ETF platform, the fund will invest in businesses that grow, make and distribute medical cannabis products. One of the goals of the new venture is to democratise cannabis investments, which have been inaccessible (because companies are still private) or expensive (because investors must buy stocks individually). The rise of ETFs—pooled portfolios designed to replicate the performance of an asset class—has made investing cheap and easy. Marijuana ETFs have proved popular in America. And yet anyone betting on cannabis ETFs last year would have seen their money go up in smoke.

Just about everybody smokes cannabis in India. Hush, not a word to anybody. We will all be arrested. It’s a democratic, egalitarian weed loved by copywriters, doctors, designers, salesmen, delivery boys, auto-rickshaw drivers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, politicians and, of course, musicians. It’s illegal and yet its use is widespread. In Odisha, it is relatively more acceptable and easier to procure. In Varanasi, at a fancy lit fest that I was invited to, bhang balls were served to delegates on a silver platter. It was part of tradition and local hospitality, the law be damned. While the world, from Coca-Cola to Corona, appropriates our tropical plant and basically reinvents bhang, making billions in the process, we have no political, moral and judicial stand on it. We have given up all claims on what was our own for millennia.

If the federal government legalizes cannabis, lawmakers should beware of monopolization by national corporations, says Shaleen Title, chief executive of the cannabis policy think tank Parabola Center. Title authored a paper on preventing monopolies in the marijuana market, outlining how domination by big business is a threat to the existing cannabis industry. She writes that “the recent wave of market consolidation and high barriers to entry for smaller actors foreshadow a future national market controlled by only a handful of companies.” Title cautions that tobacco and alcohol companies are quietly laying the groundwork with the hope of controlling the legal cannabis market.

It started 85 years ago as a farm on Moshav Ein Iron growing peaches and avocados, but if the plans of the Israeli company Breath of Life come to fruition, it could become a major player in the world medical marijuana industry. The company, which also calls itself BOL Pharma, took a major step in that direction over the weekend when it filed for an initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in what is expected to be a company valuation of $1 billion. It’s an ambitious valuation, but BOL has made its ambitions quite clear and has put together a company with research and development capabilities, a pipeline of products and extensive growing areas.

The referendum on legalising recreational cannabis use is just over a month away. Campaigns for and against the change are well under way. We’ve had expert reports from the Helen Clark Foundation, the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research and meetings around the country to discuss the likely effects of the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill (CLCB). So, what can be learned from other countries that have already legalised cannabis or reformed their laws? And how does New Zealand’s proposed law stack up against the overseas evidence?

The Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) has joined other stock markets across the globe in bracing for the impact of the Cannabis Banking Bill, which is currently before the US Congress. Having already been passed by the US House of Representatives on September 25, the SAFE Banking Act, which now goes to the Senate, where if it is passed would lift restrictions in the US on American banks doing business with cannabis companies. As a result of this move, securities exchanges in Jamaica and around the world are considering the implications for their own economic institutions. At present, foreign-based financial institutions with US banking relationships cannot freely work with legal cannabis businesses.

Some local ganja farmers are fuming over reports that a licence has been granted to a company to import Canadian cannabis into Jamaica. Speaking inside the ‘Jamaica Cannabis Industry Forum’ WhatsApp group, President of the Jamaica Cannabis Licensed Association, Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, asked growers to figuratively “holster [their] weapons and keep [their] powder dry”, noting that the Cannabis Licensing Authority (CLA) was aware of the ire created within the local industry following the latest development. (See also: Hylton slams Hill’s ‘dubious’ claim on ganja imports | Gov't to formulate local cannabis policy following Canadian company backlash)