Canadian weed companies have their eye on a massive prize: the lucrative medical and adult cannabis markets that are emerging around the world. Much of the hype around corporate cannabis is linked to the acquisition of lands and smaller growing operations internationally. The selling point is that cannabis can be grown overseas and exported to meet demand in Canada (and eventually the US), but also that Canadian companies position themselves as suppliers in emerging local markets. Lobbying to impact national legislation, supporting criminalization of traditional producers, and moving into remote territories with plans to implement plantation style economies are just some of the critiqued practices of Canada’s emerging cannabis sector.

The cannabis industry’s moral challenge is to ensure the groups who have suffered the most under the drug war can participate in the green rush and enjoy the spoils of legalization. Marijuana insiders often refer to the “cannabis space” – a term broad enough to include a social justice movement and unapologetic capitalism – and recognize no contradiction between them. For growers who operated in California’s gray and illegal markets and now want to transition into the legal market, the economics can be brutal. In the illegal market, an Emerald Triangle farmer might have sold a pound for $3,000 tax-free. Now the price is more like $600, before taxes and compliance related costs. (See also: High stakes: cannabis capitalists seek funds to drive drug trade)

The rally at the state capitol on April 20, the unofficial holiday for pot aficionados, brought out green-wigged supporters ringed in wisps of smoke. These days, they are far from the only people advocating for the legalization of marijuana. Black Lives Matter activists, who are seeking business opportunities for minority communities and say they have been hit hard by drug laws, joined the Hartford rally, as did labor organizers who want to see the industry unionized. More broadly, cannabis companies, banks and new marijuana trade organizations are deploying platoons of lobbyists to state capitals and Washington, D.C., to help shape the ground rules for the industry as more states legalize use, and as Congress weighs measures that could further legitimize the market.

Many African states that persecuted citizens for cannabis related offences for years are now promoting legal cannabis production. Over the past five years 10 countries have passed laws to legalise production for medical and scientific purposes. These include Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, Eswatini, Rwanda and Morocco. South Africa has also legalised the private growing of cannabis plants by adults for their own personal consumption. The cannabis policy liberalisation in Africa has been brought about by two main factors. One is the lobbying by local activists. Cannabis use is still criminalised in most African countries. The other factor is the emergence of the global legal cannabis industry projected to grow to nearly US$200 billion by 2028.

Significant policy shifts have led to an unprecedented boom in medical cannabis markets, while a growing number of countries are moving towards the legal regulation of adult non-medical use. This trend is likely to bring a range of benefits. Yet there are growing concerns over the many for-profit cannabis companies from the global North that are aggressively competing to capture the licit spaces now opening in the multibillion-dollar global cannabis market. This threatens to push small-scale traditional farmers from the global South out of the emerging legal markets.

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Finance minister Tito Mboweni expects the newly legal cannabis industry to pour an estimated R4 billion into the government’s dwindling tax coffers while simultaneously unlocking the country’s stagnant rural economy, he said in a tweet earlier this year. But will this potential windfall benefit ordinary people? Many South Africans are excited about the opportunities presented by this new market, since the Constitutional Court decriminalised the use, possession, and cultivation of the plant for private and personal consumption in September 2018. But there is a strict and costly bureaucratic red tape preventing most people from penetrating it.

Congressional Democratic leaders filed a marijuana legalization bill last week aimed at remedying the injustices of the drug war. But my experience as a regulator overseeing the implementation of Massachusetts’s effort to end marijuana prohibition tells me that without stronger measures, their plans will fall short of that worthy goal. In every state that has attempted to equitably legalize cannabis, big corporations quickly took over the market while those who were arrested and imprisoned under prohibition got next to nothing. We need to reverse this outcome at the federal level. But as federal lawmakers grapple with the complexities of beginning to repair the harms of the unjust war on drugs, it is critical that they study the experiences of states that have already attempted this.

The Authority for the Responsible Use of Cannabis recently held a conference where it outlined the rules for social clubs and the sale of home-grown cannabis in Malta. The conference signalled the authority’s intention to move forward after a lull of almost a year. While news that cannabis social clubs – termed “Harm Reduction” clubs in an apparent nod to civil society – will be able to register for licences as from the end of this month, doubts have been raised as to whether the guidelines laid out by the authority will follow the spirit in which the law was written. In creating a safe environment for cannabis users, the clubs to be formed under the new regulations are meant to follow a non-profit model. However, reports from the conference say it did little to allay fears of business pouncing onto a new market.

El estado de Nueva York acaba de legalizar por ley la marihuana y con ello se une a los 16 estados que permiten el consumo recreacional, la venta y distribución de la yerba entre adultos en Estados Unidos. La legalización regulariza la extensa industria del cannabis en el estado que, se anticipa, generará 3.500 millones de dólares (2.940 millones de euros) anuales en actividad económica y unos 350 millones (294 millones de euros) en ingresos fiscales que aliviarán las arcas estatales en la decaída era del covid. Parte del dinero se destinará a programas sociales para las comunidades negras e hispanas. La nueva legislación legaliza el uso recreativo de la marihuana a partir de los 21 años y, como no podría ser de otro modo, incluye programas de equidad social.

El programa piloto de Países Bajos para producir cannabis legal que abastezca a los coffeeshops está siendo el objetivo de numerosos inversores extranjeros. Aunque todavía no se ha iniciado ningún cultivo, las empresas que han conseguido alguna de las licencias para participar han recibido ofertas millonarias y muchas de sus acciones ahora son propiedad de compañías que quieren posicionarse en el futuro mercado legal del cannabis en Europa. La entrada de inversores extranjeros en las empresas que han sido seleccionadas para el programa está retrasando su avance. (Véase también: El cannabis legal en Países Bajos tendrá que esperar a 2023)

The U.S. company Stem Holdings reported in 2019 that it had “received preliminary approval to become the only licensed growing farm and processing plant for medical cannabis and industrial hemp in The Kingdom of eSwatini for a minimum of 10 years”. The government denied any knowledge of the deal, even as the country’s health ministry, in haste, pushed to pass a cannabis bill into law. What this means is that locals who have been secretly farming cannabis for years would not be able to farm and export their crops. Cannabis growers were not consulted; neither were the many traditional leaders who govern on communal land (about 54% of the country). The House of Assembly voted against it and instructed the health ministry to conduct thorough and representative consultations.

Cam Battley believes that in the not-too-distant future, his company — one of Canada’s largest licensed producers — will be exporting a “significant chunk” of the cannabis it is growing domestically. “We have a massive market over in Europe, even in Latin America,” says Battley, chief corporate officer at Aurora Cannabis Inc. “These countries are legalizing medicinal cannabis one by one but they’re not growing as much as us. They’re going to need product, and we’ve already got the ball rolling on exporting.”  It’s a sentiment shared by other major producers that are spending tens of millions of dollars to build up international footholds with the intent of being key players in the emerging global cannabis industry. But before they can make good on those ambitions, some things will have to change.

Under the federal government’s new legal regime, for the first time in Canadian history, minors in possession of more than five grams of dried cannabis can catch criminal charges. Add that, according to the Toronto Star, people of colour are already three times as likely to be booked for cannabis crimes than white people, (despite not using it any more frequently) and, strangely, legalization could have even worse consequences for young black people. It’s evident that the stigma attached to cannabis use, which marketers are so eager to reduce and normalize, is not the same for white people as it is for black communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

King Mswati allegedly entered into a deal with Stem Holdings and manipulated provisions of the Prevention of Organized Crime Act (POCA) by unleashing police officers on dagga farmers after Parliament refused to approve the Cannabis Bill, threatening the now controversial project. Around 2018 in the midst of escalating calls to legalize dagga, local and international companies applied for a cannabis license through the Ministry of Health but Stem Holdings allegedly approached royalty through the then Minister of Economic Planning and Development Prince Sihlangusemphi, a brother to the king later appointed into a position in the army equivalent to that of Minister of Defense. (See also:MP ‘Magawugawu’ on police surveillance, faces arrest over sentiments threatening King’s dagga deals)

California’s new rules allowing marijuana cultivation favor large corporate farms despite a promise in Proposition 64 that small growers would be protected, according to a group of state lawmakers and marijuana industry leaders who called for the policy to be changed. The California Department of Food and Agriculture issued emergency rules last month that allow for small and medium-sized farms of up to a quarter acre and one acre, respectively, to get licenses for the first five years. That five-year head start for small farms was promised in Proposition 64, the initiative approved last year by voters that legalized growing and selling marijuana for recreational use.