Latest Marijuana/Cannabis Stunning and amazing facts you need to know to STAY CURRENT — from NYCBD with Jeffrey Hill
By: Jeffrey Hill
Tags: Medical Marijuana, Jeffreyhill, Marijuana, Marijuana Legalization, Cannabis

Latest Marijuana/Cannabis Stunning and amazing facts you need to know to STAY CURRENT — from NYCBD with Jeffrey Hill jeffrey hill Dec 14, 2019·6 min read

The Category is growing exponentially. I hope this is helpful

STUNNER #1 — California marijuana tax hike puts future of legal market in spotlight amid worries over state industry’s viability

Flurries of meetings and negotiations have occurred behind the scenes in Sacramento since California announced a cannabis tax increase last month.

The state made $345MM Cannabis taxes in 2018 with over 55,000 full time jobs and revenue of approximately $3 Billion.

But like all new sources of income the state wants more….will it kill this new industry and push it more to the black market……The stakes surrounding these discussions — all aimed at lowering the marijuana industry’s tax burden — are nothing less than the survival of the state’s legal marijuana market, according to some industry watchers.

Representatives from multiple cannabis companies and trade organizations spoke with staffers in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) and multiple state legislators with the aim of shoring up political support to lower tax burdens on legal marijuana businesses. The state made $345MM in Cannabis taxes in 2018 and is hungry for more.

Among the proposals floated were:

Asking Newsom to cancel the tax increase.

Persuading the agency to postpone the tax hike.

Discussing prospective legislative measures to either simplify state cannabis taxes, lower them or both.

“We’re trying everything we can,” said state Assembly Member Tom Lackey, a Republican from Palmdale who sponsored unsuccessful bills in 2018 and 2019 to temporarily lower California’s marijuana taxes.

Lackey said if the tax increases announced by CDTFA are allowed to stand through 2020, it would sound a “death knell” for California’s legal marijuana industry — perhaps a little dramatic, but a real issue!

STUNNER #2 — Canopy Growth Corp. said Monday it has named David Klein, currently chief financial officer at its biggest shareholder, Constellation Brands Inc., as its new chief executive, taking over from Mark Zekulin on January 14 who replaced founder and CEO Bruce Linton.

Lets see what the $7.5B Constellation brands enterprise can do for this much derided cannabis company. A firm that was showing $23billion in valuation in late April Early May. But missed projections consistently forcing management changes.

I will continue to look at this closely and report as appropriate.

STUNNER #3 —REP RO Khanna (D- CA) tweeted, “ 663,367 were arrested for cannabis only offenses which compares to the total. incarcerated population in 1988: of 627,402.

Lets think about that for a minute. 33 states medicinally legal 11 states adult use legal and yet we are still arresting people for mmj only offenses to the tune of 663,367 in 2018. Assuming a cost of $50-$70K/year for the annual cost of keeping someone in our prison system. The cost to the government is roughly 33Billion. That could go a long way to helping with fixing some bridges, building schools, or even helping with our subway system here in nyc……That said, more states are moving Cannabis to a misdemeanor and expunging record of those in prison.

We will continue to watch this issue closely as it develops.

STUNNER #4 — People Are Skipping Sleep Aids In Favor of Marijuana- Several Studies Report

The scientific community is still unclear on whether or not marijuana can actually help treat sleep disturbances such as insomnia. A new study, however, found that fewer people purchase over-the-counter (OTC) sleep medications when they have legal access to cannabis.

“Our results show that the market share growth for sleep aids shrank with the entry of recreational cannabis dispensaries by more than 200% relative to the mean market share growth in our sample, and the strength of the association increased with each subsequent dispensary,” the paper, published in the December edition of Complementary Therapies in Medicine, concludes. “In particular, cannabis appears to compete favorably with OTC sleep aids, especially those containing Diphenhydramine and Doxylamine, which constitute 87.4% of the market for OTC sleep aids.”

Researchers at the University of New Mexico and California State Polytechnic University used retail scanner data collected by the Nielsen Company to help them understand how access to recreational marijuana affected the sales of OTC sleep medications purchased at local stores in Colorado.

A regression model showed that sleep aid market share growth decreased by 236 percent after a dispensary entered the market, and this negative association increased as the number of dispensaries grew.

“For the first time, we show a statistically significant negative association between recreational access to cannabis and OTC sleep aid sales. “Our results are consistent with evidence that legal access to medical cannabis is associated with reductions in Scheduled II-V prescription medications (e.g., opioids and sedatives), many of which may be used in part as sleep aids,” the authors wrote.

STUNNER #5 — A federal health agency hosted a leading psychedelics researcher for an event focused on the therapeutic potential of controlled substances such as Psilocybin and DMT.

Roland Griffiths, who has spent decades studying various entheogenic plants and fungi, described the existing scientific literature and future research objectives during a speech organized by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The discussion, titled “Psilocybin: History, Neuropharmacology, and Implications for Therapeutics,” went over studies on the impact of psychedelics on mental health conditions such as depression and substance misuse, He also explained how research has shown that the medically supervised administration of moderate to high doses of psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, “can produce substantial and enduring decreases in depressive mood.”

Throughout the presentation, the researcher, who heads Johns Hopkins University’s newly launched Center for Psychedelic Research, stressed the need for further studies, stating that if there’s “opportunity to do any level of analysis” on psychedelics, it should be pursued.

While federal agencies have largely avoided broad drug policy reform issues, there seems to be growing willingness to entertain conversations about psychedelics, as a decriminalization movement spreads nationwide.

STUNNER # 6 — People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who consume marijuana experience significantly fewer depressive episodes and lower rates of suicidal ideation compared to non-users, according to a new study.

The research, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology analyzed nationally representative health data from Statistics Canada’s Community Health Survey and found that people with PTSD who have not reported past-year marijuana use are much more likely to have suicidal thoughts and go through depressive phases.

Among the more than 24,000 people who were eligible for the study, with was conducted by researchers at the the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use and University of British Columbia, 420 were clinically diagnosed with PTSD. Of those, (28.2 percent) said they used cannabis in the past year. That’s markedly higher than the average of those who don’t have PTSD at only 11.2 percent

“We know that with limited treatment options for PTSD, many patients have taken to medicating with cannabis to alleviate their symptoms,” Stephanie Lake, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “However, this is the first time that results from a nationally representative survey have shown the potential benefits of treating the disorder with cannabis”

Those suffering from PTSD who didn’t report past-year cannabis usewere about seven times as likely to have experienced a recent major depressive episode, the study found. They were also 4.3 times as likely to have contemplated suicide.

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