In this compelling episode of Cognitive Liberty, I talk with Daniel Louis Crumpton about CannaSense. We discuss the growing movement to legalize cannabis in the United States, the law enforcement conundrum between state and federal government, educating and overcoming the stereotype of marijuana, and finally, the medicinal use of cannabis and the testimonials to support it.
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WATCH THIS GREAT SHOW BELOW INTRO ARTICLE
Is Big Pharma Taking Over Big Marijuana?
By Cognitive Liberty Host: Clyde Lewis
Although there is a growing movement to legalize cannabis in the United States, most elected officials have opposed legalization efforts in their states. But once voters have spoken, those elected officials don’t want federal officials cracking down on a product that is legal under state law, though still illegal at the federal level.
And the marijuana industry is a boon for state economies, with legal marijuana sales over $1 billion in Colorado last year.
Marijuana legalization proponents still cling to comments President Trump made during the campaign, when he pledged to leave regulation up to the states.
So the fate of legal cannabis under Trump in any state, and on a federal level is as cloudy as a college dorm at twenty minutes after four on April 20th.
Now, there is another threat to marijuana, especially to growers and consumers and that of course, is a conspiracy to create “Big Marijuana,” that is Marijuana that will be hijacked by “Big Pharma.”
It’s hard to have a discussion about marijuana policy that doesn’t become a discussion about the big rumors about “Big Marijuana.”
Any discussion of “Big Marijuana” is tossed about so freely and flippantly that it has come to be a catch-all moniker with no consistent meaning, except inasmuch as it is consistently a pejorative.
Even the idea of a takeover of “Big Pharma” creating “Big Marijuana” takes the fun out of any 420 celebration, but it most certainly needs to be discussed.
The reason is simple – anything Big Pharma touches becomes a for profit boondoggle where the cannabis industry could fall under the control of a few macro-corporations that create substantial social costs while hiding critical information from the public and manipulating and deceiving regulators.
There are several reasons to hate these Big Pharma maneuvers as we have seen what Big Tobacco does with their consumers.
Just thinking about the move conjures up images of greedy corporations capitalizing on heavy users, luring minors to use it, and generally developing products that ride roughshod on the public interest that put profits before public health.
Pharmaceutical companies compartmentalizing cannabis will bulldoze over the work of small operators and, with them, the social ideals of the marijuana counterculture.
If Big Pharma gets its hands on cannabis, we may see the same thing happen and this is worrisome.
Monsanto now appears to be developing genetically modified (GMO) forms of cannabis, with the intent of cornering the market with patented GMO seeds just as it did with GMO corn and GMO soybeans. For that, the plant would need to be legalized but still tightly enough controlled that it could be captured by big corporate interests. Competition could be suppressed by limiting access to homegrown marijuana; bringing production, sale and use within monitored and regulated industry guidelines; and legislating a definition of industrial hemp as a plant having such low psychoactivity that only GMO versions qualify.
Those are the sorts of conditions that critics have found buried in the fine print of the latest initiatives for cannabis legalization.
Patients who use the cannabis plant in large quantities to heal serious diseases find that the natural plant grown organically in sunlight is far more effective than hothouse plants or pharmaceutical cannabis derivatives.
The next stage in continuing control of cannabis is in the regulation, licensing and taxation of cannabis cultivation and use through the only practical means available to the corporate system, which is through genetic engineering and patenting of the cannabis genome.
Even if the Feds legalized cannabis tomorrow, a Bayer-Monsanto mega-corporation probably won’t result in any retail cannabis products for some time. It’s true that Bayer has already partnered with pharmaceutical firms that are doing trials of cannabis drugs. Also, Monsanto may be less than candid when it says it hasn’t yet tinkered with cannabis’s genetics.
But however far along their respective cannabis research efforts are, turning research into commercial product takes years, especially in a market as heavily regulated and politically fragmented as cannabis will continue to be.
When it comes to the rise of Big Marijuana, a Bayer-Monsanto merger would merely add to a process that is already well underway. The seed and drug industries are hardly the first mainstream sectors to try to colonize cannabis.
Since the start of state legalization, nearly every outside industry with conceivable cannabis play; tobacco of course, but also food and beverage, clothing, health and wellness, tourism, and Silicon Valley venture capital, has been scrambling to bring the cannabis sector out of the margins and into the mainstream.
More to the point, as the cannabis community itself has matured, it has been moving incrementally toward a business model that, if one didn’t know better, looks surprisingly corporate.
Some day, marijuana users will look back at the good old days and ask themselves why they even allowed the market to create a Frankenweed corporate monster.
Watch this informative discussion …
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Find out more about Daniel Louis Crumpton, or visit him at …
Website: DownLoadedContent.com
Facebook: Daniel Louis Crumpton
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About the host: Clyde Lewis continues a decades long endeavor to get the truth out via many forms of media with his latest Project Cognitive Liberty on TLBTV.
He has appeared in a SHOWTIME special with magicians Penn & Teller, as well as the television programs Sightings, Strange Universe and the Discovery Channel special Return to the Bermuda Triangle. He has been published in both UFO Magazine and Unknown Magazine, and has been featured in Rolling Stone. Lewis is the model for characters in such books as Safe House by Andrew Vachss, Supernatural Law by Batton Lash, and Alien Invasion by Michael Tresca.
A fan of B-horror and science-fiction movies, comic books and mythology, Lewis has also published his own fanzines and co-written scripts for television and radio. He appeared in the movies Nightfall, which he co-wrote with director Kevin Delullo; Cage in Box Elder; and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger Part IV, in which he provided the voice of the title character.
You can find out more about Clyde and contact him HERE
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