Legalisation of dagga grows
The global market for cannabis has exploded and is reaching mainstream status
THE PAST year was a 12-month champagne toast for the legal marijuana industry, as the global market exploded and cannabis pushed its way further into the financial and cultural mainstream.
Liberal California became the largest legal US marketplace, while conservative Utah and Oklahoma embraced medical marijuana.
US drug regulators approved the first marijuana-based pharmaceutical to treat children with a form of epilepsy and billions of investment dollars poured into cannabis companies.
Even main street brands like CocaCola said they were considering joining the party.
“I have been working on this for decades and this was the year that the movement crested,” said US Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat working to overturn the federal ban on pot.
“It’s clear that this is all coming to a head.”
With buzz building across the globe, the momentum will continue into 2019.
Luxembourg is poised to become the first European country to legalise recreational marijuana and in South Africa, the country’s apex court decriminalised the possession, consumption and private cultivation of the herb at home.
Thailand legalised medicinal use of marijuana on Tuesday and other south-eastern Asian countries may follow South Korea’s lead in legalising cannabidiol, or CBD.
It’s a non-psychoactive compound found in marijuana and hemp plants and is used for treatment of certain medical problems.
Legal marijuana was a R150 billion industry in the US this year with a quarter of a million jobs devoted just to the handling of marijuana plants, said Beau Whitney, vice-president and senior economist at New Frontier Data, a leading cannabis market research and data analysis firm.
There were many other jobs that didn’t involve direct work with the plants, but they were harder to quantify, Whitney said.
With all its success, the US marijuana industry continues to be undercut by a robust black market and a federal law that treats marijuana as a controlled substance like heroin.
Financial institutions are skittish about cannabis businesses, even in American states where they are legal, and until recently investors have been reluctant to put their money behind pot.
Marijuana businesses can’t deduct their business expenses on their federal taxes and face huge challenges getting insurance and finding real estate for their brick-and-mortar operations. |