When many people hear the words ‘cannabis industry’ they often think of a utopian world where legalization in America applies to everyone and nobody will ever go to jail for growing, possessing, or selling cannabis.
While this may be true for the ultra rich capitalist class of people in America who can afford to pay over a million dollars for a legal cannabis license, it is not true for the majority of us hard working Americans who just want to put some food on our table and smoke a joint or take a dab after a long day of work.
As an activist in Colorado, I learned some interesting things that you won’t see in High Times, NowThis, or any other for-profit corporate media conglomerate. They are only interested in getting money from their rich sponsors, who are only interested in numbers of viewers. The more eyeballs, the more the media company can charge advertisers. This is why they publish sensationalist viral garbage over and over, they seek to appeal to the lowest common denominator and will promote any company who gives them money to do so.
In Colorado, We The People were able to pass a referendum that legalized cannabis for personal use and home growing. As soon as we voted on our own proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution and it passed, politicians in conjunction with cannabis business owners immediately began to roll back our progress and began stripping our newly appointed rights away with dozens of new laws, regulations, and restrictions which hurt patients and only benefited the big business cannabis companies who donated to those politicians to restrict our rights.
While a few of the more ‘daring’ or ‘independent’ media out there might slightly mention what I just described, they will NEVER talk about the main point of this article; how the cannabis industry actually stifles innovation and causes higher prices for patients.
In the capitalist world, everything hinges on one basic concept: ‘intellectual property’. Intellectual property refers to intangible property that is the result of creativity, such as patents, copyrights, etc. Capitalists use intellectual property to justify charging a higher price for their product. Typically this will be done through words and phrases along the lines of: ‘our product was created with a special formula by scientists using a very technical, very expensive machine’… When in reality this product, or one extremely similar, can be made yourself at home quite easily. The capitalist business man, who we will now refer to as the vulgar economist, does not want you to know that you can do this yourself at home because that would hurt his profits. If you can make this, he can’t make money off you buying that product or service from him. So he protects his ideas (which he learned from someone else) by strict intellectual property laws and by deceptively keeping that information from the public.
When we are talking about using cannabis for medical use, keeping vital information that can improve a patient’s outlook and life is not only immoral but is down right destructive. Let’s take the case of Charlotte’s Web, (although every company in the cannabis industry is guilty of this unless they are completely open, transparent, and show the entire process behind how and what is used to make their product).
When Charlotte’s Web came out, nearly every magazine and news station in America carried a story about it and it’s ‘miraculous health benefits’. The company did nothing special to make this product. They simply got a strain from another grower, or created their own which is not hard to do yourself. They then hid any information about what this strain was, so that patients could not grow this strain themselves. Their only option was being forced to purchase products from the vulgar economist made from the strain at the highest price the market allows. If the corporate board members instead would have released the information that ‘Charlotte’s Web’ is pretty much the same thing as the strain ‘R4’, then thousands of patients could have easily have grown this plant at home and maybe then because of the massive increase in moms and dads growing for their epileptic children maybe we could actually achieve a true legalization in America in which all prohibition laws are repealed and we can all grow, sell, and process cannabis instead of just the rich friends of politicians.