Cannabis: What’s In a Name?
Marijuana, ganja, pot or weed. Pick your favorite shopping tag. Add some new trade names and that list has grown to over 1,000 sub-terms and variations. So, what’s in a name? As the cannabis industry flexes to go global, it is still rigorously constricted by “within-borders” controls. Legalization policies are flowering in countries around the world. Yet, to date, under current international laws, beware of crossing any borders and importing or exporting your product. Invisible lines are still, hard borders.
Current international law indicates that cultivation, supply and possession of cannabis should be permitted for ‘medical and scientific purposes’ only. Permitted. That is a large expanse of dangerous grey area for any budding international market.
Despite internal changes in individual countries and several states in the US, the overall legal view is still that possession of marijuana, the “drug” is a crime, and many countries continue to label and prosecute it as such. Therein, as always, lies the legal dilemma. Shakespeare may have noted that “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” but when it comes to legal jargon, that rose, or in this case, that “bud” needs to be very clearly defined as to what it is. Medical or, recreational. Legally, we can’t have our cake and eat (or smoke) it too.
Financial greed and incremental scientific developments in the cannabis industry are seducing governments towards a more lenient view. Several jurisdictions are rapidly reducing penalties for “personal use” of “medical” cannabis yet policy discussions remain complicated with conflicting claims on where to draw the line and define “medical” vs “recreational” marijuana. In the legal arena this is the fundamental platform needed to regulate a product in an open market. History has done its best to avoid the issue in some countries, by tolerating discretionary use. A “Three Monkey” policy of “see no evil”. The Netherlands and California are classic examples. ‘Medical marijuana’ was legalized by popular vote in California, in 1996, for treating chronic pain. As there is no standard way to determine individual thresholds of pain, the hear no evil” Monkey stepped into play.
Monkey Number 3 trailed in via the criminal codes. Terms such as; de-criminalization, de-penalization, and ‘legalization’ are bywords in the raging drug policy debate. De-penalization means it is Still a criminal offence, but generally, no longer punished as such. De-criminalization is when an offence gets reclassified from criminal to non-criminal. It is still an offence which can be punished via police or other government agencies. (Read that as, Feds vs States). Then there is; Legalization, moving from a previously prohibited behavior (criminal or not) to becoming a permitted behavior. The details remain, blurry.
EU Member States tend to treat the possession of marijuana as an offence, if it is for personal use. Over half of the countries do not allow prison as a penalty for minor offences. Compare that to the US and it explains a lot about legal and penal perceptions.
National EU governments are supportive of legalization of cannabis sales for recreational use but the caveat is they also have hefty prison sentences for illegal supply. I hear you. If supply is illegal, how does it get to the customer? And, what is defined as a “legal” supply? Clear as mud. Welcome to the world of cannabis.
Some clever jokers in a few EU countries grouped together to create “cannabis social clubs”. Their fuzzy logic insists that, in theory, if growing one cannabis plant is ok for personal use, then 20 plants together should be ok for a club of 20 people. There is some vestige of logic there…To date however, the EU has resisted this social experiment. Back in the day, (2015), the Spanish Supreme Court firmly laid out that “organized, institutionalized and persistent cultivation and distribution of cannabis among an association open to new members is considered drug trafficking’. Ouch.
Right now, Germany, Italy, and Denmark remain the progressive leaders of the pack in trying to set relatively clear policies. It’s a toss- up between Germany and Denmark on which model the rest will follow. Most EU countries tend to focus on flower and oil, except for France and the U.K. who are trending towards pharmaceuticals.
On the market side, in the EU, 5 companies in the cannabis industry are looking to possibly go public in 2020. Slow and steady vs the madness that introduced “pot-stocks” in the USA. Listings of cannabis firms in Europe remain rare due to patchwork policies regarding medical vs recreational definitions yet show a more deliberate projection for future business sustainability.
The upcoming March session of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), may bring some level of clarity and enable policies and, business to move forward. A fundamental change would be a removal of cannabis from the Schedule IV of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961). Drug trafficking turns business model.
Should this happen, the next stage will have to be, finding a name for all of those roses in the cannabis bouquet. If we can name over 150 species of roses and thousands of hybrids, I firmly believe we have the potential to handle this challenge. Shakespeare, what say you?…
Originally Published: January 2020
