Cannabis and International Trade CLE: Join us December 1st!

Register here!

We are excited to announce that Harris Bricken lawyers Adams Lee, Fred Rocafort and Vince Sliwoski will present on Cannabis and International Trade on Thursday, December 1 from 12pm to 1pm EST. This presentation is hosted by the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America (NCBFAA) by and through the NCBFAA Educational Institute (NEI).

Below is summary description of the panel put together by NEI:

Join our panel of experts in cannabis and international trade law to discuss topics on the current and future status of international trade of cannabis. Attorneys from Harris Bricken will provide an overview of the legal landscape on cannabis, and update which countries are the latest to legalize some form of cannabis. We’ll discuss developments in U.S. federal legalization of hemp, hemp-derived products, and marijuana. If (or when) marijuana is legally allowed to be traded across international borders, we’ll discuss how international trade issues will likely affect the development of the cannabis industry. Trade agreements like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) could be used to create a North American cannabis industry. However, trade laws are often used to protect domestic industries from import competition. Trade wars could break out to block cannabis imports, particularly where the cannabis industries in different countries are at different stages of development. We’ll discuss current U.S. regulatory issues affecting the import and export of cannabis, hemp, and CBD products. Our panelists will discuss a range of practical and legal issues related to the importation of cannabis products. A recent ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade may open the door for the importation of certain products that had previously been prohibited as drug paraphernalia – but the issue remains unsettled meaning importers must continue to proceed with utmost caution.  Finally, we’ll discuss the various intellectual property issues affecting cross-border shipments of cannabis-related products.

Register here!

In the meantime, for more on cannabis and international trade by Adams, Fred, Vince and others here at the Canna Law Blog, check out the following:

• Notes on the International Cannabis Trade
• The International Cannabis Trade: Webinar Video Replay
• USMCA and Cannabis Trade
• How to Export Medical Cannabis Internationally
• International Cannabis: Selling Worldwide
• U.S. Cannabis and International Trade: Never the Twain Shall Meet?
• International Cannabis: Breaking the Law, Staying Honest
• Should You Import Hemp to the United States?
• International Cannabis: Guidance for Companies Entering the U.S. Market
• International Cannabis Continues to Look to the U.S. Market
• As China’s Hemp Industry Suffers, U.S. Hemp Growers Prepare to Pounce
• What to Consider Before Entering the European CBD Market
• Border Woes: Transporting CBD into Canada is Not OK
• Cannabis and International Trade: Don’t Ignore the U.S.–China Trade War
• Will China Really Buy More U.S. Hemp? There is No Guarantee
• Cannabis, Tariffs and Vaping Imports from China
• Cannabis Legalization Roundup: Mexico, Luxembourg, Switzerland
• The World Trade Organization and Cannabis

The post Cannabis and International Trade CLE: Join us December 1st! appeared first on Harris Bricken Sliwoski LLP.

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Cops May Soon Be Able To Scan Your Eyeballs To See if You’re Driving Stoned

A Montana-based company called Gaize has developed a device which can scan the user’s eye and utilize crazy futuristic robot intelligence to detect THC impairment.

According to the company’s founder, Ken Fichtler, American law enforcement agencies have already agreed to use the technology, though he could not specify which ones. 

“I’ll preface all of this by saying I am pro cannabis. I’m pro cannabis legalization. I’m doing this because I see a distinct need at the federal level to have some product to detect impairment so we can keep roads safe,” Fichtler said.

The device is akin to a virtual reality headset of sorts that a police officer would hypothetically place on the head of a driver suspected of reefer smoking. It shrouds the suspect in darkness for a few moments before shining a bright light to electronically scan the movement of the suspect’s eyeballs.

“The eyes are the window to the soul. The eyes offer a remarkably clear picture into the mental state of a person. They’re full of involuntary micro-movements and reflex responses that transmit information about someone’s impairment or sobriety,” the Gaize website states.

According to Fichtler, the scan cannot be used as evidence in court, much like a traditional breathalyzer, but police officers can use it in the field if they suspect someone is high so as to take their own bias or out of the equation completely. Gaize cannot yet quantify impairment like a traditional breathalyzer does, but it can essentially indicate if the person is intoxicated enough for their eye to respond to stimulus differently than it normally would.

“You can’t simply measure THC and say, ‘Yeah, okay, this guy’s high because he’s got five nanograms of THC in his body,’ right? It just doesn’t work that way,” Fichtler said. “What we’re doing is actually directly measuring how impairment manifests in the body, which I think is a much more rational, measured and fair path forward.”

Fichtler said the test is based on several different studies which have spanned the last 40 years, including a 350-participant clinical trial Gaize conducted themselves. A cursory search of “how cannabis affects eye movement” does indeed show several peer-reviewed studies on the matter dating back to at least 1979. As with most scientific studies there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation or error but try as I might I could not find much to dispute the science behind this technology. It turns out eyeballs are just dirty little snitches that will sell stoners out at every turn.

“There’s a lot of changes that happen and a lot of them happen at a scale that a human couldn’t necessarily see unless they were looking really close or even using a magnifying glass or something. Our product is sensitive enough that we can detect these really minute changes,” Fichtler said.

Fichtler did make a point of saying Gaize will not be selling the technology arbitrarily to be used for nefarious purposes but if you work a dangerous job or like to get high on your morning commute, you may find yourself staring into the bright light of a Gaize headset soon. 

Fichtler was not able to provide High Times with an estimated date that law enforcement agencies might begin to roll out the use of these headsets but for what it’s worth he seemed to speak with the voice of a man who had signed one or more non-disclosure agreements, rather than a man waiting for orders to start coming in.

“It’s being evaluated by some really high profile departments,” Fichtler said. “They haven’t all adopted it yet, but some have. My hope is that within a couple of years, maybe this is sort of standard practice.”

The post Cops May Soon Be Able To Scan Your Eyeballs To See if You’re Driving Stoned appeared first on High Times.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the Canna Law Blog

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Delta-9 gummies from Diamond CBD are a holiday treat that ship nationwide

Last-minute gift givers & self-care procrastinators alike can rest assured that buzzy delta-9 gummies are just an online order away.

The post Delta-9 gummies from Diamond CBD are a holiday treat that ship nationwide appeared first on Leafly.

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The best NYC museums to visit after tripping or toking

Elevate your next NYC museum with a little cannabis or psychedelic pairing. You'll never see art and science the same way.

The post The best NYC museums to visit after tripping or toking appeared first on Leafly.

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Southern Illinois University Examining the Use of Cannabis for Ovarian Cancer

SIU researcher Dr. Dale “Buck” Buchanan, who is also a professor of physiology at the university, is a founding member of the Cannabis Science Center. “We started the Cannabis Science Center in … December 2018, when they took it off of the controlled substances lists and legalized use of industrial help nationwide,” said Buchanan in an interview with SIU’s college newspaper, The Daily Egyptian. “Since then there has been an amazing explosion.”

Buchanan explained that since the 2018 Farm Bill was passed, he has been interested in cannabis’s ability to treat cancer. “The vast majority of ovarian cancer research is focused toward extending what we call ‘progression-free survival,’” he added. “So it seems misguided to me that the focus of the research is on this incremental increase in life … so we’re really interested in prevention.”

Although rodents are the easiest subject to study, Buchanan notes that there is a similarity between chickens and ovarian cancer. “But the chicken is kind of counterintuitive. It gets the same ovarian cancer that women get. Women give live birth and chickens lay eggs, but the ovaries are remarkably similar and the thing that makes them so similar is the number of lifetime ovulations.”

In his observations, he’s found that Omega-three acids have natural anti-inflammatory proteins that help heal scar tissue which develops during ovulation, ultimately reducing cancerous tissue growth. “The consequence of this is that it has a 70% reduction in the severity of cancer and a 30% reduction in the incidence, and all we did was introduce flax into their diet,” he said. “But we know nothing about how it works, so that’s our work.”

This finding has led researchers such as Graduate Student Didas Roy to explore how the body’s endocannabinoid system, specifically Receptor 1, works. “So in the endocannabinoid system, there are cannabinoids produced inside our bodies … and they’re binding to specific receptors, one and two,” said Roy. “So two is not that much expressed in the ovary, but receptor one is there in high abundance, and it seems like the expression of those receptors increases in cancer.”

More specifically, Roy’s current focus is on Transforming Growth Factor ß (TGF-ß) protein, which is present in the ovaries, as well as the endocannabinoid system. “We know TGF-ß is also implicated in cancer, so we are trying to see how the both of them are related to each other, who is controlling whom and how they’re contributing to the ovarian cancer,” Roy added. “TGF-ß is a family of many, many receptors and ligands, so I’m trying to look at all of them.”

According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 19,880 women will receive an ovarian cancer diagnosis in their lifetime [in 2022], and about 12,810 women will die from the condition. More waves of research are being conducted to further explore how cannabis can reduce suffering and even potentially save lives. In August 2019, one study examined the efficacy of CBD for treating low grade ovarian carcinoma. In September 2022, one study found that cannabis’s anti-cancer properties could help patients fight against ovarian cancer and chemotherapy resistance.

There is a growing resource of studies identifying cannabis as a beneficial treatment for many types of cancer as well. One study published in August 2022 shows how cannabis users are less likely to develop common liver cancer, or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which affects about 25,000 men and 11,000 women in the U.S. annually (and kills about 19,000 men and 9,000 women each year). Another study shows how cannabis can be beneficial to cancer patients by treating pain and reducing their reliance on opiates, which were responsible for more than 923,000 deaths in the U.S. as of 2020.

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First Medical Cannabis Crop Harvest Begins in North Carolina

According to The Charlotte Observer, the cultivation site is located in the eastern part of the state in The Qualla Boundary. In addition to beginning its first harvest on Nov. 18, the tribe also plans to open the largest medical cannabis dispensary in the state sometime in 2023, which will be located in an old building previously used for bingo. “I’m really proud of my tribe taking this step, one with the betterment of this community in mind,” said general manager of Qualla Enterprises LLC, Forrest Parker.

The cannabis business is expected to create 400 to 500 new jobs (with “several hundred” applications already received for various positions), which will increase the EBCI’s total employment number to 7,500. “Most special to me is the employment opportunity,” Parker said. “We can teach them skills they can use for the rest of their lives in what is a very well-paying industry.” Over the summer, the EBCI employed about 40 people to work on cultivation, with about 80% of them members of the tribe.

The EBCI’s Tribal Council approved Ordinance No. 539, which legalized medical cannabis on tribal land in August 2021. Far beyond the state’s progress on medical cannabis legislation, the Tribal Council saw cannabis as a benefit for medical patients. “The Council’s approval of a medical marijuana ordinance is a testament to the changing attitudes toward legal marijuana and a recognition of the growing body of evidence that supports cannabis as medicine, particularly for those with debilitating conditions like cancer and chronic pain,” said Principal Chief Richard Sneed.

According to the EBCI cannabis website, the tribe will control all aspects of production. “It all begins as a seed…and develops into the plant that is the basis to all cannabis. EBCI Farms will be the source for all of its products that are sold to the public. Everything from seed to sale begins here,” the website states. Currently, the business plans to produce cannabis flower, pre-rolls, edibles, concentrates, and topicals.

“It’s a vertical market. We have to plant it. We have to cultivate it. We have to harvest it. We have to process it. We have to package it and move through all of that network of product and get it there. It’s a lot of people,” Parker told ABC13 News.

The ECBI also has its own Cannabis Control Board, which consists of five healthcare and law enforcement experts, to manage the tribe’s cannabis regulations. Current rules dictate that non-tribe members may purchase up to one ounce of cannabis per day, but not to exceed more than six ounces in a month. This also extends to a limit of 2,500 milligrams of THC in products per day, but not more than 10,000 milligrams in a month.

The New York-based Oneida Indian Nation announced in September that it would launch a seed-to-sale cannabis business sometime in 2023. Also in New York, the Saint Regis (Akwesasne) Mohawk Tribe partnered with actor Jim Belushi to open a dispensary on Oct. 27, called Belushi’s Farm Akwesasne.

Additionally, the Seneca Nation of Indians announced that its building a cannabis dispensary in the city of Niagara Falls, New York, which is slated to open in February 2023 as well. “After extensive research and planning, the Seneca Nation is excited to create a new, Nation-owned business in the growing and competitive cannabis market,” said Seneca Nation President Rickey Armstrong Sr.

There are many tribe-owned and operated cannabis dispensaries throughout the country already, including Mountain Source Santa Ysabel operated by the Iipay Nation Tribe (located northeast of San Diego), to the Paiute-owned NuWu Cannabis Marketplace in Nevada, and the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe’s Joint Rivers dispensary in Washington State.

The Indigenous Cannabis Industry Association (ICIA) hosted the National Indigenous Cannabis Policy Summit on Nov. 15-16 in Washington, D.C., which covered a variety of topics in relation to create solutions to common challenges that tribes face in the industry. “The Summit brings together Tribal leaders, elected and government officials, business, healthcare, veterans groups, and advocacy organizations to provide solutions to the most pressing challenges and opportunities growing for Indian Country,” the event website states.

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