In a new study published in the Israeli medical journal Rambam Maimonides, researchers found that the consumption of cannabis with a rich phytochemical profile by patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was associated with a reduction in the need for conventional ADHD medication.
First reported by NORML, this cross-sectional questionnaire-based study of 59 adult patients licensed for medical cannabis treatment in Israel considered self-reported data on preferred methods of consumption, cultivator and cultivar name, as well as monthly dose.
Other parameters were also taken into account. While all patients had been diagnosed with ADHD by a physician, the study also quantified self-reported veracity of symptoms, noting either low or high scores. These scores were evaluated alongside monthly consumption rates, with 18 participants falling within a low range of 20-30 grams and 35 who consumed within a high range of 40-70 grams.
According to the data collected, both the low dose group and patients reporting lower levels of ADHD symptoms had a higher rate of stopping all ADHD medications after using cannabis. Moreover, the study discovered a correlation between low-symptom patients and lowered anxiety scores. Researchers also described an association between patients with lower ADHD scores and a higher rate of cannabinol (CBN) consumption, a cannabinoid byproduct of THC oxidation, but not THC.
These results build on previous work from 2017 where the 1:1 ratio (THC:CBD) product Sativex was found to improve hyperactivity and impulsivity in a randomized placebo-controlled experimental study published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology.
While the Israeli study acknowledged that more research is needed to fully determine if cannabis and its phytochemical components could be successfully used for ADHD management, initial findings suggest that higher-dose consumption of phytochemical-rich cannabis, specifically CBN, is linked to medication reduction and improved symptom scores. According to the report by NORML, the researchers also expressed their hope that these findings will help motivate local regulatory bodies to “consider making ADHD an approved indication for medical cannabis license” in the future.
The Green Organic Dutchman Receives Award for Leadership in Organic Farming from the Canada Organic Trade Association
As consumers become increasingly savvy about the cannabis they purchase, the certified organic segment is poised to grow in popularity.
Toronto, ON, February 20, 2020 – The Green Organic Dutchman Holdings Ltd., a leading producer of premium certified organic cannabis, is honored to announce that it has received the prestigious Leadership in Organic Farming Award from the Canada Organic Trade Association (COTA). Organic Leadership Awards are given to industry leaders who have displayed exceptional leadership through their involvement in advancing Canada’s organic sector.
As consumers become increasingly savvy about the cannabis they purchase, the certified organic segment is poised to grow in popularity. It offers a clean, safe and high-quality alternative to mass-produced options grown in rockwool or other synthetic mediums. Furthermore, market research indicates that sustainability is a key driver when making purchase decisions; consumers favour supporting environmentally responsible organizations.
“TGOD was born from a bold vision, building the global leader in certified organic cannabis. Receiving this award validates the hard work and dedication of the team at TGOD and speaks to our promise of making life better for our customers and the communities where we do business. We would like to thank COTA for recognizing our efforts and commitment to sustainable organic cultivation,” commented Brian Athaide, CEO of TGOD.
The Award recognizes TGOD’s continued commitment to organic practices through the development of additional sustainability measures, sharing of knowledge with others, and mentorship. The Company has implemented a number of key initiatives to bolster its environmental, social and governance (ESG) program.
TGOD Community Farm TGOD’s community farm grows food for donation to a local charity that not only distributes food, but also educates individuals, and provides support and financial counselling to new mothers.
Water Capture and Conservation At its two Canadian facilities, TGOD has invested in a rainwater recapture system that collects rainwater (and melting snow) from the roof, recapture basins that hold up to 5 million litres, and other areas. The Company has been able to reduce its need to draw fresh water from the local well systems.
Recyclable Packaging TGOD is committed to sourcing materials that are recycled, reusable and recyclable. The Company considers the impacts of its supply chain and the materials it uses.
Global Cannabis Partership (GCP) TGOD is a founding member of the Global Cannabis Partnership (GCP) (founded in 2018). This international initiative looks to establish worldwide corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards in the legal cannabis industry.
Reusable Living Soil TGOD’s certified organic cannabis is grown in living soil, putting the flower in charge. The living soil allows the Company to send significantly less waste to landfill as the same soil can be used for up to seven years, unlike traditional cannabis growing methods which use the inert rockwool medium and dispose of it after each harvest.
Rooted in the Community In 2019, TGOD established a volunteer group called “Rooted in the Community”—named to showcase how important it is for the Company to be an integral part of the communities where it operates. They recently participated in the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup and are working to support homeless Ontarians in the Hamilton region.
Hybrid Greenhouses TGOD’s hybrid greenhouses have been built to LEED certification standards. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is an internationally recognized rating system for green buildings.
Environmental Farm Plan In March 2018, TGOD was the first cannabis company to complete an Environmental Farm Plan (“EFP”). The EFP is a voluntary assessment used to assess 23 distinct environmental areas on the farm.
Barn Swallow Project Barn swallows are a bird species that are endangered in Ontario. To help in the swallows’ population recovery, TGOD has installed and monitored approximately one dozen nesting cups on the community farm.
A major cannabidiol (CBD) hemp processor in Pittsburgh has shuttered in the wake of plummeting pricing, leaving farmers with the all-too-familiar problem of a lack of buyers.
Commonwealth Alternative Medicinal Options (CAMO) recently closed its 45,000-square-foot CBD processing facility, TribLive reports. CAMO Chief Operating Officer Mike Moody told the outlet the company saw a 75% decrease in prices for finished products.
Those in the CBD space are familiar with this hard downward trend on pricing. In August of 2019, biomass was selling around $3.50 per percentage point of CBD content, according to pricing from PanXchange. By January of 2020, that had fallen to less than $1.
In its peak, the company employed about 25 people, TribLive reports. It grew its own hemp but also contracted with farmers to grow more. Those growers report still having thousands of pounds of unsold crops.
As prices have suffered from an oversupply of farmers rushing into the market, other processors have had similar troubles. Winchester, Ky.-based hemp processor GenCanna recently filed for bankruptcy in a move to reorganize more than $100 million in debt.
The newest addition to the Cresco team shares his plans for the company’s newly created role, which is responsible for helping the company scale without losing its product quality and consistency.
Multistate cannabis operator Cresco Labs announced last week that it had hired Greg Butler, a former marketing executive for Molson Coors, to fill the newly created position of Chief Commercial Officer and to help scale the company’s U.S. market presence.
Butler, who has a background in driving brand growth for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Walgreens, will be responsible for commercial strategic planning, bolstering Cresco’s sales and marketing teams with new talent, leading the launch of new products, and M&A strategies and integration.
Here, Butler discusses how his CPG experience will benefit him in this new role, as well as what he hopes to achieve as Cresco’s first chief commercial officer.
Cannabis Business Times: What does the new Chief Commercial Officer position entail, and what are some of your key responsibilities in this new role?
Photo courtesy of Cresco Labs
Cresco Labs Chief Commercial Officer Greg Butler
Greg Butler: [This position is responsible for] scaling how we operate, but also building the right teams [and] the right go-to-market strategy to compete in the different regions we operate in.
I oversee all of our own brands—Cresco, Mindy’s, Remedi, Reserve—and how those brands not only start to build at a national level, but also [how they] operate locally. Our retail brand, Sunnyside*, [recently launched] here in Illinois [when] Illinois went adult-use, and that brand will be rolling across our footprint, as well. [I will be] managing that brand and how that brand comes to life across all our retail stores and across states. For my team, we think about partner brands, so M&A integration, whether it’s acquiring companies, which we just concluded with Origin House in California, or other potential assets we may want to acquire. That all now sits within my team, as well as the review of what we’ve acquired and how we integrate them into Cresco Labs.
Then, it’s also commercial planning. Commercial planning is the lifeline of all big CPG [companies]. It’s the thing that tells you, what brands should you be selling? How much of those brands? How much supply is necessary to support those brands? That commercial planning function is a key component of this role, as well.
CBT: How will your background as a marketing executive with Molson Coors and other consumer packaged goods companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Walgreens benefit you in this new role with Cresco Labs?
GB: I always joke that [cannabis is] probably the one industry that I think all of my previous experiences are applicable to. Starting my career at Pfizer, I was very focused on medical marketing. How do you drive patient education and patient trust and healthcare professional trust within your brand? And in cannabis today, a big chunk of the market across multiple states is a medical patient. How medical patients and the healthcare market engage with brands is [different from] how consumers want to engage with brands when it’s for personal or recreational use.
Then, I moved into capital markets and did a lot of work advising private equity-owned companies [on] how to scale or restructure, which also is at play at Cresco Labs. We’re thinking about scale and building our business for the future.
At Molson Coors, it’s the experience of, how do you build brands that consumers love?
Cannabis is a fascinating product where, if you think about it, it’s one of the very few products where the same product is used for a medical use but also can be used by an everyday consumer for personal use. How [do] you build brands to connect with those two very different consumers who have very different needs?
CBT: How is the cannabis industry different from the other industries you’ve worked in? Is there anything that is particularly unique?
GB: The state-by-state regulations are fairly unique. The challenges we have in cannabis [are] to build not only national brands but also a national company operating within the unique specifics of state regulations. That’s different, I think, from traditional CPG. While it’s probably the most extreme version of state-by-state [regulations], it’s not that different from how states regulate the three-tier system in alcohol or how you have to think about messaging and what you can and can’t say in medical markets. So, it is unique in that we’re operating in a collection of states but adhering to the regulations of each state is not a huge challenge that CPG companies don’t see.
The second thing is that we have to constantly remind ourselves about the different consumers of cannabis. How we’ve structured our portfolio strategy is we build the occasion-based segmentation, which looks at, what are the different occasions in which cannabis is being used? What are the unique needs of those occasions, and who is the consumer of those occasions? Unlike pharmaceuticals, where it’s a prescription-led product which is being [prescribed] for a specific medical condition, cannabis can be used for a medical condition, for supporting general health and wellness, [but] cannabis can [also] be used as a personal escape—same product, very different occasions, very different consumer needs. Our jobs as marketers is to make sure these brands are designed with an understanding of who the consumer is and what they’re looking for.
CBT: What are you most excited about as you take on this new role?
GB: I think [another] component of cannabis, which I think is probably the most unique, is we’re at the very beginning of this industry. We’re thinking about where the industry needs to go, but also starting to focus on education and building trust with consumers, patients, stakeholders and customers. I think you can’t take any of that for granted. This is the very beginning. This industry is already large, it has many facets to it, but we are at the very beginning of new consumers entering cannabis, trying to understand how to use the product [and] what product is right for them. We have regulators understanding how the industry needs to be regulated. We have business stakeholders trying to figure out, how do the financials of cannabis work? So, with that level of newness comes a real impetus for us to really focus on education, transparency of our operations and building trust with all stakeholders that we engage with in a much more emphasized way than in perhaps traditional CPG where the ways of working, how to evaluate a company and how to rethink a product are already down.
Most people who consume a Miller Lite know how a Miller Lite impacts them and they know how many Miller Lites they can consume before they’re impaired, and that doesn’t exist for many consumers in cannabis today. So, how do we educate people to become more comfortable, more aware and more informed about what goes into their products is something I’m very excited about as we pioneer the next chapter of this industry.
CBT: What are some of your shorter- and longer-term goals in this new position?
GB: In the short-term, as we are scaling across states, [one goal is] ensuring that we are building the commercial backbone here at Cresco Labs to ensure that our patients and our customers have access to quality products. [We are] building that infrastructure now, as we enter California through Origin House, to ensure that we have our cars and trucks and [that our] sales teams have the right portfolio to service those customers. Here in Illinois, we are scaling our operational footprint to ensure that we are supplying the demands of this market, which is pretty unique. How do we ensure that all of our medical patients have access to products? And then how do we offer the right products to consumers who might be trying adult-use cannabis for the first time? There’s quite a big lift that we are currently undertaking to make sure that we have those operating structures and standards to ensure we are meeting those needs.
The second [goal] is to continue to build our brands. We have a portfolio of incredible brands that have all been uniquely designed for unique occasions. We’ll continue to scale those brands across the states we’re operating in.
The third [goal], now that we’re building a national retail brand under Sunnyside*, is ensuring the locations in which we rebrand [or] build a Sunnyside* deliver on the promise we made on what Sunnyside* stands for in every market where we operate.
Longer-term, I think it’s continuing to ensure that as we look at our geographical footprint, we have the most strategic footprint of any cannabis operator—that’s access to consumers and access to patients. [We are focused on] building the right infrastructure of our operations to ensure that we’re delivering products of the highest quality that are consistent and are standard across our footprint.
I think long-term, anyone who’s taking a leadership position in cannabis has to be focused on our collective goal, which is to help normalize this industry and professionalize how we operate in this industry. There are a lot of things that we’re going to be bringing to market which either help to continue to normalize cannabis use for those who want to use cannabis, and then also [to] professionalize how cannabis operators must engage with customers, consumers, government stakeholders and all community groups that are connected to the industry.
There is so much opportunity that exists for cannabis. I think so many patients and consumers are just starting to understand how this could fit into their life. I hope my addition to this industry also [offers] even more confidence to those who are looking for a career in cannabis, that it makes them really believe in where this industry can go and how exciting a job or career in this industry can be. We’ve never seen anything quite like what this industry has the potential to be. I think that the smart minds and creative minds that we can bring into this space is what’s going to drive this industry to its full potential. I’m hoping that they come to Cresco, that many more join in what we can build.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.
Georgia Considers Criminal Penalties for Hemp Possession
A bill that recently passed a state House committee would allow police to treat transporting hemp without paperwork the same as possessing marijuana.
At a time when law enforcement across the country is grappling with distinguishing hemp from tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-rich cannabis, a new bill in Georgia has proposed eliminating that problem by treating them nearly the same.
The bill, H.B. 847, would allow police in the state to arrest people for possession of small amounts of either type of cannabis. It passed the state’s House Agriculture Committee Feb. 18 and now heads to the full House for a vote, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
If passed, the bill would criminalize transporting hemp without paperwork showing it was produced under a farming or processing license—a regulation not explicitly spelled out in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) interim final rule. Violators of that rule would face up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine for possession of less than an ounce of hemp, which is the same penalty one would face in a misdemeanor marijuana charge in the state, AJC reports.
Georgia approved hemp farming last year, and its plan is currently under review by the USDA.
AJC reports at least 12 cities and counties in Georgia have passed laws reducing penalties for possession of an ounce or less of marijuana. The decriminalization may have backfired for hemp producers, though, as police around the state have since stepped forward with enforcement concerns. Hemp is nearly indistinguishable from marijuana, though several field testing kits have come online since hemp's legalization to help make that distinction.
Opponents of the bill criticize police and the state for adding criminal penalties to possessing hemp—which is legal at the federal level—instead of investing into those field tests, AJC reports.
The bill also ties in legislation that would bring Georgia into compliance with federal regulations, making it essential to pass for hemp farming to begin in the state this year.
The bill could be amended if it passes the House and makes it to the Senate, AJC reports. According to AJC’s legislative navigator tool, the bill has a 75% chance of passing.
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