Recent Cannabis Sales Analysis
According to recent sales data, marijuana continues to be popular among the public. You probably didn’t need an in-depth analysis to know that!
Specifically, and most interestingly:
Flower sales were up 30% year over year. Interestingly, concentrates were up 45% over the same period (July ’18 vs July ’19) in the same market, Nevada.
Wax had the biggest YOY growth at 88%, although it’s $1.1M in monthly sales didn’t even register as 2% of the overall market in July in Nevada.
Vape was up 48% YOY, but this is July data. The news cycles since have pounded the vaping industry, and a recent conversation with a vape supplier indicated that, not surprisingly, vaping sales are down of late.
The biggest takeaway: While flower sales continue to blossom, concentrates growth is even higher. Leave your own bad puns below!
(Thanks to BDS Analytics for sharing some of their professional grade data!)
Another Step Toward Legalization
In a historic vote today, November 20, 2019, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would effectively end marijuana prohibition.
The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act of 2019, or H.R. 3884, was introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and passed out of committee today by a vote of 24-10.
The full text of the bill can be found here. The NCIA summarizes the bill like this:
“The MORE Act would federally decriminalize cannabis by removing it from the Controlled Substances Act, and would require the expungement of past federal cannabis convictions. The bill would establish a Cannabis Justice Office to administer a program to reinvest resources in the communities that have been most heavily impacted by prohibition, funded by a 5% tax on state-legal cannabis commerce. It would also allow the Small Business Administration to provide loans and grants to cannabis-related businesses and support state and local equity licensing programs, and would permit doctors within the Veterans Affairs system to recommend medical cannabis to patients in accordance with applicable state laws, among other provisions.”
To be sure, the MORE Act still faces rather long odds – the House is consumed by impeachment hearings and the Senate, not exactly a pro-cannabis group to begin with, hasn’t been passing much of anything lately. It’s hard to imagine the Senate getting more effective when unwanted Articles of Impeachment fall in their lap courtesy of House Democrats.
Still, today is yet another milestone on the long and bumpy path to ending the prohibition of cannabis!
One Set of Rules – Or 50?
Good regulation is very hard to achieve. It takes a proper balance, an ability to listen to all sides, and like so much of life, some trial and error to get it right.
The regulation of the cannabis industry is waist deep in the trial and error phase right now. With the federal government still clinging to a 20th Century prohibition mindset, despite the proven harm and failure of this fear-based policy, many states have had to lurch about in scientific darkness to do the best they can to fulfill their public safety obligations. It makes the next year or so a critical time for the quickly emerging cannabis sector.
One cannabis CEO told me his company is on pace for 50 different sets of packaging for their product, to meet 50 different regulatory requirements for everything from opaqueness to childproofing to warning labels.
Stepping forward into the void is the National Cannabis Industry Association. Their recently published white paper is a roadmap for possible outcomes as national legalization of marijuana in America becomes more and more inevitable.
Written as proposed standards with various options for elected officials and policy makers alike, Adapting a Regulatory Framework For The Emerging Cannabis Industry is a must read for those who have the power and the obligation to bring this medicine out of the shadows and into people’s health care routines in a safe and efficent manner.
Bad Policies Have Consequences
If there’s one thing recreational pot smokers have known all their adult lives, it’s that the federal government isn’t always right.
The Cannabis Times has a story today with the tag line “The U.S. government told an outrageous lie in 1972, the health industry internalized it, and we’re all struggling with the consequences.”
Turns out President Richard Nixon had assembled this thing called the Shafer Commission, and he had stacked the deck to demonize weed. The CT tells the story better than I can:
“In the end, the Shafer Commission, stacked by Nixon, surprised everyone, especially Nixon, with its conclusion that the “possession of marihuana [sic] for personal use … no longer be an offense, [and that the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration not involving profit, no longer be an offense.”
“Nixon ignored the recommendation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) maintained cannabis as a schedule 1 drug with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
“Nixon’s lie about marijuana, which became the government’s lie, never became politically significant, although the lie continued as a sideshow through the Reagan years and up through Jeff Sessions’ term as attorney general.”
So even the medical people cherry picked by Tricky Dick to demonize pot had to admit that, even though they couldn’t spell it correctly, marijuana isn’t bad for you.
We’re only now beginning to learn the full extent of marijuana’s medicinal properties, because the federal government wouldn’t fund research of weed. And they would arrest anyone who tried to research it. All while waving through opiods and encouraging the health care system to create opiod addicts.
At 20/20 Growth, our primary goal is to create a platform where all interested parties can come together to discuss and shape important policies like these in a common sense manner. It’s possible. Our home state, Colorado, while not perfect, has been a good model for how to legalize weed responsibly. Sure, they probably went a little too far. (Is moldy weed really a problem? Haven’t all long-time users like yours truly been smoking some level of mold in their weed for decades now?) But it was new and there was no playbook. We all get it. I rarely meet anyone upset that Colorado put in a number of measures to keep the industry clean (background checks and cameras everywhere being two high profile examples).
Good government policies keep us safer. Bad government policies hold us back.
At 20/20 Growth, we create conferences designed to guide everyone to a healthy balance.
The Massive Potential of Cannabinoids
The potential for cannabinoids is truly amazing.
And the advent of man-made cannabinoids will help, as this Marijuana Business Magazine article details so well. https://mjbizmagazine.com/man-made-vs-natural-cannabinoids/
As the article states, many of these compounds, like THC-V and CBG, appear in such trace amounts in any one given plant, that even acres and acres can’t produce enough volume of these pharmaceutical elements.
From the article:
“Aspirin is made from the bark of willow trees, yet you don’t see any willow tree cultivation facilities. Everything is made in the lab,” said Narbé Alexandrian, CEO of the cannabis-focused Toronto investment firm Canopy Rivers, which is getting involved in the space. “That’s what you’re going to see in cannabis. To get a stable, active pharmaceutical ingredient, you need to extract from a lab-tested facility, not from the plant itself.”
Of course, the only reason cannabinoids like CBG are only now being discovered is because of the horrible public policy of the federal government in the 20th Century regarding the cannabis plant.
At 20/20 Growth, we are committed to creating a platform where all parties can help advise and guide better public policies. Join our email list, and we’ll keep you posted!
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