Pot Stock Canopy Growth Jumps on NY Hemp Plant Licence Approval

By Melanie Kramer
Source: ccn.com

Canadian cannabis company Canopy Growth has been granted a license to produce and process hemp in New York. This quickly following the US farm bill, which legalized the production of hemp in the US. Canopy shares are rising on the Nasdaq and inspiring rallies in other so-called “pot stocks.”

Canopy Growth to Open $150 Million Facility in New York

Canopy Growth Corp now plans to spend up to $150 million to build the production facility in New York:

Thanks to the work of key state and federal government officials from the State of New York, Canopy Growth is proud to outline its commitment to invest in New York in order to establish a Hemp Industrial Park.

Canopy also thanked New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo for his contribution to the Hemp Research Pilot Program and Senator Charles Schumer for his part in passing the US Farm Bill.

The farm bill removed industrial hemp from the list of federally controlled substances, creating a legal market for cannabidiol (CBD). It also opened the US market for Canadian cannabis companies like Canopy Growth. CBD looks set to become a common health product ingredient in North America and potentially globally.

The New York facility for Canopy will focus on hemp extraction and production. Canopy says it will “create jobs in an exciting, highly profitable new industry.”

The Silicon Valley of Hemp in a $20 Billion Market

Democratic Senator Schumer hopes to make the US “Southern Tier” the Silicon Valley of hemp production and a “true cash crop” adding:

I fought so hard to strip the burdensome federal regulations from industrial hemp in our Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2018, which was recently included in the Farm Bill, because I knew how much it could mean to the Southern Tier, and this investment proves it.

Brightfield Group predicts the value of the CBD and CBD-derived product marketplace to reach $20 billion by 2022. Investors already appear enthralled by the prospect of cannabis-related stocks in what constitutes a completely new sector.

Canopy Growth Stocks Up Nearly 13% and Rising

Canopy’s share price has risen since the approval of the US farm bill, further jumping today on the news of the New York licence. At the time of writing, its share price has risen from $36.86 to $42.49, up 11.08% with no sign of slowing.

Canopy Growth Corp Share Price for the Last Three Months Source: TradingView

The performance is also inspiring the wider market with Aurora Cannabis up over 6% and Tilray up over 4% on the Nasdaq.

Nasdaq Performance Today Source: Trading View

Despite the boost from, and for, pot stocks, the Nasdaq lost 0.94% for the day after news of contracting imports and exports in China decimated premarket trading.

Michigan law: Medical marijuana cards not required for CBD oil

By Aleanna Siacon
Source: freep.com


Revita Oil CBD products ranging from topical balm to oil tinctures are products available at the My Florida Green office in Naples on March 26, 2018. (Photo: Olivia Vanni/Naples Daily News)

In a news release posted Thursday, state Rep. Steve Johnson, R-Wayland, announced that legislation that protects the use of cannabidiol or CBD oil has been signed into law.

Under this legislation, CBD oil and other products derived from hemp would not fall under Michigan Medical Marijuana regulations.

That means Michiganders are not required to have a medical marijuana card to get CBD oil and other industrial hemp products.

“CBD oil derived from hemp doesn’t get you high,” Johnson said in a statement.

“It contains no more than 0.3 percent Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). But the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs decided last summer to start classifying it the same way they do marijuana, which contains 5 to 35 percent THC.”

The legislation passed, Public Act 642 of 2018, clarifies that CBD oil and other products derived from hemp fall under the definition of industrial hemp, and not the definition of marijuana.

According to the Michigan Legislature's website, the bill was approved by the governor on Dec. 28 and filed with the Secretary of State on the same day.

“Many people use CBD oil derived from hemp to treat pain, anxiety and depression, and to reduce the prevalence of epileptic seizures,” Joe Brown, a farmer in Saranac who makes hemp wellness products said in a statement.

“Hemp is fundamentally different from marijuana, and I’m grateful to Rep. Johnson for his work to ensure this is reflected in Michigan law.”

New Congressional Marijuana Bill Is Actually Numbered H.R. 420

By Tom Angell
Source: forbes.com

In a hat tip to marijuana culture, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have officially reserved the number H.R. 420 for a bill that would dramatically change federal cannabis laws.


Photo by Tom Sydow

420, of course, is a special number for marijuana enthusiasts, who celebrate the plant extra hard every April 20.

The new bill filed in the House on Wednesday by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) is titled the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act. If passed, it would remove cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act.

“While the bill number may be a bit tongue in cheek, the issue is very serious. Our federal marijuana laws are outdated, out of touch and have negatively impacted countless lives,” Blumenauer said in a press release. "Congress cannot continue to be out of touch with a movement that a growing majority of Americans support. It’s time to end this senseless prohibition.”

This isn't the first time that 420 has worked its way into official legislative numbering.

California’s first effort to create statewide medical cannabis regulations was through a bill numbered SB 420 in 2003.

In 2017, a Rhode Island senator filed a marijuana legalization bill given the designation of S 420.

And on Capitol Hill, the first time the House voted on measure to block the Department of Justice from interfering with state medical cannabis laws, it was through an amendment considered under 2003's Roll Call 420.

The current legislation, which Blumenauer picked up from former Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), who was sworn in on Tuesday as Colorado's new governor, would also transfer cannabis enforcement authority from Drug Enforcement Administration to a renamed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana, Firearms and Explosives.

A similarly renamed Alcohol, Tobacco and Marijuana Tax and Trade Bureau within the Department of the Treasury would also have oversight authority, as would the Food and Drug Administration. Federal permits would be issued for cultivating, packaging, selling and importing marijuana.

Shipping or transporting marijuana into states that have not legalized it would be prohibited.

Last Congress, Polis's version of the bill garnered 26 cosponsors.

Separately, Blumenauer recently released a step-by-step plan to federally legalize marijuana in 2019.

His new bill is the third piece of standalone cannabis legislation filed in the new Congress, which began last week.

Facebook took down many CBD business pages.

Now it says that was a mistake.
 

Facebook was categorizing CBD and hemp businesses as “prescription pharmaceuticals.”

By Chavie Lieber
Source: vox.com


Many CBD and hemp Facebook pages have been unpublished by the social media platform. Getty Images

A few weeks ago, Hannah Smith, a 23-year-old Fort Collins, Colorado, resident who works at her family’s CBD products company, Joy Organics, got a call from her mom, asking why their Facebook page wasn’t working. Her mother assumed the password had been changed, or that someone had switched admin permissions. When Smith tried logging on herself, she found that Facebook had unpublished the Joy Organics Facebook page, flagging the business for “promoting the sale of prescription pharmaceuticals.”

Smith tried to file an appeal, but her claim was denied. She started a petition, which has received nearly 3,000 signatures. When she reached out to contacts in the CBD industry, she learned that many other CBD companies in North Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado, and Kentucky had had their Facebook pages shut down. According to the Boston Globe, at least six CBD companies in Massachusetts saw their accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram shut down as well.

In an email on Monday morning, Facebook admitted that its team had erroneously removed CBD and hemp pages.

“We mistakenly removed Pages for hemp and CBD oil that do not violate our policies and we are currently working to restore these Pages,” a spokesperson said.

Smith is dismayed by Facebook’s erroneous characterization of CBD. The nonpsychoactive cannabinoid of marijuana has become a popular ingredient in coffee and dog treats lately, but CBD is far from a prescription pharmaceutical. Proponents boast that CBD has medicinal properties including soothing anxiety, pain, and stress, although there aren’t enough scientific studies on it to make any conclusive claims. The substance is also now a popular subject of discussion since hemp, a species of cannabis plant that CBD can be extracted from, became legal in December thanks to Congress passing the farm bill.

“It was a huge bummer Facebook killed our page right before the holidays,” Smith said in a recent phone interview. “And we had just come up with a whole marketing campaign for our new skincare line.”

Smith was aggressive about filing additional appeals, and over the weekend, the Joy Organics page was finally reinstated. But other CBD companies are still fighting to get Facebook pages back up.

“I don’t understand why Facebook is attacking us now,” said 36-year-old Jamie Johns of Franklin, Tennessee, who owns a franchise of three CBD stores, Hempy’s. “I don’t even sell anything on our Facebook page, we just use it to educate the community and tell them about new products and new studies.”

According to Facebook’s Community Standards about what can and can’t be posted to the platform, the company states that it “prohibit attempts by individuals, manufacturers and retailers to purchase, sell or trade non-medical drugs, pharmaceutical drugs and marijuana.” The company’s Pages-Specific Policies also notes that company pages “must not promote the sale of prescription pharmaceuticals.” Pharmaceuticals are allowed to have Facebook pages, but must obtain permission from the social media company first.

Facebook said it did not believe hemp or CBD companies violated any of these terms, but it did not further explain why its team had removed these pages in the first place. Last week, Kentucky’s Commissioner of Agriculture Ryan Quarles even penned a letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on behalf of his state’s CBD businesses whose pages were taken down.

"America's hemp farmers and businesses should be celebrated and supported." Just confirmed @KYAgCommish sent this letter to @facebook, urging them to reconsider the practice of limiting hemp companies' access on social media. https://t.co/s3CL5HRc6Y pic.twitter.com/L08y1pquge

— Garrett Wymer (@GarrettWKYT) January 4, 2019

The timing of Facebook coming after CBD companies seemed a bit strange to Smith: “I still don’t know what is behind Facebook’s actions. Ignorance? Pharmaceutical industry interests?” she muses.

Several CBD companies told Vox that they don’t believe that Facebook deleted their pages by mistake. One business owner, Sunshine Bickett, who runs Sunshine CBD Bake in Lafayette, Indiana, believes the passing of the farm bill had caused confusion at the company.

“Personally, I think this is happening because they are correlating us with big pharma now that hemp is legal,” Bickett said. “Pharmaceutical companies pay big bucks to be on Facebook, and then there are little guys like us who have pages. Once the farm bill passed, maybe Facebook saw an opportunity to move things around.”

Although the newly passed farm bill made hemp and CBD legal, the state of non-psychoactive cannabinoid is murky at best. After the bill was passed, the FDA issued a statement that its opinions had not changed and that all CBD companies must obtain FDA approval. The association also sent out warning letters to several CBD companies last month, demanding they file with the FDA.

Facebook says it’s working to reestablish all CBD pages on the platform soon, but its latest move shows how complex the world of CBD is going to become. It might have a new legal status, but it will be a while before CBD’s struggles disappear for good.

   

Hemp entrepreneurs say big retailers unfairly dominate online ads

By Alexis Keenan
Source: yahoo.com

President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill in December, officially legalizing industrial hemp — but hemp entrepreneurs fear they’ll still struggle to promote their products.

According to two hemp entrepreneurs who spoke with Yahoo Finance, social media companies, search engines and payment processors reject their advertisements, ban their keywords, and strip them of lucrative accounts, while giving major retailers a pass.

“We’ve been rejected by almost every single digital media company that’s out there, any advertising platform, Facebook (FB), Instagram, Twitter (TWTR), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Bing, Yahoo, the search engines,” Ari Sherman, founder of Boulder, Colorado-based Evo Hemp, said.

Sherman’s company sells THC-free hemp products, including energy bars, seeds, and protein, as well as CBD oil. CBD, or cannabidiol, is a non-psychoactive biochemical found in hemp and marijuana plants, which is distinct from THC, or tetrahydrocannaabinol, the psychoactive biochemical found in marijuana. Both biochemicals are cannabinoids that interact with neurotransmitters, known as the endocannabinoid system.

Sherman says CBD is clouding the issue.

“We sell our [non-CBD food] products in Whole Foods Market, in Costco, in Kroger stores, even Barnes & Noble bookstores carry some of our hemp bars,” Sherman said. “Why can I not advertise a product that is currently being sold in these grocery stores?”

Sherman wants an answer to that question, and he wants to know why big box retailers are allowed to run paid ads for hemp products while his ads are shot down.

View photos

Messaging from Facebook to Evo Hemp rejecting Evo Hemp's requests to boost posts for hemp and CBD products.

Same hemp. Different rules.

“They’re allowing them to advertise a few hemp products here and there,” Sherman said. “Versus us, we couldn’t promote those exact same items.”

Brittany Carbone, co-founder and CEO of New York-based hemp company, Tonic, knows hemp advertising struggles well. Her company grows hemp and manufactures CBD oils and dog treats under a state-licensed pilot program.

View photos

Image: Yahoo Finance

Because of competing federal and state laws, Carbone’s CBD products, unlike Sherman’s energy bars, seeds and protein powders, have a less certain legal status despite industrial hemp legalization.

State pilot programs, first authorized by the 2014 Farm Bill, permitted states to oversee growth of industrial hemp plants and plant derivatives for research, so long as THC, the psychoactive biochemical found in both hemp and marijuana cannabis plants, remained below 0.3% concentration.

At the same time, cannabis plants and their derivatives remained federally illegal under the Controlled Substances Act, as federal law long failed to differentiate between marijuana and hemp.

Even with THC levels below 0.3%, CBD proved a tough sell for advertisers, regardless of any rights that producers like Carbone may have had to create products using hemp cultivated in accordance with state rules.

“You can make a really strong case that CBD grown and extracted from a state-authorized pilot program is legal,” as of adoption of the 2014 bill, Erica Stark, Executive Director of the National Hemp Association, said.

Either way, CBD is under renewed scrutiny.

“The catch is that CBD is now subject to FDA approval,” Stark said.

With FDA oversight permitted by the 2018 bill, comes the possibility that the agency will categorize CBD as a pharmaceutical drug and therefore subject CBD sellers to pharmaceutical advertising guidelines.