by
Mike Huguenor on January 20, 2021
Last July, as the local economy scrambled to survive the third month of the coronavirus pandemic, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took to Twitter with some economic figures of his own.
“Excited to announce our Q2 numbers showing strong growth across the board,” Ek tweeted on July 29, 2020.
Linked in the tweet was an infographic touting the company’s 299 million monthly listeners, recent expansion to Russia, and exclusive podcasts with former First Lady Michelle Obama and bro-losopher Joe Rogan.
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by
Dan Mitchell on January 20, 2021
Before the runoff U.S. Senate elections in Georgia earlier this month, most pot advocates were ready to accept that the GOP and Mitch McConnell would hold on to the upper chamber, meaning that any substantive reform of federal cannabis laws would have to wait at least two years. Those advocates were–completely understandably–pessimistic.
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by
Dan Mitchell on January 13, 2021
Cannabis and spiritually have always been intertwined, with various degrees of validity and seriousness.
It was used as an entheogen (a psychoactive substance used in religious practices) as far back as ancient India, and some Hindus still consume bhang, an elixir that contains cannabis, in their spiritual practices. The Buddhist Mahakala Tantra specifically mentions cannabis as a medicinal plant. Cannabis is, of course, central to Rastafarianism.
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by
Dan Mitchell on January 6, 2021
The pandemic has brought the cannabis industry a strange mix of outcomes—things that were to be expected alongside surprises both good and bad. Now, as a vaccine rolls out, few know what to expect in 2021 and beyond.
It wasn’t surprising cannabis sales took off after stay-at-home orders were issued last spring as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in the United States, just as it wasn’t surprising that sales dipped a month or so later.
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by
Dan Mitchell on December 30, 2020
As 2020 dawned, most observers of the California cannabis industry expected it to be an eventful year for the legal-weed business and it was–but not in a way that anybody expected.
Over a swoon-inducing couple of weeks in March, when Bay Area and state officials issued shutdown orders as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, it looked at first like the industry, forced to shut down, might sink into oblivion. Soon enough, though, county and state governments declared cannabis to be an essential business, saving the day.
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by
Dan Mitchell on December 23, 2020
Research, or the lack of it, is one not insignificant reason the cannabis industry is in the strange stage of limbo it’s lived in for years: bifurcated, highly restricted with different rules from state-to-state and without much opportunity for grants to deepen our understanding of the plant.
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by
Dan Mitchell on December 16, 2020
As 2020 crawls to a close, the California pot industry is looking back with a mix of relief and chagrin at a year that was supposed to be filled with big strides, but was instead filled with relatively small wins.
Industry relief comes in the form of the state deeming pot an essential business that could keep operating despite the pandemic lockdowns. The Chagrin is because as the year began, the expectation was that taxes would be lowered, some regulations eased, and the three agencies that govern the state’s pot industry consolidated into one. The state government, stymied by the pandemic, didn’t address any of that.
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by
Dan Mitchell on December 9, 2020
The U.S. House last week passed the MORE Act, marking the first time a federal legislative body has voted to remove cannabis from the criminal code.
Just weeks ago, the move might have been called a historic event, but an empty exercise, because the Senate as it’s currently composed is unlikely to even bring such a bill to the floor for a vote, much less pass it. But it might now be more than that, and not only because the Democrats might take control of the Senate next month—an eventuality few people had considered likely before Election Day last month.
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by
Dan Mitchell on August 19, 2020
In the midst of dealing with the day’s pressing issues, we sometimes lose the thread of how much, and how quickly, things change.
A couple of years before the Supreme Court upheld gay marriage in 2015, such a development was almost unthinkable. Tobacco use dropped by 68 percent in the years between 1965 and 2018, according to the American Lung Association and the Centers for Disease Control, from 42.4 percent of the adult population to just 13.7 percent in 2018.
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by
Dan Mitchell on August 12, 2020
In the summer before she was supposed to start third grade, Rylie Maedler’s teeth started falling out. The Delaware kid’s mom, Janie, also noticed an “asymmetry” in Rylie’s face. A CT scan revealed that a tumor was winding its way through the seven-year-old’s skull, the result of a rare disease, Aggressive Giant Cell Granuloma.
Though it was “benign” in the sense that it wasn’t cancerous, the tumor could still kill her, and in the meantime it was making her life miserable, causing pain and seizures. And it was growing.
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