Lp,s are doomed!
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I got my licence to grow in 2001.
Flin Flon was all medical canna users had and it was a duzy.
Seeds, hermies, mold. Flin flon had it all.
LP is a Charles Ponzi affair.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/flin-flons-pot-mine-goesupinsmoke/article1348416/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-marijuana/fate-of-canadas-marijuana-mine-in-limbo-idINTRE56L6Z320090722
https://www.wired.com/2001/07/mining-the-depths-for-dope/
"We plan to grow and strengthen our position as the #1 Canadian LP in total sales on a consolidated basis."
Bonehead should plan to grow fire.
Good weed sells...
Bunk is in the red.
Ponzi from the start.
Short is where it,s at.
Don,t be a bag holder.
First LP Flin-Flon in 2001. 500 tons of bogus weed scrapt.
They will go bankrupt before 5 years.
Who says? Market is oversaturated. Prices are dropping every Q.
It had to come down to that. Craft did,nt want 20 cents per gram.
N.B. has finaly seen the light of day.
Next in line : farmers market.
Good call!
There’s a lot of money to be made by keeping cannabis illegal - literally billions. Some industries have been fighting legalization since the 1930s. Some industries that lobbied to keep cannabis illegal are now profiting off the plant. For companies that have pivoted, is it okay to sow deceit in the form of anti-marijuana propaganda and then start making revenue from it without putting in the work to dispel the stigma?
Hey happy, are you a certified pumper?
Have you done the Pepsi challenge?
LPees bunk weed has to be given away, it,s so bad.
https://mjbizdaily.com/aurora-sends-first-shipment-of-free-cannabis-to-france/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=MJD_20210825_NEWS_Daily&elqTrackId=BB025E996244A599F16FA956398A3A37&elq=bfeb156f43aa47dfac7e22d27b21da90&elqaid=5145&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3736
Aurora,s bunk weed will be given away to Europe.
https://mjbizdaily.com/aurora-sends-first-shipment-of-free-cannabis-to-france/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=MJD_20210825_NEWS_Daily&elqTrackId=BB025E996244A599F16FA956398A3A37&elq=bfeb156f43aa47dfac7e22d27b21da90&elqaid=5145&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3736
Tilray bunk weed has to be given away in order for Europe to accept.
https://mjbizdaily.com/aurora-sends-first-shipment-of-free-cannabis-to-france/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=MJD_20210825_NEWS_Daily&elqTrackId=BB025E996244A599F16FA956398A3A37&elq=bfeb156f43aa47dfac7e22d27b21da90&elqaid=5145&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3736
https://groweriq.ca/how-to-get-a-cannabis-license-in-south-africa/
https://businesstech.co.za/news/technology/515352/cannabis-company-plans-listing-after-being-handed-first-rights-to-grow-and-package-weed-products-in-south-africa/
https://matadornetwork.com/read/everything-know-cannabis-south-africa/
"It identified legislative restrictions and “the threat of takeover or dominance” by well-funded companies and pharmacy groups as the main challenges to the industry."
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/south-africa-crafts-strategy-for-1-9-billion-cannabis-industry-1.1643967
You are doomed happy.
hey happy read and learn
https://phys.org/news/2007-10-opium-marijuana-underground.html
Flin-Flon was providing extra-bunk weed for medical folks.
But you were not born yet.
https://www.thereminder.ca/opinion/in-our-words-bring-back-flin-flons-original-cash-crop-pot-4131433
https://www.producer.com/news/firm-grows-medical-pot-in-mine-shaft/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3296815/A-trip-to-a-funny-farm.html
BUD TO BUST
Flin Flon's pot mine goes up in smoke
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/flin-flons-pot-mine-goesupinsmoke/article1348416/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/health-minister-tours-pot-farm-
Canada : Wood, Water - And Weed
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URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1377/a06.html
Newshawk: puff_tuff
Votes: 0
Pubdate: Sat, 28 Jul 2001
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2001, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: letters@globeandmail.ca
Website: http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: CAROLYN ABRAHAM
WOOD, WATER - AND WEED
We're famous for our natural resources and now, CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports, here comes an unnatural one. A small town in northern Manitoba is betting its future on a good buzz.
Brent Zettl and his team rise at dawn at the Victoria Inn. Wearing jeans and sweatshirts, they hoover down eggs, hash browns and coffee. A waitress packs lunch in brown bags to carry them till dinner. No one delivers 360 metres underground.
They speed off in pickup trucks and vans as daylight spills over Flin Flon, over the corrugated steel buildings and the soaring smelter stack of the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company that built this northern Manitoba town, where the blue and orange coveralls, damp and dirty from the pits, sway on clotheslines behind the clapboard company houses.
Seven miles northeast, Zettl's convoy turns up a private two-lane highway and toward Trout Lake, to a copper and zinc mine blown out of the hard rock from a nearby hillside. Headlights nose into the mouth of the mine and disappear down its black gullet.
For the next 25 minutes they bounce in darkness down steep Byzantine shafts. Breakfast lurches in their bellies as they head down, way down, to where no one has gone before -- the first legal marijuana farm in the country, the continent and, as far as anyone knows, the world.
Zettl, the president and CEO of Prairie Plant Systems Inc., and his five colleagues have driven the six hours to Flin Flon from Saskatoon three out of the last four weeks. They've bumped up and down the mine shaft along with 10 locals who tend the cannabis crop in its cavern, hauling in supplies as the clock ticks. Soon, much sooner than expected, it will be showtime.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Allan Rock leads his own entourage to Flin Flon to survey the historic project his federal department contracted to Zettl's small biotech company last December. The government earmarked $5.7-million over the next five years for Prairie Plant to grow close to a tonne of medicinal-grade marijuana. Come harvest time, it will be shipped out to patients suffering chronic pain from AIDS, cancer, epilepsy and Multiple Sclerosis. Later, people will smoke it in clinical research trials.
Starting Monday, the sick earn the protection of a new federal regulation that permits them to possess, and in some cases cultivate, what is otherwise an illegal narcotic. Zettl is Canada's first legitimate pot dealer, doing with scientific sophistication down in this Manitoba mine shaft what daring dope enthusiasts have done for decades in garden patches, suburban basements and idle meadows.
Health Canada's communications department is hoarding photographs of the underground operation until the minister makes his own descent. They're expecting so many requests for interviews they've asked the mining company, which leases space to the marijuana project, to secure three telephone lines to handle reporters' calls.
Word is spreading through town that CNN, ABC and the New York Times will be trekking to this prairie outpost "at the end of the road," as they like to call it in Flin Flon, where fame is an odd fit. Mayor Dennis Ballard, a burly sixty-year-old in a golf shirt and black jeans, heard they want him to make a speech. "Oh geez," he says. "Am I going to have to wear a suit?"
Zettl has been banking on a big splash. For more than a decade, the 39-year-old has clung like the stubborn pines on rocky slopes to his entrepreneurial dream. To him, the underworld of empty mines could be the biotech farmer's fields of the 21st century.
Scientists are modifying plants to produce the proteins for new drugs, yet environmentalists gasp at the prospect of contaminating other species. Deep in the bowels of the earth, says Zettl, where there's no wind to carry pollens on to neighbouring fields, opportunity waits. Stone-insulated grottos offer ideal protection and a limitless growing season, with a temperature that even in the dead of winter holds steady at between 10 and 12 degrees Celsius.
The miners spotted it first. At lunch, they'd spit their orange and apple seeds into the pits and watch them shoot up six inches before they finally withered from lack of light. In a remote town where fresh produce can be pricey or scarce, the idea took seed. Town and mine together sought out a willing green thumb and the headlines led them to Saskatoon.
The young Zettl, agriculturalist and fledgling businessman, had earned media attention for his work cloning hardy Saskatoon berries. Officials from Hudson Bay Mining and the Greenstone Community Futures group came calling in 1990. The first time they took him down, at ear-popping speeds, below the earth, he thought to himself, "What the hell I am doing here?" But instinct made him a quick convert.
It was greenhouse growing turned upside down: If the mine supplied steady heat, he could supply the light. In February 1991 in went the Saskatoon berries, growing five times the speed underground as they did on the surface. Next came the roses -- 80 dormant long-stems that exploded to 1,100 in three months. "That was our signature," Zettl said. "The miners would take those home and I'm pretty sure we were responsible for a population surge in Flin Flon."
Hudson Bay Mining had backed the project, out of interest and for a little publicity, said Wayne Fraser, director of the company's environmental policies -- publicity they got in spades: Equinox, National Geographic, even the National Enquirer ran the story, right alongside one about former Kojak star Telly Savalas being buried alive.
Hothouse tomatoes and culinary herbs also grew into smashing successes. But not on the bottom line. It was cheaper to import from Mexico, and too hard to crack the food-distribution ring. Still, Zettl's gut kept telling him that the unique conditions of mine agriculture made it ideal to grow plants for medicinal use. And what better way to show it than to turn out a bumper crop everyone from Flin Flon to the Phillipines would be talking about? "This had enough profile that it would elevate us," he says. "That's our target and now we have to prove it."
Against 195 competitors for the Health Canada contract, including one that pitched the famous "Diefenbunker" government bomb shelter as a marijuana plot, Zettl and Flin Flon came out the winners. He had the staff, the research ability and a site so secure that officials had to see it to believe it. "In some ways it's like achieving the last laugh. I don't know how many times people heard about our work in the mines and said, 'Hey, sounds like great security for a hydroponic pot operation.' "
In fact, the marijuana under Trout Lake is faring almost too well. With levels of carbon dioxide in the mine twice the concentration of the atmosphere ( fresh air must be pumped in for workers at 250,000 cubic feet a minute ), with no wild fluctuations in temperature and no insects to spread disease, the cannabis is literally growing like a weed.
"They're real happy plants," says Zettl. "We've got one five feet tall." A regular cannabis growth cycle spans 12 to 15 weeks. Theirs are busting up an inch-and-a-half a day. At that rate, they could be ready to harvest in four weeks -- half the usual rate of maturity.
Just a few months ago, they wondered if they'd have anything to plant at all. They had thought they could plug in through diplomatic channels and collect the widest variety of species, one from a seed bank in St. Petersburg, Russia, another in the Phillipines and Hawaii. But despite their contract with Health Canada, they had no authority to import an illegal substance.
In the end, Health Canada played intermediary and sent them marijuana seized by RCMP detachments across the country. So the first harvest will be a chemical surprise. "Nobody knows what it is you get on the street," says Mark Hetherington, Prairie Plant's senior researcher.
Hetherington is also the quality control officer, and laughs easily at the notion that people might picture him slumped in a corner with a bag of Doritos. In fact, when the dope is cured and dried, Hetherington will run it through a gaschromatograph to test levels of THC, marijuana's main psychoactive ingredient. The contract with Health Canada calls for marijuana with THC levels of between five and seven per cent.
With the health minister's visit less than a week away and an early, unexpected harvest, it's a scramble -- transplanting 3,000 marijuana plants into bigger containers, and installing the dryers, five stainless-steel, refrigerator-sized forced-air contraptions that will dehydrate the weed. They're still painting the lab and hooking up the computer system.
So, every sun-up, they're heading down, outfitted in miner's caps and blue coveralls, slithering through the burrows beneath Trout Lake. Eyes blink and adjust to its glare, and then to the majesty of "the chamber" where white paint covers walls, floor and ceiling and the loamy scent of cannabis tinges the air.
Here, it is awe by numbers: 150 thousand-watt, high-pressure sodium and metal-halide bulbs snuggled in reflective chrome tubes and dangling three feet above the crops; the 3,000 plants, nestled in their own containers, sit on tennis-court flooring, porous for drainage, installed above 230 cubic yards of concrete in a 12,000-square-foot cavern -- roughly three times the size of a high school gymnasium -- blasted out of the Canadian shield.
"The first time people see it they don't say a word," says Zettl. "They just stand there and look around, trying to believe what they're seeing. They don't expect the brightness, the space down here."
They've only used a fraction of it so far. At full capacity, there's three football fields worth of potential pot plots. So far, Brazil, Ireland and South Africa have made inquiries. Flin Flon's contribution might very well make Canada a hewer of wood, drawer of water, and grower of weed.
Flin Flon is so small it defies the three-M principle that characterizes most other North American communities: It has neither mall, movie theatre nor McDonalds. Its people are content to fish trout and pickerel, launch aspiring Bobby Clarkes on their frozen ponds and, Mayor Ballard says with a laugh, party.
"People think we're rough-hewn, a little stupid in the head, we fight and drink beer. Sure we fight, I remember getting my nose broken outside that dance hall there," he says. "But we've got self-reliance and we've turned out brain surgeons and inventors and nuclear physicists."
And now Flin Flon growing dope for the nation's medically needy.
When Health Canada first announced Flin Flon would be the site of the marijuana project, some locals cheered, Ballard especially, as though they'd won an Olympic bid. In a one-industry town, any shot at diversifying is worth taking. "You're always on the bubble. Your fortunes rise and fall with one industry," says Ballard, himself a consultant to the Hudson Bay mining company. One day the news is grand, as with the recent $400-million expansion of the Triple Seven Mine; the next day it can tumble along with metal prices.
Faith in the mine runs as deep as shafts in this community, and Flin Flon is far from poor. The average individual income hovers around $45,000 a year. "You might not see it in the ramshackle houses," Ballard says, but wander around and you can count the sprawling cottages along the lakeshore, the skidoos, the speed boats and the mine parking lots filled with shiny SUVs.
But the company is downsizing, and the young people ship out just like the minerals from the ground. The population of has shrunk to 7,000 from 12,000 over the last dozen years. Something new was needed, and what could be better than to exploit the tapped-out mines?
"Our CEO loved the idea," says Wayne Fraser of Hudson Bay Mining. "There was some snickering, but nobody ever lost money growing pot."
"If Health Canada is ready to get into it," agrees Ballard, "Why not? No one's going to sneak down and get a joint." His eyes twinkling with mischief, he adds, "I applied for a job as sampler."
Some people here might believe it. Ballard hides his irreverence no better than he hides the ashtray on his desk. ( "There's actually a bylaw against smoking in here." ) Back in the seventies, when he was principal of the Ruth Betts elementary school, he sat on a local panel and said he thought pot should be legalized. "People erupted," he laughs.
But now, the town is right down in the mine with Zettl and his coworkers. They lured him here. They've eaten his tomatoes and smelled his roses, and when this town bands together, it's from the bottom up. When an explosion at the smelting plant killed a man last summer and injured several others, for example, the local women collected $15,000 in empty buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
And when word got around about Zettl's struggle to get "product," it reached the ears of the mayor's office. Dennis Strom, a local councillor in Creighton, Sask., just a whisper across the border from Flin Flon, called Ballard. "Did you hear," he said, "they can't get any seed?"
"No seed?" the mayor said. He picked up the phone and called Health Canada himself.
Like Zettl, Ballard sees the potential of the marijuana project. No one knows if it will lead to any permanent production. So far it's only 10 new jobs, and Health Canada and Prairie Plant are still discussing whether joints or water pipes are the better delivery system, which may mean no marijuana-cigarette production plant. The research itself might fail. The plot could close. But the principle will have been proven loud and clear: Mines make a fabulous greenhouse.
"Do you know how much empty space we have down there?" Ballard says. "Why not do something with it?"
The first evidence of economic spinoff is the travel magazines stacked on the counter at the Zig Zag Zone, Flin Flon's Main Street purveyor of all things youthful and rock 'n' roll: KISS T-shirts and Britney Spears posters and Pokemon cards. Zig Zag's long-haired proprietor, Chris Pilz, outfitted in an Indian Motorcycle tank top and clearly no stranger to the bench press, opened the shop with his wife Ronna two years ago.
They heard the blurb on the radio last December when Flin Flon won the marijuana project and whooped. That very day they decided to produce a T-shirt to commemorate Flin Flon's place in history. Ronna Pilz phoned her artist brother Larry Mulvaney in Vancouver to design a prototype: A dazed-looking miner pushes a cartload of dope from the mouth of a mine, with the smelter stack transformed into a giant joint billowing skyward. The miner sings, "High Ho, High Ho, it's off to work we grow." The caption: "Flin Flon -- Marijuana Growing Capital of Canada."
The Pilzes ordered 200 and sold out the first day. "The locals bought it," says Chris. "They thought it was really funny." They ordered 400 and ran dry in a week. He's sent freebies to Jay Leno, David Letterman ( who, he heard, plugged Flin Flon on late-night TV ) and displays Rosie O'Donnell's thank-you card. With a second shirt design, a new commemorative mug and a Web site pulling in orders from as far away as the Grand Cayman Islands, Zig Zag is selling 1,000 shirts at $20 a pop every three weeks. The Pilzes are planning their first Caribbean vacation this winter.
"They say most businesses don't start to see a profit until the fifth year, but we've just done so well with this," Pilz says. "It's been like winning the lottery."
Ron Dobson does not share the joke. He wrote protest letters to the the Daily Reminder, Flin Flon's newspaper -- of which he now happens to be the editor. He's all for helping people in medical need, but the T-shirts say nothing about marijuana as medicine. "It sends the wrong message. . . . It concerns me that a 10-year-old can walk down the street in Flin Flon and see someone they respect wearing that T-shirt and think they're a role model, that smoking pot is cool.
"If Health Canada was going to put this in our backyard they should have some education programs for the youth in the community about the differences between medicinal use and recreational use. People don't wear morphine T-shirts. I came out of the Seventies, and I admit to inhaling for several years, and I know how destructive pot can be. Young people smoking pot . . . slide into a culture that does not promote achievement."
Kevin Dallas, a 29-year-old born and raised in Flin Flon who now drives the town taxi and airport shuttle, says there were "elderly people right mad about that t-shirt, that it was glamorizing dope smoking and all." His grandmother called from Montreal, worried the plot would bring drug wars to town on the scale of the Columbian cartels.
Dallas's own wife suffers from chronic joint and muscle pain. If marijuana helped her condition, he says, he'd find it on the streets if he had to. "Some of the elderly people say, you know, 'Oooh, it's a holy sin,' and the younger people, well, they want samples. But there's no worries about that, it's like Fort Knox up there."
The way Sgt. Bob Bazylewski sees it, anyone after marijuana in the mine would have better luck trying to rob dope from a gang of bikers. The head of Flin Flon's RCMP detachment, a native son come home to police the streets he grew up on, said he has not a whit of concern. The miners might have helped themselves to a few of the hothouse tomatoes, but they're four miles of solid rock and steel doors away from the dope crop. And anyone planning to head down the shaft, Bazylewski says, doesn't stand a chance.
"There's all kinds of video cameras. There's only one way in and there's no back door to sneak out," he says. "It would take a thief at least 15 minutes to get out and it would only take us two minutes to get there."
At six o'clock every evening, Hudson Bay blasts further into its mines. The workers tag in and tag out so that no one gets caught below in an explosion that rattles houses across town. It drives Zettl and his team to the surface for dinner. But in an hour, maybe two, they're back down again.
In between tending the plants and the construction puzzles of installing drywall in a wet place, Zettl finds time to read nasty e-mails and field patronizing calls from critics convinced those prairie hicks in Flin Flon will grow nothing but weak weed.
They bellyache that Zettl should be going "hydroponic." They razz him that growing Saskatoon berries is no grounding for growing dope. But he and Hetherington believe it's a myth that today's black-market marijuana has THC content in the 20 per cent range. Before long, they'll be testing their hunch in the seed that came from the street.
But like the pulp-fiction subterranean explorer Josiah Flintabbety Flonatin ( from 1914's The Sunless City, by J.E. Preston Muddock ), who this town was named for, Zettl is diving into the unknown. He listens to his critics because it only makes him more determined.
"My goal," he says, "is to have those people who are in need get it and say: 'This is the best damn stuff I've ever had in my life.' "
Canada : Wood, Water - And Weed
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URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1377/a06.html
Newshawk: puff_tuff
Votes: 0
Pubdate: Sat, 28 Jul 2001
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2001, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: letters@globeandmail.ca
Website: http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: CAROLYN ABRAHAM
WOOD, WATER - AND WEED
We're famous for our natural resources and now, CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports, here comes an unnatural one. A small town in northern Manitoba is betting its future on a good buzz.
Brent Zettl and his team rise at dawn at the Victoria Inn. Wearing jeans and sweatshirts, they hoover down eggs, hash browns and coffee. A waitress packs lunch in brown bags to carry them till dinner. No one delivers 360 metres underground.
They speed off in pickup trucks and vans as daylight spills over Flin Flon, over the corrugated steel buildings and the soaring smelter stack of the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company that built this northern Manitoba town, where the blue and orange coveralls, damp and dirty from the pits, sway on clotheslines behind the clapboard company houses.
Seven miles northeast, Zettl's convoy turns up a private two-lane highway and toward Trout Lake, to a copper and zinc mine blown out of the hard rock from a nearby hillside. Headlights nose into the mouth of the mine and disappear down its black gullet.
For the next 25 minutes they bounce in darkness down steep Byzantine shafts. Breakfast lurches in their bellies as they head down, way down, to where no one has gone before -- the first legal marijuana farm in the country, the continent and, as far as anyone knows, the world.
Zettl, the president and CEO of Prairie Plant Systems Inc., and his five colleagues have driven the six hours to Flin Flon from Saskatoon three out of the last four weeks. They've bumped up and down the mine shaft along with 10 locals who tend the cannabis crop in its cavern, hauling in supplies as the clock ticks. Soon, much sooner than expected, it will be showtime.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Allan Rock leads his own entourage to Flin Flon to survey the historic project his federal department contracted to Zettl's small biotech company last December. The government earmarked $5.7-million over the next five years for Prairie Plant to grow close to a tonne of medicinal-grade marijuana. Come harvest time, it will be shipped out to patients suffering chronic pain from AIDS, cancer, epilepsy and Multiple Sclerosis. Later, people will smoke it in clinical research trials.
Starting Monday, the sick earn the protection of a new federal regulation that permits them to possess, and in some cases cultivate, what is otherwise an illegal narcotic. Zettl is Canada's first legitimate pot dealer, doing with scientific sophistication down in this Manitoba mine shaft what daring dope enthusiasts have done for decades in garden patches, suburban basements and idle meadows.
Health Canada's communications department is hoarding photographs of the underground operation until the minister makes his own descent. They're expecting so many requests for interviews they've asked the mining company, which leases space to the marijuana project, to secure three telephone lines to handle reporters' calls.
Word is spreading through town that CNN, ABC and the New York Times will be trekking to this prairie outpost "at the end of the road," as they like to call it in Flin Flon, where fame is an odd fit. Mayor Dennis Ballard, a burly sixty-year-old in a golf shirt and black jeans, heard they want him to make a speech. "Oh geez," he says. "Am I going to have to wear a suit?"
Zettl has been banking on a big splash. For more than a decade, the 39-year-old has clung like the stubborn pines on rocky slopes to his entrepreneurial dream. To him, the underworld of empty mines could be the biotech farmer's fields of the 21st century.
Scientists are modifying plants to produce the proteins for new drugs, yet environmentalists gasp at the prospect of contaminating other species. Deep in the bowels of the earth, says Zettl, where there's no wind to carry pollens on to neighbouring fields, opportunity waits. Stone-insulated grottos offer ideal protection and a limitless growing season, with a temperature that even in the dead of winter holds steady at between 10 and 12 degrees Celsius.
The miners spotted it first. At lunch, they'd spit their orange and apple seeds into the pits and watch them shoot up six inches before they finally withered from lack of light. In a remote town where fresh produce can be pricey or scarce, the idea took seed. Town and mine together sought out a willing green thumb and the headlines led them to Saskatoon.
The young Zettl, agriculturalist and fledgling businessman, had earned media attention for his work cloning hardy Saskatoon berries. Officials from Hudson Bay Mining and the Greenstone Community Futures group came calling in 1990. The first time they took him down, at ear-popping speeds, below the earth, he thought to himself, "What the hell I am doing here?" But instinct made him a quick convert.
It was greenhouse growing turned upside down: If the mine supplied steady heat, he could supply the light. In February 1991 in went the Saskatoon berries, growing five times the speed underground as they did on the surface. Next came the roses -- 80 dormant long-stems that exploded to 1,100 in three months. "That was our signature," Zettl said. "The miners would take those home and I'm pretty sure we were responsible for a population surge in Flin Flon."
Hudson Bay Mining had backed the project, out of interest and for a little publicity, said Wayne Fraser, director of the company's environmental policies -- publicity they got in spades: Equinox, National Geographic, even the National Enquirer ran the story, right alongside one about former Kojak star Telly Savalas being buried alive.
Hothouse tomatoes and culinary herbs also grew into smashing successes. But not on the bottom line. It was cheaper to import from Mexico, and too hard to crack the food-distribution ring. Still, Zettl's gut kept telling him that the unique conditions of mine agriculture made it ideal to grow plants for medicinal use. And what better way to show it than to turn out a bumper crop everyone from Flin Flon to the Phillipines would be talking about? "This had enough profile that it would elevate us," he says. "That's our target and now we have to prove it."
Against 195 competitors for the Health Canada contract, including one that pitched the famous "Diefenbunker" government bomb shelter as a marijuana plot, Zettl and Flin Flon came out the winners. He had the staff, the research ability and a site so secure that officials had to see it to believe it. "In some ways it's like achieving the last laugh. I don't know how many times people heard about our work in the mines and said, 'Hey, sounds like great security for a hydroponic pot operation.' "
In fact, the marijuana under Trout Lake is faring almost too well. With levels of carbon dioxide in the mine twice the concentration of the atmosphere ( fresh air must be pumped in for workers at 250,000 cubic feet a minute ), with no wild fluctuations in temperature and no insects to spread disease, the cannabis is literally growing like a weed.
"They're real happy plants," says Zettl. "We've got one five feet tall." A regular cannabis growth cycle spans 12 to 15 weeks. Theirs are busting up an inch-and-a-half a day. At that rate, they could be ready to harvest in four weeks -- half the usual rate of maturity.
Just a few months ago, they wondered if they'd have anything to plant at all. They had thought they could plug in through diplomatic channels and collect the widest variety of species, one from a seed bank in St. Petersburg, Russia, another in the Phillipines and Hawaii. But despite their contract with Health Canada, they had no authority to import an illegal substance.
In the end, Health Canada played intermediary and sent them marijuana seized by RCMP detachments across the country. So the first harvest will be a chemical surprise. "Nobody knows what it is you get on the street," says Mark Hetherington, Prairie Plant's senior researcher.
Hetherington is also the quality control officer, and laughs easily at the notion that people might picture him slumped in a corner with a bag of Doritos. In fact, when the dope is cured and dried, Hetherington will run it through a gaschromatograph to test levels of THC, marijuana's main psychoactive ingredient. The contract with Health Canada calls for marijuana with THC levels of between five and seven per cent.
With the health minister's visit less than a week away and an early, unexpected harvest, it's a scramble -- transplanting 3,000 marijuana plants into bigger containers, and installing the dryers, five stainless-steel, refrigerator-sized forced-air contraptions that will dehydrate the weed. They're still painting the lab and hooking up the computer system.
So, every sun-up, they're heading down, outfitted in miner's caps and blue coveralls, slithering through the burrows beneath Trout Lake. Eyes blink and adjust to its glare, and then to the majesty of "the chamber" where white paint covers walls, floor and ceiling and the loamy scent of cannabis tinges the air.
Here, it is awe by numbers: 150 thousand-watt, high-pressure sodium and metal-halide bulbs snuggled in reflective chrome tubes and dangling three feet above the crops; the 3,000 plants, nestled in their own containers, sit on tennis-court flooring, porous for drainage, installed above 230 cubic yards of concrete in a 12,000-square-foot cavern -- roughly three times the size of a high school gymnasium -- blasted out of the Canadian shield.
"The first time people see it they don't say a word," says Zettl. "They just stand there and look around, trying to believe what they're seeing. They don't expect the brightness, the space down here."
They've only used a fraction of it so far. At full capacity, there's three football fields worth of potential pot plots. So far, Brazil, Ireland and South Africa have made inquiries. Flin Flon's contribution might very well make Canada a hewer of wood, drawer of water, and grower of weed.
Flin Flon is so small it defies the three-M principle that characterizes most other North American communities: It has neither mall, movie theatre nor McDonalds. Its people are content to fish trout and pickerel, launch aspiring Bobby Clarkes on their frozen ponds and, Mayor Ballard says with a laugh, party.
"People think we're rough-hewn, a little stupid in the head, we fight and drink beer. Sure we fight, I remember getting my nose broken outside that dance hall there," he says. "But we've got self-reliance and we've turned out brain surgeons and inventors and nuclear physicists."
And now Flin Flon growing dope for the nation's medically needy.
When Health Canada first announced Flin Flon would be the site of the marijuana project, some locals cheered, Ballard especially, as though they'd won an Olympic bid. In a one-industry town, any shot at diversifying is worth taking. "You're always on the bubble. Your fortunes rise and fall with one industry," says Ballard, himself a consultant to the Hudson Bay mining company. One day the news is grand, as with the recent $400-million expansion of the Triple Seven Mine; the next day it can tumble along with metal prices.
Faith in the mine runs as deep as shafts in this community, and Flin Flon is far from poor. The average individual income hovers around $45,000 a year. "You might not see it in the ramshackle houses," Ballard says, but wander around and you can count the sprawling cottages along the lakeshore, the skidoos, the speed boats and the mine parking lots filled with shiny SUVs.
But the company is downsizing, and the young people ship out just like the minerals from the ground. The population of has shrunk to 7,000 from 12,000 over the last dozen years. Something new was needed, and what could be better than to exploit the tapped-out mines?
"Our CEO loved the idea," says Wayne Fraser of Hudson Bay Mining. "There was some snickering, but nobody ever lost money growing pot."
"If Health Canada is ready to get into it," agrees Ballard, "Why not? No one's going to sneak down and get a joint." His eyes twinkling with mischief, he adds, "I applied for a job as sampler."
Some people here might believe it. Ballard hides his irreverence no better than he hides the ashtray on his desk. ( "There's actually a bylaw against smoking in here." ) Back in the seventies, when he was principal of the Ruth Betts elementary school, he sat on a local panel and said he thought pot should be legalized. "People erupted," he laughs.
But now, the town is right down in the mine with Zettl and his coworkers. They lured him here. They've eaten his tomatoes and smelled his roses, and when this town bands together, it's from the bottom up. When an explosion at the smelting plant killed a man last summer and injured several others, for example, the local women collected $15,000 in empty buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
And when word got around about Zettl's struggle to get "product," it reached the ears of the mayor's office. Dennis Strom, a local councillor in Creighton, Sask., just a whisper across the border from Flin Flon, called Ballard. "Did you hear," he said, "they can't get any seed?"
"No seed?" the mayor said. He picked up the phone and called Health Canada himself.
Like Zettl, Ballard sees the potential of the marijuana project. No one knows if it will lead to any permanent production. So far it's only 10 new jobs, and Health Canada and Prairie Plant are still discussing whether joints or water pipes are the better delivery system, which may mean no marijuana-cigarette production plant. The research itself might fail. The plot could close. But the principle will have been proven loud and clear: Mines make a fabulous greenhouse.
"Do you know how much empty space we have down there?" Ballard says. "Why not do something with it?"
The first evidence of economic spinoff is the travel magazines stacked on the counter at the Zig Zag Zone, Flin Flon's Main Street purveyor of all things youthful and rock 'n' roll: KISS T-shirts and Britney Spears posters and Pokemon cards. Zig Zag's long-haired proprietor, Chris Pilz, outfitted in an Indian Motorcycle tank top and clearly no stranger to the bench press, opened the shop with his wife Ronna two years ago.
They heard the blurb on the radio last December when Flin Flon won the marijuana project and whooped. That very day they decided to produce a T-shirt to commemorate Flin Flon's place in history. Ronna Pilz phoned her artist brother Larry Mulvaney in Vancouver to design a prototype: A dazed-looking miner pushes a cartload of dope from the mouth of a mine, with the smelter stack transformed into a giant joint billowing skyward. The miner sings, "High Ho, High Ho, it's off to work we grow." The caption: "Flin Flon -- Marijuana Growing Capital of Canada."
The Pilzes ordered 200 and sold out the first day. "The locals bought it," says Chris. "They thought it was really funny." They ordered 400 and ran dry in a week. He's sent freebies to Jay Leno, David Letterman ( who, he heard, plugged Flin Flon on late-night TV ) and displays Rosie O'Donnell's thank-you card. With a second shirt design, a new commemorative mug and a Web site pulling in orders from as far away as the Grand Cayman Islands, Zig Zag is selling 1,000 shirts at $20 a pop every three weeks. The Pilzes are planning their first Caribbean vacation this winter.
"They say most businesses don't start to see a profit until the fifth year, but we've just done so well with this," Pilz says. "It's been like winning the lottery."
Ron Dobson does not share the joke. He wrote protest letters to the the Daily Reminder, Flin Flon's newspaper -- of which he now happens to be the editor. He's all for helping people in medical need, but the T-shirts say nothing about marijuana as medicine. "It sends the wrong message. . . . It concerns me that a 10-year-old can walk down the street in Flin Flon and see someone they respect wearing that T-shirt and think they're a role model, that smoking pot is cool.
"If Health Canada was going to put this in our backyard they should have some education programs for the youth in the community about the differences between medicinal use and recreational use. People don't wear morphine T-shirts. I came out of the Seventies, and I admit to inhaling for several years, and I know how destructive pot can be. Young people smoking pot . . . slide into a culture that does not promote achievement."
Kevin Dallas, a 29-year-old born and raised in Flin Flon who now drives the town taxi and airport shuttle, says there were "elderly people right mad about that t-shirt, that it was glamorizing dope smoking and all." His grandmother called from Montreal, worried the plot would bring drug wars to town on the scale of the Columbian cartels.
Dallas's own wife suffers from chronic joint and muscle pain. If marijuana helped her condition, he says, he'd find it on the streets if he had to. "Some of the elderly people say, you know, 'Oooh, it's a holy sin,' and the younger people, well, they want samples. But there's no worries about that, it's like Fort Knox up there."
The way Sgt. Bob Bazylewski sees it, anyone after marijuana in the mine would have better luck trying to rob dope from a gang of bikers. The head of Flin Flon's RCMP detachment, a native son come home to police the streets he grew up on, said he has not a whit of concern. The miners might have helped themselves to a few of the hothouse tomatoes, but they're four miles of solid rock and steel doors away from the dope crop. And anyone planning to head down the shaft, Bazylewski says, doesn't stand a chance.
"There's all kinds of video cameras. There's only one way in and there's no back door to sneak out," he says. "It would take a thief at least 15 minutes to get out and it would only take us two minutes to get there."
At six o'clock every evening, Hudson Bay blasts further into its mines. The workers tag in and tag out so that no one gets caught below in an explosion that rattles houses across town. It drives Zettl and his team to the surface for dinner. But in an hour, maybe two, they're back down again.
In between tending the plants and the construction puzzles of installing drywall in a wet place, Zettl finds time to read nasty e-mails and field patronizing calls from critics convinced those prairie hicks in Flin Flon will grow nothing but weak weed.
They bellyache that Zettl should be going "hydroponic." They razz him that growing Saskatoon berries is no grounding for growing dope. But he and Hetherington believe it's a myth that today's black-market marijuana has THC content in the 20 per cent range. Before long, they'll be testing their hunch in the seed that came from the street.
But like the pulp-fiction subterranean explorer Josiah Flintabbety Flonatin ( from 1914's The Sunless City, by J.E. Preston Muddock ), who this town was named for, Zettl is diving into the unknown. He listens to his critics because it only makes him more determined.
"My goal," he says, "is to have those people who are in need get it and say: 'This is the best damn stuff I've ever had in my life.' "
Yeah right.
https://www.thereminder.ca/opinion/in-our-words-bring-back-flin-flons-original-cash-crop-pot-4131433
Happy, i read that COViD is a hoax and Trump has won the election.
Breaking : black market has lost another 10% over the weekend...
Martha is gaining traction...
Market flooded with Crappy Growth best.
Legacy are turning to potato growing to save the day.
Legacy has lost 80 billions ever since medical established in 2001.
Have,nt you be fooled enough with Crap-Grow,s predictions
/The legal system in canada has already taken 50% of the black market’s business and it has not even been trying./
500 tons of bunk weed destroyed & more to come...
Greenhouses bought and sold for peanuts.
1000 employees terminated.
Nowhere to go in an overcrowded market.
I,d love to see them trying.
Where do you get the Stock Market weed to 50% of black market biz
Shure it,s not the other way around??
Colombia Challenges Canadian Cannabis Dominance
NEWS PROVIDED TO El BONNO'S RANCH
NetworkNewsWire
Aug 23, 2021, 08:30 ET
NEW YORK, Aug. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In 2020, Canada became the largest exporter of dried cannabis flower in the world.
Today, Canada is looking over its shoulder at a formidable competitor in Colombia, which recently instigated some legislative changes that position the country to become the global cannabis leader.
Colombia was already recognized for its robust infrastructure, distribution and exports of certain cannabis products such as medicinal oils and extracts, but the country had a gaping hole in exports by keeping dried cannabis flower strictly verboten.
That hole was filled on July 23, 2021, when Colombian President Ivan Duque signed a legislative decree ending the prohibition on the export of dried cannabis flower — a significant global market and a potential windfall for Flora Growth Corp. (NASDAQ: FLGC) (Profile) and its expansive global operations.
The broader industry should also benefit from this latest development since most majors, including Canopy Growth Corporation (NASDAQ: CGC), Tilray Inc. (NASDAQ: TLRY), Cronos Group Inc. (NASDAQ: CRON) and Sundial Growers Inc. (NASDAQ: SNDL), support the mainstream worldwide evolution of legal cannabis.
Colombia made history by modifying its cannabis laws, including allowing export of dried cannabis flower.
Flora's Cosechemos cultivation facility, located in Bucaramanga, Colombia, offers an ideal cannabis-growing climate and features an expansive 247-acre land package.
Free sunlight and water from natural onsite springs, along with optimized cultivation techniques, results in strong yields per cannabis plant; costs only $0.06/gram compared to $1.89 in North America.
Flora leverages cost-effective cannabis cultivation in Colombia to supply cannabis and its derivatives for portfolio of premium brands and products across several verticals.
Flora has more than 280 products, cosmetic and pharmaceutical manufacturing licenses, and 2,500-plus points of distribution across Latin America and the United States.
Colombia: A New Cannabis Star
Near-perfect growing conditions, skilled labor and friendly regulations have underscored Colombia's emergence in the legal cannabis space since the country first allowed the production of medical cannabis just over five years ago.
However, until now, dried cannabis flower, or buds, could only be processed for export as a medicinal oil or extract for fear that flowers would find their way to the black market.
The new law puts Colombia "at the forefront in terms of regulatory competitiveness," according to President Duque, adding that his country will now participate in new markets, including food, beverages, cosmetics, and textiles, in addition to pharmaceuticals.
Upon signing the decree, Duque quoted experts in saying legal cannabis will represent a $64 billion global market by 2024 while noting that cannabis will serve as a tool for "economic reactivation" in Colombia post the COVID-19 pandemic.
"According to a 2019 study, in Colombia, the cannabis sector generated 17.3 agricultural jobs per hectare," said Colombia's Minister of Justice Wilson Ruiz.
The Colombian hierarchy seems determined to catapult the country into global leadership as a legal cannabis exporter in order to boost the economy and create a lot of jobs at home.
These circumstances may play right into the hands of Flora Growth Corp. (NASDAQ: FLGC), which is focused on cannabis cultivation and processing operations in Colombia to supply international markets.
The new decree could prove to be a bonanza for established licensed producers, especially when considering the extremely low production costs and that dried cannabis flower represents the majority of sales in countries with mature markets, such as the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, and Australia.
Headquartered in Miami and already having established a globally recognized house of brands, Flora is positioned to be one of the world's lowest-cost cannabis producers and has strategically positioned itself as a global cannabis consumer packaged goods (CPG) company with a vast international distribution platform.
Flora has more than 280 products, cosmetic and pharmaceutical manufacturing licenses, and 2,500-plus points of distribution across Latin America and the United States.
Further, Flora has two separate LOIs executed for significant acquisitions and is forging partnerships to expand the breadth of its distribution domain by leveraging networks of others.
Flora fundamentally believes against vertical integration and has positioned itself to be nimble and asset light, allowing it to work with the best of the best in their respective channels to bring product to market and capture incremental revenue while derisking the prospect of entering new jurisdictions and channel segments.
Against this backdrop, the regulatory update in Colombia is likely to be a growth accelerator and supercharge revenues. Soaring revenues with high margin product is the holy grail of Wall Street.
A 25-Fold Advantage
It's no industry secret that outdoor growing is far less expensive than greenhouse cultivation, but Flora has taken it to another level in Colombia.
Free sunlight and water in three pilot plantings on 4.94 acres at Flora's Cosechemos farm allowed for testing of 30 varieties of non-psychoactive (high-cannabidiol or CBD) cannabis and optimization of its growing techniques, which resulted in a cost base of just $0.06 per gram.
That compares to $1.89 per gram in North America, calculated through an average of four major North American licensed producers.
Flora's cost is even 60% lower than its nearest Colombian peer. In response to the updated laws in Colombia, Flora promptly signed a letter of intent with an international distributor to supply dried flower and derivatives immediately following the first commercial harvest and obtaining all requisite import licenses.
With that harvest, Flora also expects to start supplying the Australian markets with medical cannabis, as well as over-the-counter CBD products via a partnership with Evergreen Pharmacare.
Production of high-CBD strains of cannabis are already well underway at Cosechemos, with prep work now being done to propagate strains high in THC, the psychoactive component in cannabis.
Moreover, an extraction lab at the facility constructed to EU-GMP standards is expected to be completed this quarter, for which Flora will seek EU-GMP certification.
As soon as Flora receives the requisite paperwork in order for it to export its cannabis products, the company will be positioned to immediately capitalize on the massive global dried cannabis flower market segment that was previously unavailable.
Ideal Climate, Plenty of Acreage
Colombia's climate is ideal for the cultivation of cannabis year-round, and Flora owns some of the country's finest farming acreage. Flora's Cosechemos farm in Bucaramanga, Colombia, covers 247 acres (10.8 million square feet).
Flora also holds the rights to another 5,268 acres (230 million square feet) licensed in Puerto Boyacá, Santander, about 170 miles southwest of Bucaramanga.
Situated on the equator, Flora's licensed land in Colombia's climate is perfect for year-round cannabis cultivation.
The property sees 12.8 hours of sunshine 365 days per year, has extremely fertile soil, and receives optimal wind conditions (3 mph average), which helps reduce risks of contamination from other plants.
The land also hosts six natural spring water deposits, meaning Flora has zero water costs.
Colombia is the cut-flower capital of the world, and a top producer of coffee, bananas and more, resulting in a highly skilled agricultural labor force that work for roughly one-tenth of comparable peers in the United States.
The combination of these factors facilitates a minimum of three harvests per year, which is up to three times that of its North American peers.
Marketing Opportunity for New Products
Unlike Canada and the U.S., where companies must essentially rely on word of mouth for awareness and branding, Colombia is removing marketing restrictions on its domestic cannabis products.
For Flora, this means advertising across its portfolio of products to drive sales at its more than 1,500 points of distribution throughout Colombia.
It could also be beneficial as it relates to an LOI with Avaria for Flora to introduce Avaria's KaLaya, an award-winning pain cream distributed across Canada to Colombia and the Americas.
The new Colombian regulations allowing cannabinoid-infused food and beverage opens the door for developing new products and introducing products already in the Flora's Kasa Wholefoods food and beverage unit.
A perfect storm brewing, the new laws dovetail with Kasa recently signing a distribution agreement with Importaciones y Asesorias Tropi S.A.S., Colombia's largest CPG distributor, which is expected to generate $10 million in annual revenue for Flora by delivering premium and sustainable canned products to Colombians, with the opportunity to expand the product line in the future.
Follow the Money: Cannabis Investment
Duque referencing a $64 billion market in 2024 seems in line with other pundit's forecasts.
Fortune Business Insights in June said it foresees the global cannabis market reaching $97.35 billion by 2026 with 32.9% compound annual growth.
Safe to say, the legal cannabis market is still growing in leaps and bounds, which breeds bullishness in major players throughout the world.
Titanic = Failed
Afghanistan = Failed
Trump = Failed
LPees = Failed
Linton = Failed
LPees 1.0 = Failed
Snoop Dog = Failed
DNA Genetics = Failed
Seth = Failed
Martha = Failed
LPees 2.0 = Failed
LPees 3.0 = Failed
Things are levelling out in the red...Lol
Marijuana
Fund
Dima Bosov brought millions of dollars from Russia to California, thinking the emerging cannabis industry would be a safe bet for easy money. He was wrong.
By MARY JANE GIBSON
AUGUST 23, 2021
Rolling Stone
LPees are doomed!
Puffed UP
Puffed out! Canada's legalized weed business flops with rush to grow the drug resulting in a 1.1 BILLION gram marijuana mountain that can't be sold as HALF of all cannabis is still bought illegally
Canada's legal weed market has been struggling since legalization in 2018
Between 2018-2020, some 500 tons of unpackaged cannabis was destroyed
In 2019 and 2020, total of almost 6 million packages of cannabis were discarded
Canadian firms currently warehousing 1.1 billion grams of harvested cannabis
Almost all of that cannabis is considered 'unsaleable' due to poor quality
Canadian authorities said consumers get half their weed from black market
Households spent $2.45billion buying non-medical pot from illicit channels
Meanwhile, Canadians spent just $2.31billion on legal purchases of weed
By ARIEL ZILBER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and REUTERS
PUBLISHED: 18:21 EDT, 8 August 2021 | UPDATED: 19:19 EDT, 8 August 2021
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Canadian marijuana manufacturers are sitting on 1.1 billion grams (2.4 million pounds) of the drug that they can't sell as the country's legalized weed industry runs out of puff.
Last October, Canadian cannabis firms had around 1.1 billion grams of harvested or processed cannabis sitting in storage. Around 95 per cent of that weed is considered ‘largely unsaleable’ because it has been spoiled by time, and because there's just too much existing supply to try and sell it.
The low quality of the products as well as the slow process by which the provinces allowed for licensed stores to sell the cannabis in the years since legalization is being blamed for the destroyed stockpiles.
Read More
Big corporate firms that rushed into the newly-legalized industry have also been blamed the for issue by expanding too quickly.
Smaller mom and pop businesses which know their clientele better say some of the rules the corporate giants want - such as growing the drug indoors, to stop teenagers with drones stealing their weed - show how poorly they understand their market.
Canadian marijuana users also prefer to get their products through illicit means as about 50 percent of pot that is consumed north of the border is obtained on the black market, according to The Walrus. It is unclear why the demand for illegally-grown weed continues to boom, although experts say it may be because illegal dealers will sell people more of the drug than their prescription allows for.
Between 2018 and 2020, Canadian producers have had to destroy 500 tons - or 985,000 pounds - of unpackaged dried cannabis, according to MJBizDaily.
A worker collects cuttings from a marijuana plant at the Canopy Growth Corporation facility in Smiths Falls, Ontario, on January 4 +3
A worker collects cuttings from a marijuana plant at the Canopy Growth Corporation facility in Smiths Falls, Ontario, on January 4
The Canadian Marijuana Index, which lists the country’s largest cannabis producers, reported an 82 percent drop since its high point in January 2018 +3
The Canadian Marijuana Index, which lists the country’s largest cannabis producers, reported an 82 percent drop since its high point in January 2018
In 2019 and 2020, companies had to throw out nearly 6 million packages of cannabis that were ready for retail.
Those included 3,783,397 packages of dried cannabis; 1.5 million packages of extracts; 714,491 packages of edibles; and 943 packages of topicals.
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The warehoused cannabis combined with the destroyed products means that at least 1.6 million kilograms of marijuana went unsold as of the end of 2020.
Companies destroy the excess cannabis by either combining it with kitty litter or using either incineration or composting.
The website cited statistics provided by Health Canada, the federal agency which regulates cannabis production in the country.
The cannabis industry was considered promising in the months leading up to the legalization. In 2017, the share values of three of Canada’s largest pot manufacturers surged by more than 200 percent.
Investors were getting rich based on hype and the promise of massive sales once legalization was official. By April 2018, there were 102 licensed producers of marijuana.
But companies apparently miscalculated the level of demand and flooded the market with an oversupply of cannabis.
Canopy Growth Corporation, a company once known as Tweed, was at one point worth more than $20billion CAD ($16bn USD).
It had several growing facilities spread out across the country, including in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Newfoundland, and Ontario.
A cart full of bagged marijuana is rolled through the corridors at the Canopy Growth Corporation headquarters in Smiths Falls, Ontario, on May 15, 2019 +3
A cart full of bagged marijuana is rolled through the corridors at the Canopy Growth Corporation headquarters in Smiths Falls, Ontario, on May 15, 2019
Since 2018, however, the firm has reported net losses of more than $3.8billion CAD ($3.2bn USD), and now has a market cap of just $7.55bn USD.
The largest Canadian marijuana producers have in total lost more than $8.8billion CAD ($7bn USD) in the last three years.
The Canadian Marijuana Index, which lists the country’s largest cannabis producers, reported an 82 percent drop since its high point in January 2018.
Canada's government appears eager to help the pot industry by cracking down on the thriving black market.
Earlier this year, Canada launched a public consultation seeking to tighten rules for individuals who are allowed to grow their own medical cannabis, in an effort to clamp down on pot seeping into black markets.
In a draft guidance issued for the consultation, Health Canada highlighted recent police raids and arrests at production sites where people were using licenses to 'cover and support large-scale illegal production and sale.'
The move comes as Canada tries to fix its ailing pot market, where illegal producers sell more annually than hundreds of licensed cultivators, even over two years after the country became the first major nation to legalize weed in 2018.
Households spent more than $2.45billion buying non-medical pot from illicit channels last year versus $2.31billion of legal purchases, according to Statistics Canada data.
'Abuse of the medical purposes framework undermines the integrity of the system that many patients and health care practitioners rely on to access cannabis to address their medical needs,' Health Canada said in the draft document.
The draft guidance for the first time sets out factors that the regulator may consider in refusing or revoking a registration for 'personal production.'
Factors include authorization of unjustified amounts and 'criminal activity and/or diversion of cannabis.'
In January, Ontario Provincial Police seized over 180,000 cannabis plants and numerous vehicles and firearms by raiding illegal cultivation facilities, many of which exploit Health Canada's personal medical weed cultivation licenses.
Under the rules, people using cannabis for medical purposes must get a daily amount authorized by medical care practitioners - doctors, nurses and social workers - to either be bought from official retailers or grown personally.
Health Canada said in December it was seeing a surge in the amount of pot personal cultivators were being authorized to grow.
The number of patients registered for purchase from federally licensed retailers was 377,024 in September last year, a 24 percent increase from June.
Meanwhile, registrations for personal cultivation grew 29 percent over the period to 43,211.
Even though personal cultivators remain a small fraction of overall patient registrations, these people are allowed to grow as much as 36 grams per day on average, compared with just 2 grams authorized for daily purchase from retailers.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9874785/Canadas-legalized-weed-business-flops-1-1-BILLION-gram-marijuana-mountain-sold.html
[color=red][/color]
BUSINESS
What Do You Do with a Billion Grams of Surplus Weed?
Cannabis legalization was supposed to be a licence to print money. Three years on, nobody is turning a profit
BY KIERAN DELAMONT
ILLUSTRATION BY BYRON EGGENSCHWILER
Published 17:03, Aug. 5, 2021
BACK IN 2018, during those months before Canada legalized recreational cannabis, things were good for the pot industry. Companies were being hyped as pioneers in “the green frontier” and “proof that money grows on trees.” Cannabis stocks were going ballistic, and three of the largest companies’ share values had each increased by more than 200 percent over the course of 2017—according to media outlet MJBizDaily, the Canadian Marijuana Index had risen by 117 percent in December of that year alone. Investors were not just making money, they were making money fast.
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Nowhere was the hype more obvious than Smiths Falls, Ontario, where a mundane press event one hot summer day in August 2018—the opening of cannabis producer Tweed’s visitors’ centre—offered a bizarre study of an industry primed for ascension. About a dozen TV cameras were present, plus photographers, reporters, dignitaries of the local business community, and politicians, all crowding through a routine facility tour. The event was a master class in buzz generation: it featured sample chocolates and an invitation to imagine them dosed with cannabis; production rooms that were still half empty and an invitation to imagine them finally full in a few short months; a gift shop and café and an invitation to imagine them packed with happy buyers. That all of it seemed somewhat half-finished could be glossed over—the promise of prosperity was obvious.
The town of Smiths Falls had come to see cannabis as a path to economic salvation. It had been hurting since 2008, when chocolatier Hershey closed shop. Tweed moving into the old chocolate plant in 2013 gave residents reasons both real and symbolic to be hopeful. As far as any of the company and government folks on the junket were concerned, Smiths Falls was ground zero for a new worldwide movement. The mayor called it the cannabis capital of the universe, and perhaps he was right. A few US states had piloted recreational cannabis, but this felt different—Canadian legalization would create a national industry with the sheen of a social revolution. Prohibition and the unequal criminalization of cannabis were, in principle, coming to an end. Global brands were in the making. Multinational corporations were on the rise. Countries across the world were going to look at Canada and be inspired—we were the future.
Is Cannabis the Answer to Everything?
Canada Made Weed Legal. But For Who?
The Big Smoke
Three years later, much of that hype has vanished, and now both industry and government are beginning thorough post-mortems of what is, and isn’t, working with pot legalization. The lavish A-list parties, so common in the early days, were petering out even before COVID-19 arrived. Barely more than half of all pot sales today are conducted through the legal market (and that milestone was only recently reached). Back in early 2019, Tweed—later renamed Canopy Growth Corporation—had a valuation north of $20 billion and active growing facilities in St. John’s, Fredericton, Bowmanville, Edmonton, and Saskatchewan, as well as two in BC’s Lower Mainland. In the last year, all seven have been closed or sold. At the original location, in Smiths Falls, layoffs are a regular occurrence. Since 2018, total reported net losses amount to more than $3.8 billion. Across the industry as a whole, total losses since 2015 are north of $10 billion.
The most poignant sign of the failure of the cannabis business, however, might be sitting in warehouses across the country. At its peak, last October, following the 2020 growing season, there was about 1.1 billion grams of harvested or processed cannabis held in storage: 95 percent of inventory has not been purchased by retailers or wholesalers, and much of it is “assumed to be largely unsaleable,” writes MJBizDaily’s Matt Lamers, whether because of degradation or excess supply. We have more pot in this country than we can possibly sell. Producers today are sitting on a massive, and predictable, oversupply that is slowly becoming worthless—and that’s going to cost a lot of companies a lot of money.
THE INDUSTRY’S WOES can be traced in part to its temporarily lucrative early relationship with investment capital. After Justin Trudeau’s Liberals took power, in 2015, elected in part on the promise of pot, large producers, including Canopy Growth and Aurora, sought out listings on a variety of Canadian stock exchanges. They were after retail investors, and producers hired third-party investor-relations firms to promote their stocks as a once-in-a-generation chance to get in on the ground floor not just of a company but of an entire industry. Strong retail investment soothed whatever lingering anxieties Bay Street might have had about the sector. “The cannabis boom was an investment banker’s dream,” wrote Mark Rendell and Tim Kiladze in a 2019 Globe and Mail article. “With so much retail investor demand, it was easy to underwrite share sales—and to dictate the terms of the game.”
In the absence of any other metrics, like revenue or sales projections, investors learned to judge a company by “funded capacity,” a rough measure of how much cannabis a given company could potentially grow on the land it possessed. The result was a production arms race: more investment meant new facilities, which meant more production, which meant more investment, which meant more money pushed into production. This cycle went on and on.
“Cannabis investors asked for a big scale of production when they should have asked for a good scale of sales,” says John Fowler, the former CEO of The Supreme Cannabis Company, one of the producers that attracted a lot of buzz early on. (Supreme’s stock price doubled over the back half of 2017, and its market cap peaked in early 2018—nearly a full year before legal pot actually went on sale.) “They shouldn’t have talked about funding capacity, thrown money behind anybody who was going to build square footage.”
The logic governing the industry ahead of legalization tended to assume that any pot a company could grow would ultimately be sold. Licensed producers were accounting for their cannabis in ways that didn’t always make sense—valuing their inventory on their balance sheets similarly to stable commodities like vegetables, which have relatively consistent market prices and are more-or-less guaranteed to sell. (That many of the executives in the industry at that time had backgrounds in alcohol and commodities, where the price of a product and its path to market are more stable, likely played a role.) Really, cannabis had neither: nobody was exactly sure what the market price for retail pot would be, nor did anyone have a concrete idea of what consumers actually wanted. But pretending otherwise made the companies look great on paper. Valuation corresponded most with funded capacity, which is how you got a $20 billion company that hadn’t sold a single gram to recreational buyers. “Gross margins in the sector are distorted as a result, making firms look more profitable than they really are,” wrote Joe Castaldo in Maclean’s in early 2018, peeling back the layers of this accounting practice.
Producers themselves often did little to dispel this idea. Fowler recalls companies keeping and storing fan leaves (leaves that contain low levels of psychoactive cannabinoids) at a higher value than they were worth to bolster their balance sheets. “This was five years ago—nobody was asking questions. All the company has to do is say, ‘Well, we’re hopeful we’re going to find a way to make oil out of this, so let’s keep it on the balance sheet.’”
But, for investors who saw stock prices going gangbusters throughout 2017 and early 2018, the weed game was already profitable. The business model at that time didn’t demand actual weed sales: selling hype, selling the potential of selling weed, was proving lucrative. Stories of everyday Canadians getting rich on pot stocks fanned the flames even further. Investment was cast as a high-risk, huge-reward opportunity. Plus, it was providing massive amounts of capital to companies that needed to build highly specialized facilities to adhere to strict government regulations. With help from this investor enthusiasm, the industry expanded to 102 licensed producers by April 2018. The investments in facilities, massive hiring sprees, and fantastical marketing budgets all followed, undeterred by projections that it would be years before most producers turned any profit.
“There were steps along the way where decisions were made by big companies that?.?.?.?made sense at the time,” says Jay Rosenthal, a long-time industry analyst. “Public markets were responding to funded capacity.?.?.?.?The more capacity you had, the more people believed your company was going to be real and therefore would invest in your stock.”
Fowler makes a similar point. “It was advantageous for companies to keep that legend alive,” he says. “When the market was still giving people credit for so many years of forward sales, nobody wanted to stick up their hand and be a wet blanket and say, ‘Hey, we don’t think those sales are going to happen.’”
In the early days of legalization, product shortages, illustrated by news footage of lineups for stores with emptied shelves, reinforced the idea that more production capacity was needed. Under pressure to quickly supply the legal market and to stop wasting bureaucratic time, Health Canada adjusted its approval process to require that companies have a facility in place before they could be licensed. The idea was to bump serious players with existing assets to the front of the line and stop approving licences for facilities that were still speculative. By late 2019, the market had flipped into oversupply, but even then, little was done to slow the pace of production. The capitalist logic of the market had pushed large producers to make ever more cannabis—to strive tirelessly to outproduce their competition, to drive down production costs, and to flood the market with more and more pot products whether people wanted them or not.
LEGALIZATION HAS ALWAYS had critics from within the cannabis world, people who see a lost opportunity to support smaller, more sustainable producers as the bedrock of the cannabis industry. The know-how already existed in the many operations that had supplied unregulated markets for generations. Rather than constructing a hybrid system that legitimized parts of the existing cannabis market, the federal government set up a highly regulated system over which Health Canada maintained significant control. The result was an industry that was politically palatable but whose corporate character could feel alienating to some veterans of the cannabis world.
By the time legalization took effect, Tim Barnhart had already been selling weed commercially for a few years, beyond the reach of the Canadian government, out of his Legacy 420 store on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, east of Toronto. He has watched the way cannabis legalization has played out from an Indigenous vantage: seeing corporations claim to be pioneering what he was already doing pretty sustainably for his own people.
Barnhart also saw some of these well-funded companies using their influence to impact regulations in selfish ways. In one memorable example, Canopy Growth’s former CEO, Bruce Linton, lobbied hard against outdoor growing, famously floating the theory to Senate members visiting the company’s facility that teenagers could ransack a licensed grower via drones.
“Had you had medical growers in there, and Indigenous Canadians, I think you would have had a set of good hybrid regulations, but what you have today is the financialization of [cannabis], and it’s not working for anybody—not even the LPs,” Barnhart says, referring to licensed producers.
There is a growing sense that things have not gone to plan. Since its high point in January 2018, the Canadian Marijuana Index has dropped by about 82 percent. There has also been turnover among many high-profile executives—Linton and Fowler, as well as leaders at Aphria and 48North, among them. The largest companies still rarely, if ever, report quarterly profits as an era of mergers and acquisitions begins to consolidate the market. The first half of 2021 saw Canopy Growth’s purchase of Supreme and the merger of Tilray and Aphria—two of the first and largest companies on the scene.
“Just as I don’t think any company in the industry would tell you they’ve gotten every decision right, nor should we expect that the federal government has gotten every decision right,” says Ryan Greer, former co-chair of the National Cannabis Working Group. The government is required to undertake a review of the Cannabis Act’s wider impact starting no later than this October, but the industry is getting a head start by leading its own analysis, highlighting issues like burdensome regulations and supply chain issues—or, as Greer summarizes, “general overall regulatory burden. It is a very costly and cumbersome process to navigate.”
Some now see an industry that has strayed from its original anti-prohibition path and failed in ways that feel distinctly capitalist. “There are people who aren’t able to fill their full prescriptions with legal cannabis because of costs,” says Caryma Sa’d, a lawyer and the executive director of cannabis-advocacy organization NORML Canada. A recent survey conducted by Abacus Data for Medical Cannabis Canada found that those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market.
And yet, cannabis producers are throwing away more product than ever before. Since 2018, nearly 450 million grams of unpackaged cannabis have been destroyed, according to reporting from MJBizDaily. Nearly 280 million grams of that was from 2020 alone, representing almost 20 percent of all production that year. (An “expected” loss in commercial growing is between 5 and 8 percent.) Add to that nearly 3.8 million finished packages of dried flower, 1.5 million packages of extracts, and more than 700,000 packaged edibles.
“Maybe this is a feature of capitalism,” Sa’d says. “We are throwing out food while people go hungry; we have empty houses and people are homeless. So to see that replicated in the cannabis space is unfortunate but perhaps unsurprising.”
The question is not whether there is money to be made in cannabis—almost all experts agree that the pot business is viable in the long run—but why the industry’s most well-funded producers have been so consistently unable to turn a profit on something once talked about as a licence to print money. Canadians spent roughly $2.6 billion on legal cannabis in 2020—a healthy amount, but far short of the $6.5 billion that CIBC projected in 2018. Even in a year that saw legal cannabis finally comprise more than half the market, the biggest companies are still in the red: Aurora reported more than $3 billion in losses for 2020; Canopy Growth’s losses totalled $1.3 billion; Tilray lost $271 million (US). As Dan Sutton, CEO of the boutique producer Tantalus Labs, put it in an interview with BIV, “Today there are no consistently profitable cannabis cultivators—big or small—in Canada. Zero.”
WHILE THE FINANCIAL losses keep piling up, the industry is beginning to change. After a sluggish rollout, more “microcultivators” are gaining licences for smaller craft operations. A smaller scale of production could be a more sustainable business model, but even these seem ill-fitting within a heavily regulated cannabis economy. Forced, in most cases, to sell to a provincial wholesaler along with everyone else in the sector, craft producers can struggle to gain traction when they come up against the marketing departments of the Auroras and Canopies. The business model that underwrote the early days of legalization has yet to stabilize, and a long-expected phase of difficult bankruptcies, mergers, and consolidation—meaning mass layoffs and abandoned growing facilities—is here.
A drive through Tyendinaga or Kettle Point, Ontario, on the other hand, offers a window into another way forward: a sovereign, self-regulating Indigenous cannabis trade. Shops along the road are located just a few kilometres away from the field where the cannabis is grown. The quality is often quite good. Some of the shops are supported by Legacy 420’s nation-to-nation wholesale and quality-testing services. If nothing else, these operations demonstrate that safe cannabis sales aren’t the exclusive dominion of highly regulated shareholder capitalism—that safely growing and selling pot need not require a degree in capital finance.
“Done the right way, it can be a lucrative industry,” Barnhart says. “But Canada didn’t get it right. So now they have a costly product, a surplus that’s all dried out, and I don’t know what they’re going to do. There’s going to be huge corporate write-down again, and I’m not sure where that’s going to leave a lot of these players.”
The days of big corporate cannabis companies dominating the market may be on the wane, and a billion grams of weed they can’t sell could only accelerate that process. As Fowler says, turbulence at the major producers seems unavoidable for the foreseeable future—it could take two years to work through, it could take ten. “Unfortunately, the exuberance of the early days of our cannabis industry—we’ll live under that shadow for a long time.”
KIERAN DELAMONT
Kieran Delamont is a writer and photographer based in Nova Scotia, located in Mi'kma'ki—the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. His work has appeared in Broadview, Maisonneuve, TVO, and elsewhere. He has been writing about the cannabis industry since 2016.
BYRON EGGENSCHWILER
Byron Eggenschwiler has done artwork for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and GQ.
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Bruce Ponzi!
1.0 fail
2.0 fail
3.0 fail
4.0 doomed
Chuck knows how to Ponzi canna naive suckers...
Chuck Rifici of the Auxly Cannabis Group discussed the future, “Demand is greatly outstripping supply.
https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2018/11/28/highlights-of-ottawas-hemp-expo/
The seed of freedom was planted by Dana Larsen & All.
Canadians & Americans alike have join in and LPees Ponzi has failed.
https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2016/03/29/dont-wait-to-overgrow-canadas-unjust-marijuana-laws/
Who wants to show i.d. to purchase bunk weed for a premium?
Doomed.
http://overgrowcanada.com/
once you go craft, you can never go back. Eddy Lepp.
Craft cannabis is a delicacy; although, it is often difficult to find growers that produce quality weed.
Well, look no further because here are our top 5 picks of craft cannabis growers who have mastered the art of cultivating exquisite weed that will knock your socks off.
What is craft cannabis?
The term craft cannabis has been diluted in recent years.
Technically, it should refer to cannabis that is grown in small-batches using cutting edge cultivation techniques.
This produces an exceptional flower that is considered boutique by comparison to most other cannabis.
These next 5 growers cultivate some of the best quality weed you can find in Canada.
SPACE BROS
One of the most hype brands in Canadian craft cannabis is Space Bros.
With cutting edge medical facilities, Space Bros breeds and pheno-hunts thousands of strains a year, selecting only the top handful to provide the highest quality products.
These AAAA nugs are organically grown with strong terps and a clean burn.
Not only do they have outstanding weed, but they also have one of the most sought after brands in the market with a lot of hype surrounding their new launch.
Space Bros Craft Cannabis Growers
Space Bros will be launching its in-house branded strains this summer.
However, I was lucky enough to try out some of their pre-launch cultivars.
El Chapo, Dallas Bentley OG, and Pink Grizzly all have authentic gassy terps for all you fuel lovers out there.
Although a little small in bud size since they’re fully organically grown, these nugs are coated in trichomes and have strong flavours.
Not to mention they pull smooth and burn clean.
Sacred Gardens Craft Series
Another remarkable grower is Sacred Gardens Craft Exotic Cannabis. Based on Vancouver Island, Sacred Gardens pheno-hunts for strains with unique terpene profiles and exotic flavours cultivated using micro-cultivation methodology.
Their weed is representative of what true Canadian craft cannabis actually is.
Sacred Gardens Craft strains have high THC content and impeccable quality control including batch ID, date Harvested, and date packed as labelled on every package.
Sacred Gardens Craft Cannabis Grower
Some of my personal favourite strains from Sacred Gardens are Rainbow Driver, Wedding Crasher, and Dosie-Pie.
These strains have exceptional terpene profiles that are sweet with a bit of spiciness to them.
These glistening nugs are packaged in resealable bags that come with a 2-way humidity pack to keep the weed at optimal freshness.
Unlicensed Producer
Unlicensed Producer, based in Manitoba, has a long history in growing and is known to be one of the top growers in Canada.
Unlicensed Producer is infamous for growing top quality strains that have spot-on terpene profiles and are covered in trichomes.
These beautiful nugs are hard to find and one of the most exclusive drops on the market.
Ghost Drops Craft Cannabis Growers
Some of their top strains include First Class Funk, Banana Punch, and the renowned Gorilla Glue 4.
You can rely on Unlicensed Producer to bring out the strongest and most accurate terpene profiles for these strains.
Unlicensed Producer’s version of Gorilla Glue 4 has the truest and closest terpene profile to the original G.G.4 strain.
Unlicensed Producer does exclusive, small-batch releases through Ghost Drops at https://ghostdrops.net/ which almost always sell out immediately.
But be prepared to drop some bank because this luxury weed is quite pricey.
Gastown Craft Cannabis
Gastown Craft Cannabis is a full-service producer of in-house cultivation and extraction.
They have deep roots in the BC cannabis scene and are known for their consistency, variety, and branding.
The team is well recognized as some of the leading professionals in craft cannabis, producing beautiful nugs packaged in their iconic gas cans.
Gastown Craft Cannabis
Some of my personal favourites are Pink Gas and Pine Tar which has gassy and piney terps and are heavy hitters with strong sedative effects.
Then there’s the bright and citrusy mimosa with uplighting effects and one of the most pleasant smelling orangey terp profiles I’ve smelled.
The quality of every batch is consistent and reliable so you can expect great weed for every order.
Prohibition Farms
And to end it with a banger, Prohibition Farms is a Manitoba-based grower and retailer of some of Canada’s cleanest cannabis.
The flower is grown with care and attention without any pesticides, PGR, or sprays, producing clean, sticky, and potent buds on par with some of the finest cannabis in California.
What is notable about Prohibition Farms’ weed is that they are PGR-free.
PGR is a growth chemical used by some growers that act as plant steroids which you want to avoid smoking. Prohibition Farms’ Chief Cultivator produces incredible looking buds au naturel without using chemical enhancers like PGR.
Because of that, their weed is some of the cleanest burning on the market with ash as white as snow.
You know you’re weed is clean when your ash looks like coke…
One of their top strains is the Mac 1.
Although there are many versions of the Mac 1 by different growers, Prohibition Farms’ version of Mac 1 stands out.
This pheno was hunted from authentic Capulator seeds boasting a very unique terpene profile for this strain.
Instead of the usual citrusy terpenes on typical Mac 1s, the Prohibition Farms’ version has meaty and savoury terps.
Another top strain would have to be their LA Kush Cake.
I speak from personal experience– this Indica dominant hybrid strain will lay you out.
They also do exclusive in-house drops including French Toast, Milkbone, and one of my personal favourites– That’s What She Said (dropping soon)
Whether you’re a connoisseur or just looking for good weed, these top 5 craft cannabis growers are definitely must-tries.
Their craft cannabis strains have some of the most exquisite terpene profiles that taste good and burn clean.
Smoking boutique weed is an indulgence; once you go craft, you can never go back.
No legacy canna folks will ever buy lp,s shares.
LP model is designed to fail.
Cannabis investers are straight dudes with refer madness mentallity.
They don,t understand the canna market, nor the culture...
Stuck in a Ponzi caper.
They are doomed, but they do not know it yet.
"There's a bunch of folks out there who made careers off of being hawkishly anti-weed and sending generations of people away who, overnight all of a sudden, became CEOs for burgeoning pot corporations,” said Baruchel.
https://www.cp24.com/entertainment-news/jay-baruchel-talks-cannabis-legalization-in-canadian-audible-original-highly-legal-1.5550573
Another corrupt LP bites the dust.
No jail time for these white crooks?
Funny how rules are different for legacy and stock market bunk...
Robinson revealed that 200 kilograms (441 pounds) of cannabis obtained by Bonify was considered “unauthorized product for sale,” although he said he was UNABLE TO DETERMINE ITS ORIGIN.
Priceless!!!
Cops do go after folks who grow 4 plants in Manitoba & Quebec.
Ho well.
"The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s federal police force, did not conduct a criminal investigation into the matter, nor did the local Winnipeg Police Service."
Canadian cannabis cultivator Bonify Holdings Corp. is shutting down, 2½ years after its sales license was suspended because the company sold illegally sourced marijuana into the regulated market.
Another Canadian company, CannTrust, is currently restructuring after violating federal cannabis regulations.
The impending closure of Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Bonify was announced in an Aug. 12 email to shareholders from CEO Pierre Morris. The email was obtained by MJBizDaily.
“The wind-down started on August 9, 2021 and will conclude in the next few weeks,” Morris wrote in the email, in which he cites “substantial challenges since (Bonify’s) inception, not the least of which was the suspension of its sales license for most of 2019.”
That license was reinstated by Health Canada in late 2019, and the company resumed selling recreational marijuana in Canada in mid-2020.
The privately held company brought products to market in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan after the reinstatement and “realized over $1 million in gross sales in 2021,” Morris noted in his email to shareholders.
He added that Bonify “stabilized internal processes, increased production and significantly cut its operational costs.”
“Unfortunately, these changes were not sufficient to achieve profitability or positive cash flows and Bonify continued to suffer operational losses through 2019, 2020 and 2021.”
Although Bonify “attempted to find new sources of capital, partnerships to grow its revenue base and a purchaser for the business,” Morris wrote, those efforts failed.
His email to Bonify shareholders was first reported by Canadian cannabis news website StratCann.
In an email to MJBizDaily, Morris said he had “nothing further to add” in relation to that report.
Bonify’s illicit-cannabis scandal came to light in December 2018.
Health Canada soon confirmed that Bonify had released “unapproved cannabis products” for sale in the neighboring province of Saskatchewan.
Bonify recreational cannabis products in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were subsequently recalled.
The company hired George Robinson, then CEO of defunct cannabis company RavenQuest BioMed, to undertake an internal investigation.
Robinson revealed that 200 kilograms (441 pounds) of cannabis obtained by Bonify was considered “unauthorized product for sale,” although he said he was unable to determine its origin.
Three Bonify executives were terminated with cause in relation to the scandal, Robinson told media during a news conference at Bonify’s Winnipeg facility.
Bonify’s authority to sell cannabis was suspended by Health Canada in February 2019 but reinstated that October.
In November 2019, the Winnipeg Free Press reported that Bonify had reached out to shareholders to raise short-term capital as it sought acquisition by a larger company.
Despite the license suspension, Bonify was not fined for the violation by Health Canada, the Canadian marijuana regulator confirmed to MJBizDaily this year.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s federal police force, did not conduct a criminal investigation into the matter, nor did the local Winnipeg Police Service.
https://mjbizdaily.com/canadian-cultivator-bonify-shutting-down-in-wake-of-illegal-cannabis-scandal/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=MJD_20210817_NEWS_Daily
Exclusive: Ed Rosenthal, The 'Ganja Guru,' On Home Cultivation And The Cannabis Industry
By Nicolás José Rodriguez via El Planteo.
"The ganja guru," Ed Rosenthal, is an international authority on cannabis horticulture, as well as an author, educator, social activist and legalization pioneer.
Co-founder of High Times magazine, Ed is a professor at Oaksterdam University in Oakland, California, and author of "Ed Rosenthal's Marijuana Grower's Handbook," a book that, since 1978, has inspired millions of people to learn the best marijuana growing techniques.
In 2002, Ed was prosecuted and his case influenced public opinion in favor of state medical marijuana laws. At the age of 77, the professor and author puts into perspective the advances of the home cultivation movement, raises some questions inherent to the industry and offers a few clues to think about the future of legalization.
Everyone should have the right to grow their own marijuana
Since Ed began championing the cause of home cultivation, 50 years ago, the movement has achieved some degrees of freedom in terms of where we can grow our cannabis and under what rules. However, he believes this is an incomplete revolution and that there are still many rights to conquer.
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The horticulturist explains that there are several state laws in the United States that allow people to consume and buy, but not grow on their own cannabis. For example, in the state of Washington, where people cannot currently grow, but can buy cannabis in licensed dispensaries.
Why home cultivation?
First of all, home cultivation is about reclaiming pleasure, collective and individual enjoyment. "Growing a plant is a pleasure," says Rosenthal.
Another reason to support home cultivation is a question of health: "When we grow we know what we are consuming and thus we can avoid consuming pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers".
ed rosenthal
And, finally, there are reasons for social justice. "It is much cheaper (and therefore more accessible to everyone) to grow cannabis naturally, rather than going out and buying it," Ed adds.
"Marijuana use may not be addictive, but growing it is. There are people who don't use marijuana anymore, but they still like to cultivate the plant. Growing is very addictive, and probably, the reason is that of anthropomorphism: marijuana has stages of growth: a vegetative stage, a reproductive stage, like human beings."
From 'marijuana' to 'cannabis': the resignification of a plant
Since the late 1970s, the U.S. has seen an explosion of home cultivation and the cannabis culture has spread around the world. In part, thanks to the work of people like Ed.
Since then, the meaning of marijuana has mutated: stepping from being a countercultural revolutionary flag to being a commodity, a lifestyle, and a life-enhancing medicine, that stimulates productive, relaxed, and happy individuals who abide by the dominant social rules.
Ed finds it very interesting that cannabis has gone from being a pariah to being considered an essential product during the pandemic. And believes that, in part, this was due to a question of social control: if people were going to stay at home, the government understood that it would be much healthier for them to consume marijuana rather than alcohol.
Ed describes the expansion of cannabis culture internationally as a driver of global change. “Something similar to what is happening in the music industry”.
"Like with Seth Rogen smoking a joint on TV, how do you know where that kid can travel with his message? Everywhere, of course! There's an international aspect to the expansion of our movement and there's also a strong regional aspect."
The experienced horticulturist states that a particular gene pool can be grown in different areas because of its resistance to disease or other environmental conditions.
Varieties and cultivation techniques differ in yield by zone, and yields vary according to latitudes. All these aspects influence each region to develop different ways of relating to the plant and different cannabis cultures that contribute to legalizing the plant.
Legalization in perspective
Ed Rosenthal believes that the advance of legalization in California progressed as a matter of racial justice, on the one hand; and, on the other, as a cultural change that swept the entire country, starting in 1973 when marijuana was decriminalized for the first time in Oregon.
According to Ed, once marijuana was presented as a medical issue, "more and more people became familiar with it because more people were using it." General acceptance of marijuana grew and "reached the majority of voters sometime in the late 1990s in California."
And he clarifies that "in Northern California, growers were notably absent in the push for legalization, a good portion of them wanted it to remain illegal to continue to have a market with inflated prices because of the risk of getting caught."
"It was a long-term process, with tipping points, it took 50 years, but society went from being two-thirds against it to maybe two-thirds in favor of it. Certainly a majority. And a good example of that would be Oklahoma, which is a very conservative state, voted for Trump the second time, but also 70% voted in favor of medical marijuana. This shows how, even in a conservative state, concerted effort can make change", he analyzes.
ed rosenthal snoop dogg
"I think there are a number of international companies that are trying to get now into various places in South America. This has its good and bad points, but there is no reason why cannabis has to be anything but regional," explains the "Ganja Guru."
According to Ed, there is no reason why you can't produce cannabis in cooperatives or have both home growing, small-scale production and industrial production.
"My main concern is that people have the right to grow their marijuana. The closer the consumer is to the flower, the easier it is for cannabis to stay regional. That's why I don't mind giant industrial cannabis companies, as long as people have the right to grow their own at home."
California: a beacon for the industry?
The state is often touted as a beacon for the industry. However, Ed rejects the idea of making California a model for-export .
Laconic, the septuagenarian author states, "I don't agree with the idea of California being a beacon for the industry. California is not a recipe or a silver bullet."
Rosenthal explains that California has made it very difficult to enter the industry.
First, many counties don't allow the industry at all and don't allow outdoor home growing, while state law restricts home growers to six plants.
"So if you want to grow a bunch of small plants (in California) you're breaking the law, even if they don't produce much. And there are a lot of reasons why people might want to grow small plants. It's a matter of space and it takes less time to do it. Also, people need more varieties for their own use."
Ed explains that there is also a problem of limited licenses, which makes ordinary people and companies compete for them, and believes that marijuana "should be an open market".
He offers an example: if people pass the hygienic and other business requirements, "they should be able to open a cannabis store. I don't think everyone should have to pay millions for licenses. This creates an inequitable situation and makes it very difficult for people to enter the market."
Another problem in California, according to Ed, is the method for counting plants that determines how much people can grow, and argues that "counting the number of plants is a totally unscientific, unproductive and useless method that should be eliminated."
"The idea of labeling plants is ridiculous -can you imagine if we did that with corn or wheat or something like that? I'm sure in the future these methods will be eliminated because they're stupid and they slow down the industrial use of the plant, it triggers every cost you can imagine and it's bad for the environment."
Ed explains that often in California, people are forced to grow larger plants that are very inefficient and, again, like a good teacher, he clarifies with an example:
"Let's take a typical plant. You know, it's five feet tall, let's say. It spends a lot of its time vegetating, growing a lot of leaves and branches, which are not harvested. So, it spends a lot of time in a useless state for us. Smaller plants make it possible to shorten flowering times and ensure a steady home supply of cannabis for the user."
As to which method of recording and measuring crops he recommends, Ed advises concentrating on the canopy of the plants, the shade casted by the plants on the ground: "California should rely on science to measure the number of plants. That is, on the amount of space and the amount of light it receives under certain environmental conditions and surface area."
Cannabis, Social Equity and Mobility between Social Classes
In addition to regulatory and technical issues, Ed points out that California still owes a huge debt to racial minorities and social classes that have been historically criminalized for cannabis use and points to social equity programs that seek to enable small businesses to enter the industry.
"If there was ease of entry into the market, there would be no need for an equity program."
Simply put, Ed tells us that if people had enough money to get a license similar to a grocery store, in general, it wouldn't be a restricted situation. They would just do it. "But here they're saying, 'oh no,' only a certain number of licenses, 'sorry,' we only have 12 licenses available and no, no, no license for you."
Rosenthal believes that, part of the reason many states proceed this way, is because of a tax issue, as it's easier to tax a few large corporations "than it is to go out and collect from a lot of small farmers."
Ed points to "bureaucratic requirements that are designed to protect people who are already in business and make it very expensive to open a cannabis store."
In fact, licenses can cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of USD.
Rosenthal calls these license programs a "social inequity programs," adding, "In Nevada, for example, just to apply, you need USD 500,000. That's part of the inequity program. And it's a class issue. It's about a difference between social classes that the regulators don't understand."
He warns that often the economic need of some people enrolled in social equity programs allows them to be used as fronts by more powerful investors who remain in the shadows.
"I'm not saying that social equity is bad, but it happens that sometimes these programs include people who opportunistically find supposed partners who have been harmed by criminal laws, to put together purported social equity ventures, to then, buy them out as soon as is legally possible."
To reverse this process of "social inequity," Rosenthal proposes more and better training of the industry's workforce in the state: "If they really wanted to achieve social equity in this industry, what they should be doing is funding internship programs and entrepreneurial training."
Ed's idea is not new. Basically, the professor argues that the industry should serve the social ascent of the industry's workers through investment in education. This, for him, means social equity in cannabis and a contribution to social justice that is possible.
"My idea is that people really move between social classes."
"If what you really want to do is to achieve progress, to move society at large forward, what you need to do is to make the entry into the marketplace not as arduous and costly as it is now and give tools to producers to improve their business. This is a business and everyone who wants to have it should be licensed and pay taxes."
Ed refers to licensing on an ongoing basis as a possible way out of the current scheme.
"Now in California they've licensed home cooking so people can sell baked goods or, you know, different things. Well, why not do the same thing then for cannabis?". He adds, "This would prevent that when people buy cannabis, a lot of that money would leak out of the community."
Social classes and unionization in the cannabis industry
Rosenthal believes that unions should have a place in cannabis, as there is a lot of labor in the sector.
"And even with mechanization and automation, there will always be a certain amount of labor. And I think it would be good to have unions in both the production and retail phases of cannabis."
Rosenthal believes that workers will have fair pay and working conditions while preventing the exploitation of migrant workers who come to California with the illusion of earning unthinkable sums in their home countries. And often, find themselves living in exploitative conditions, doing monotonous, repetitive work with little rest under no health and safety standards.
Cannabis appellations
In the 1970s, growers went to Northern California to forge (for better or worse) the first cannabis region widely recognized in pop culture. A region that is considered a mecca of self-management and life outside of the conservative white American suburbs typical of the post-war era.
One of the strategies in vogue in California to enhance the value of cannabis products from Northern California are the regimes of appellation of origin -as with wine.
Producers in Mendocino county, in the northern part of the state, are preparing regulations to make their cannabis a distinct product that takes advantage of the region's growing cannabis reputation to penetrate market niches.
In this regard, Rosenthal considers the system "controversial". "Because producers tend to change the terroir, the native soil in which the plants are grown".
Given that they alter local soils, why should they have that designation? On the other hand, Ed says that despite what most growers think -that they have "native" varieties or landraces, in reality, these strains are not landraces, and are constantly being manipulated.
"The reason growers arrived in the 'emerald triangle,' in California, was not because of the good soil or the wonderful climate, which they definitely don't have. If you really want to grow good cannabis, what you want is lots of sunlight, UV radiation and a good amount of heat. You don't need to come to Humboldt."
"You don't see farmers running to the mountains upstate to grow corn or vegetables. The only reason people went up there is because of the difficult interdiction by the police. Many of them have done illegal things as far as the environment is concerned, like leaking nutrients into the soil and leaching fuels into the watershed which kills native vegetation."
He says with a smile, "This is going to get me a lot of hate, of hate mail.”
The Tomato Model
Rosenthal believes there should be room for everyone in the cannabis industry and explains what he calls the "Tomato Model”, a strategy for low-scale cannabis production.
The Guru explains that "there are international companies growing tomatoes and, in parallel, there are farmers grouped in regional forums, cooperatives, chambers and individual farmers or gardeners who can sell their tomatoes on the side of the road and can compete in the 'boutique segment' with an industrial tomato."
"More people grow their own tomatoes at home for their own consumption than all the industrial tomato groups combined. And I think, if we had smart regulations, that's what would happen in cannabis," he clarifies.
Ed says he doesn't mind that there are multinational industry organizations that certainly contribute to the advancement of the industry. But he clarifies that "this progress should not proceed amidst restrictions for individuals and home growers."
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cannabis/21/08/22452245/exclusive-ed-rosenthal-the-ganja-guru-on-home-cultivation-and-the-cannabis-industry
The current market demand is for higher levels of THC, the main psychoactive compound that puts the high in pot. But master grower Dittmer believes that as consumers mature so too will their tastes, which is why smaller growers like Mariwell are experimenting with and developing more complex terpene profiles, smells and flavours.
“If you can create products your competitors don’t have, it puts you in a good position,” he said. Terpenes, he added, are “where the industry goes next” and that the days of simply catering to stoners seeking a bigger high are likely coming to an end.
McAllister said Canadians are discovering more uses for cannabis — which remains legal for adults only — including as a sedative, to boost energy, to increase appetite or as an anti-inflammatory.
“We’re definitely seeing a positive shift in awareness of the cannabis consumer to look beyond just THC,” said George Smitherman, president and CEO of the Cannabis Council of Canada. “They’re discovering there’s a lot more to the cannabis plant than THC — we’re going to see that evolution.”
Added Wiggins, the consultant: “You don’t buy wine by the alcohol content, but, now, people are buying cannabis by (the level of) THC. Terpenes provide the mood of the high, the type of the high.”
https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/no-light-pollution-no-pricy-hydro-at-sunshiny-outdoor-pot-farm
Canopy Growth still is a buy
It has been a sobering year for Canopy Growth so far, and the stock has fallen more than 26% in value year to date -- even as the Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF is up 12%. For all the potential the company believes it possesses, including its goal of being in the U.S. market within a year, it has continued to underperform. The stock trades at an egregious multiple of 12 times its future revenue (rivals Tilray and Aurora Cannabis trade at multiples of just 7 and 5, respectively) and remains vastly overvalued. These latest results do little to change that, which is why, despite its struggles this year, it wouldn't be surprising to see the pot stock continue to fall further in the weeks and months ahead.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/08/17/3-troubling-numbers-from-canopy-growths-q1-results/