Marijuana Predictions 2021 – How Did We Handle Our Crystal Ball?

This article originally appeared on Cannabis.net and was republished with permission.

About a year ago I wrote some predictions for 2021. I thought now would be a good time to check my performance. At the end of this year I will give another forecast for 2022. However, I believe that there will be no “big” changes in the next year other than those expected. We are currently in full legalization requests.

Still, let’s take a closer look at how I dealt with my psychic pot skills in retrospect.

Photo by Polina Kovaleva from Pexels

What I misunderstood:

Cannabis is fully legalized in North America

I was so close! Mexico is slated to vote on its cannabis system in the next five days, if that goes through, two-thirds of North America would have fully legalized. The US was the big disappointment. Not only did the Democrats hold the presidency, a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, they all made the public say “YES”. for legalization. What have you done? They waited!

They waited for Republicans to come up with a much simpler bill that could potentially achieve much of the social justice that the Democrats wanted to promote with their bills. The problem with reforming social justice through legalization laws is that there will be some tax conservatives who oppose it.

You have to deal with it, you cannot force such reparations. You can only create opportunities and then use taxes to create some sort of retroactive system to empower communities negatively affected by the war on drugs. However, this should take the form of social programs that help ex-inmates get jobs, loans, coaching, education, etc. You don’t accomplish this by giving a percentage of the licenses to the people concerned.

This is something that the Democrats don’t really understand. It could be because a large chunk of lawmakers are millionaires and completely disconnected from the grassroots they purportedly serve. Having weed licenses in minority communities doesn’t fix anything, it just creates a welfare system for a few with the hope of helping many.

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Since the USA could not make a decision on legalization – I missed my forecast a little. I am still reasonably confident that by the end of the year Mexico will happen “something” that resembles a closed framework.

Hemp tests are increasing

Unfortunately, another one that I thought was a safe deal again was the US decided to go completely on Uncle Sam on the tests. Currently, a hemp plant has a low test threshold to be considered hemp (below 1%). The bill should raise the limit to 3%, which is still very low. But nothing seems to be moving here either. This is kind of a disappointment, considering that increasing the THC limit on hemp would actually make it easier for hemp farmers to grow more diverse crops, taking these microdoses of THC to their advantage. We have to see what happens in the future.

Photo by Esther Kelleter / Getty Images

What I understood correctly:

COVID jobs and the cannabis industry

The cannabis industry now has more than 321,000 jobs and continues to grow. As more and more states were legalized and the federal government toyed with the idea, cannabis actually came as a relief for the Covid pandemic. Combine that with the “Great Resignation,” where more people quit their regular jobs and move to other sectors – my predictions about job growth were spot on. In fact, we will likely be near 400,000 cannabis jobs in the US by the end of this year.

New brands of cannabis

Justin Bieber, Jay Z, and a host of other celebrities created new cannabis brands this year. While these are still celebrity brands, we’ve seen this trend increase over the course of 2021. No name brands team up with high-ranking celebrities and they make sales overnight!

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However, along with the increase in prominent brands, many new products came out in 2021 and we can only expect this trend to continue in 2022, especially with international trade around the corner.

New paradigm for drugs

This is pretty tough, but I’ll give myself a win here too. The reason for this is that the psychedelic revolution really started in 2021. There have been numerous incredible discoveries made about psychedelics and mental health, and I can’t help but wonder if cannabis was causing this shift.

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While we are not quite in a “new paradigm” yet, the vast majority of people are now open to discussing cannabis as their medicine and their preference as a recreational activity. Talking about mushrooms or ketamine is no longer a taboo, and even Dr. Hart got on Joe Rogan’s podcast on “Therapeutic Heroin.”

If that’s not a paradigm shift, then I don’t know what.

How will I fare in 2022? I’ll drop my predictions at the end of this month.

This article originally appeared on Cannabis.net and was republished with permission.