Regulate cannabis like fish – Cannabis | weed | marijuana

Regulate cannabis like fish? Excuse me what? According to Leah Heise, the cannabis industry can learn a lot from commercial fishing.

An experienced cannabis executive, Leah has served as CAO of Ascend Wellness Holdings, CEO of Women Grow, CXO of 4Front Ventures, and President of the Chesapeake Integrated Health Institute.

During her time at Ascend, Leah focused on growing the company from 73 employees to over 1300 in less than 18 months, growing the company from $19 million in 2019 revenue to a market cap of $1.6 billion. dollars in 2021.

Leah is also a medical cannabis patient, having discovered the herb after being hospitalized over 35 times for pancreatitis.

Leah Heise is a cannabis expert. Their expertise is unparalleled, unlike the so-called “experts” in the media who spread drug war propaganda.

So when she says the cannabis industry has a lot to learn from commercial fishing, we sit up and take notice.

Regulate cannabis like fish? Say something?

Regulation of cannabis before stigmatization

Leah Heise

With her experience in the regulatory landscape, Leah knows what works and what is doomed to fail. And unfortunately, most legal states have regulated cannabis from a position of stigma.

“We do everything little by little, through legal proceedings. “It’s very costly to the system and there’s just a better, more efficient way to do it,” Leah says. “And I think that possible regulation similar to a commercial fishing industry could be the way to go.”

Of course, Leah points out that there are other options, and this is just one of many ideas. But she says, “These regulators need to understand what they are regulating.”

“They do it from a perspective of stigma and lack of education,” Leah says. “We need to turn back a hundred years of stigma and propaganda.”

Whether it’s racial stigma or the false belief that cannabis will corrupt your brain, Leah values ​​education. From scientific papers proving the effectiveness of cannabis to patient reports to studies linking legal cannabis to fewer cases of domestic violence and alcoholism.

“The industry and the factory need rebranding,” says Leah. “It’s not Cheech and Chong. It’s all of them; it is diverse. Anyone could use it, from your great-grandmother to your child, depending on what they have. It won’t cause their brain to die or their IQ to go down.”

Regulators need education

Simply put, the public (and many regulators) are uninformed about cannabis. Drug warriors amplify the alleged harm while marginalizing the medical and therapeutic benefits.

But how would regulating cannabis like fish help? Leah admits that if the government gets involved, a strong regulator needs to be created.

“Or just let the states do it,” she says. “We don’t necessarily need another layer on top.”

But let’s assume that the federal government actually steps in and implements national cannabis regulations. What can we learn from the commercial fishing industry?

Regulate cannabis like fish

What can the cannabis industry learn from commercial fishing? How do you regulate cannabis like fish?

“Fishing is a highly regulated industry,” says Leah. “Because the government is trying to balance the interests of environmental groups with the interests of the commercial fishing industry.”

Yes, they are separate products, but both are natural and come from the earth. Likewise, generations of people work in the industry, whether they are multiple generations of fishermen (and women). Or the cannabis industry’s legacy farmers (particularly in black and brown communities).

There is a problem of overfishing in commercial fishing. “To save the planet and the fishery itself, the federal government stepped in,” says Leah.

And she sees opportunities for the cannabis industry and its regulators to learn from the commercial fishing industry.

Commercial fishing regulators do not regulate from a stigma perspective. “I haven’t seen a single state,” Leah says, referring to states where cannabis is legal, “where there aren’t massive lawsuits. And even with Schedule III, there will be lawsuits.”

Learn from the commercial fishing industry

Leah favors a more comprehensive approach to cannabis regulation that is modeled on the successes of the commercial fishing industry.

“They design so-called fishery management plans,” she says. “Scientists in the government will come forward and say, ‘Okay, we’re starting to see the scallops collapse in the Atlantic. We are seeing a decline in the number of new pollocks. And we need to develop a fisheries management plan to achieve this.’”

According to Leah, the commercial fishing industry has councils with various stakeholders, from environmental groups to commercial industries to recreational groups.

“They come together to self-regulate,” Leah says. “It speeds up the process and really eliminates a lot of the hassles associated with a lawsuit because those involved at least feel like they have a voice.”

“Nobody goes away happy,” Leah adds. “That happens in every really decent negotiation, right? Everyone gives a little.”

Leah believes a board of stakeholders would prevent things like canopy limits or taxes within the supply chain. Things that ultimately hurt the industry and only strengthen illegal markets.

The problem, says Leah, is that current cannabis regulators “aren’t holistically considering the impact of the various regulations they put in place.”

Regulating cannabis like fish – unintended consequences?

Is there any state that is already doing this? What are the chances that DC will adopt cannabis regulations that embody the principles of the commercial fishing industry?

One of the biggest problems, Leah says, is the lack of money on the enforcement side. Leah remembers from her time as a regulator:

We were often presented with very strict rules to enforce. But we weren’t given the money to hire and train the people we needed to actually enforce these regulations.

The result is that cannabis operators openly flaunt the rules because paying the fines is sometimes cheaper than complying.

There is also debate about how strict cannabis regulations should be. Should we regulate it like alcohol? Or should we view cannabis as a vegetable no more dangerous than a carrot?

“I think the polarization that exists in this industry also exists in the country,” says Leah, so there is no easy answer.

Unintended consequences

However, one should be careful of the unintended consequences of regulation. Leah remembers visiting Africa, specifically Botswana, about a year ago.

“The Gates Foundation had donated billions of dollars worth of bed nets,” Leah recalls.

They thought that providing mosquito nets would eliminate malaria. But what they didn’t understand is this [the Bostwanans] needed food. So what people did was they used the nets to fish. But the nets were covered in pesticides. It killed all the fish. And you’re still suffering from malaria and you don’t have food, and that’s because there wasn’t really a holistic decision in this case. [The Gates Foundation] was not sufficiently informed to be able to respond to the actual main need.

Unintended consequences are an unavoidable fact of life. In Canada, for example, the government legalized cannabis from a position of stigma and propaganda. The result is a thriving black market that serves consumer needs that the legal market cannot meet.

With this in mind, we asked Leah how likely it was, on a scale of one to ten, that the United States would legalize and regulate according to rational and holistic principles. Will authorities regulate cannabis like fish?

If ten is the ideal and one means stigma and propaganda, then what is the verdict?

“I think it will be less than 5,” says Leah. And like the situation in Canada or the more restrictive U.S. jurisdictions, the consequences of regulation based on stigma point to a robust illicit market.

“You can choose the legal route or the illegal route,” says Leah. “But you won’t make it go away.”