Retired astronaut wants to grow cannabinoids in space

High in the annals of fake viral imagery is that of former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield holding a bag of weed aboard the International Space Station.

The photo made the rounds in 2018 and prompted a fact-check by online watchdog Snopes.

In the original photo, posted to Hadfield’s Twitter account in 2013, he can be seen holding a bag of Easter eggs.

Because the internet is the internet, years later the same image was manipulated and reposted by a Facebook page (ironically dubbed “Pictures in History”), this time with the eggs replaced with ganja.

“The picture of Chris Hadfield with a bag of marijuana is not only fake, but since NASA has been a drug-free workplace since at least the mid-1980s, there are unlikely to be similar (but genuine) photos of astronauts with drug paraphernalia,” said Snopes.

But the wrong image may have been somewhat prescient. Late last year, Hadfield joined the board of directors of BioHarvest Sciences, a biotech company focused on medicinal cannabis.

In an interview with Futurism published this week, Ilan Sobel, CEO of Hadfield and BioHarvest, explained that “space might even be the perfect environment for producing out-of-this-world medicinal cannabinoids.”

“We see the potential possibility that valuable smaller cannabinoids can be grown in much higher quantities than on Earth,” Sobel told Futurism.

“These unique compositions of full-spectrum cannabis could have significant value in providing more optimized treatment solutions for many palliative conditions for which compounds currently synthesized by the pharmaceutical industry do not provide adequate solutions,” he added.

But Hadfield told Futurism that cannabinoids are just part of BioHarvest’s cultivation program, and what really drew him to the company “was the scalability of the biotech’s platform and how it can solve a lot of the farming problems that we’re dealing with.” feeding 10 billion people are facing.”

Therefore, “BioHarvest is focusing its efforts on providing future astronauts — and humans on Earth — with microgravity-enhanced nutrients, rather than a way to get high,” Futurism reported.

Hadfield joined BioHarvest’s advisory board in December, saying at the time that the company’s “proprietary platform technology has the potential to have a significant impact on the world as well as bio-space science.”

“The company has built a world-class team of scientists, and I look forward to working with them and my fellow consultants to scale BioHarvest’s solution,” Hadfield said in the announcement.

Sobel said at the time that Hadfield’s “unparalleled experience will help combine our expertise in plant cell biology with space science.”

“He is a great addition to our advisory board at this stage of our growth, and he will support us in our quest to become a global biotech leader,” said Sobel.

As for that infamous viral image, Hadfield told Futurism that smoking in space wasn’t such a good idea.

“On the space station, in an emergency, you’re the fire department,” he said. “You can’t have gotten high or drunk or whatever just because you die if something goes wrong.”

However, he left the possibility open.

“Once the population gets big enough, once you get a sufficiently stable situation, people are going to want a drink,” Hadfield told Futurism. “People will want weed.”

When it comes to cannabinoids and space, Hadfield and BioHarvest aren’t exactly going “where no man has gone before.”

In 2020, agricultural biotech Front Range Biosciences announced that “it will be sending hemp plant cell cultures on a resupply voyage to the International Space Station,” Rolling Stone reported at the time, adding that the “purpose of the project is to see if These cells may or may not develop genetic mutations under these conditions, and once they return, scientists will analyze their DNA to see if they have changed at all.”