SPAIN LOOKS AT LEGALIZING MEDICINAL CANNABIS
Spain is set to become the latest European country to decriminalize the use of cannabis for medicinal use, with some eyeing a route for Europe’s biggest illegal cannabis growing nation to become the hub of a legal industry. As law enforcement gets to grip with “hemp fever”, with legitimate farmers falling foul of strict rules on which part of the plant can be sold, a parliamentary commission is to consider legalizing the use of the drug to treat conditions like multiple sclerosis or epilepsy. In 2018, Britain changed the law to allow the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes but it requires a prescription from a doctor. INEWS.UK
Setting laws on hemp (delta-8 THC) at the state level.
The federal government put state legislators in a tough spot to oversee the intoxication cannabinoid industry.
Over 12 states have set some sort of laws for intoxication cannabinoids by either banning them altogether or legalizing them. Many lawmakers are unsure of the path forward for these lab-derived products. Tennessee decided to leave the issue untouched by not passing a bill to legalize the products, setting safe guidelines and age requirements, or ban the products altogether. What makes this issue different than legalizing cannabis is that these products are legal federally under the 2018 Farm Bill. With little to no federal oversight done on this industry over the last four years and the confusion of states on this matter, it is hard to see where this industry moves in the future.
Cannabis research continues to skyrocket despite prohibition.
More and more resources and access are coming to the cannabis research field.
Last week in the Journal of Cannabis Research, the researchers detected 30k cannabis-related studies since 1829. Between 2000 and 2018, the researchers said, “more than $1.5 billion in funding has been dedicated to cannabis research”. Nowadays, most research in this space is associated with harm, not medical use of cannabis-related products. There are still many barriers to completing a research study on a schedule 1 drug like cannabis, but the grip seems to be loosening. For example, when the infrastructure package was signed into law last year, it included provisions to allow scientists to “study the actual marijuana that consumers are purchasing from state-legal dispensaries instead of using only government-grown cannabis.”
