Cannabis giant to slash its workforce by 60% as the legal pot industry’s recent boom goes bust amid a haze of finger-pointing

February 10, 2023

Canopy Growth, backed by Corona beermaker Constellation Brands Inc., will close major operations and cut 60% of its jobs as it says Canada’s marijuana industry has failed to meet expectations due to competition from a thriving black market.

The scaling back of Canada’s second-largest pot producer is the second restructuring in less than 12 months. Together with job cuts announced in April, Canopy estimates it can save as much as C$310 million ($230 million) and be profitable, helping it become the right size for Canada, and enter the US through Canopy USA. On a conference call, Chief Executive Officer David Klein cited Canada’s thriving illicit market for revenue declines. 

“Today, there are two very different cannabis markets in Canada. One that’s legal, highly taxed and regulated, and one that’s thriving and illicit,” he said, estimating that the black market represents about 40% of Canada’s overall cannabis sales. That has meant that the $7 billion marijuana market that was supposed to materialize in Canada hasn’t come to fruition, Klein said, and forces companies like his to try to compete on price with illegal operators who don’t have to pay taxes.

Canopy Growth, backed by Corona beermaker Constellation Brands Inc., will close major operations and cut 60% of its jobs as it says Canada’s marijuana industry has failed to meet expectations due to competition from a thriving black market.

The scaling back of Canada’s second-largest pot producer is the second restructuring in less than 12 months. Together with job cuts announced in April, Canopy estimates it can save as much as C$310 million ($230 million) and be profitable, helping it become the right size for Canada, and enter the US through Canopy USA. On a conference call, Chief Executive Officer David Klein cited Canada’s thriving illicit market for revenue declines. 

“Today, there are two very different cannabis markets in Canada. One that’s legal, highly taxed and regulated, and one that’s thriving and illicit,” he said, estimating that the black market represents about 40% of Canada’s overall cannabis sales. That has meant that the $7 billion marijuana market that was supposed to materialize in Canada hasn’t come to fruition, Klein said, and forces companies like his to try to compete on price with illegal operators who don’t have to pay taxes.

Shares fell as much as 18% in Thursday trading.  

It’s a massive shakeup for a business that was once the standard-bearer for Canada’s pot sector after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government legalized the use of recreational marijuana in 2018. That same year, Constellation, the marketer of Corona beer and Robert Mondavi wines, struck a multibillion-dollar deal that gave it a 38% stake in the cannabis firm.

Canopy’s complaints about competition from the black market echo those made in California and other US states, as the marijuana industry lobbies for tax cuts, the ability to open more locations and other regulations that could favor it.

Canopy was Canada’s most valuable marijuana company — now it’s second to Tilray Inc. — and at one point its stock-market value rose to nearly $20 billion. But business results have fallen far short of expectations and it has never been able to fully realize Constellation’s high hopes for pot-infused beverages. 

For complete story  The legal pot industry's recent boom goes bust | Fortune

(So, now what will the Government do? Cut taxes to give the industry a boost? If so, then the already scarce revenues being consumed by compliance, bureaucracy, enforcement of regulations, the continuing policing of the on going illicit market, and the growing health and mental health costs – are going to be reduced even more. Hmmm? So much for the cornucopia of cannabis! – Dalgarno Institute)

Also See

• Up In Smoke – California Legalization Disaster
• Then There Were Three – Marijuana Markets
• The Economic & Social Costs of Marijuana: Colorado
• Legalize cannabis and a veritable cornucopia will emerge.

The Australian Taskforce for Drug Prevention has reacted to the Greens’ recent call to legalise cannabis for recreational use, urging them to do their homework on cannabis before announcing policy positions on drugs.

Gary Christian, spokesperson for the Taskforce which incorporates five of Australia’s top drug prevention entities, says that the science on cannabis is now so damning that even the withdrawing of its medicinal use needs to be politically considered.  “The science very recently confirmed that cannabis is causal in twice the number of cancers as tobacco, is causal in 70% of pediatric cancers, and that it is not only causal in 89 of 95 birth defects such as babies born without limbs, but also that the associated genetic mutations and epigenetic changes causing these conditions are being passed down to a cannabis user’s children, grandchildren and beyond, causing generational grief and harm.”

Cannabis has recently been found to accelerate aging in users by 11%, taking potential productive years off lives.  This simply adds to the well-known mental health issues where a 2019 Lancet study calculated that 30% of new psychosis/schizophrenia diagnoses in London and 50% in Amsterdam were caused by cannabis.  Further, the role of cannabis in suicide and violence, including domestic violence, is well established with strong evidence pointing to a role in homicide and even mass shootings in the US.

The Taskforce also points to the social harms caused by the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use.  When Colorado legalised cannabis in 2013, cannabis use doubled within a two year period, causing a near doubling in cannabis-related hospitalisations and a 62% increase in drugged driving fatalities. 

To the argument that legalising cannabis will put criminals out of business, a media release last week by US company Curaleaf announced it is closing down its cannabis operations in Colorado, California and Oregon, states where recreational cannabis use has been legalised, because they can’t compete with the illicit cannabis grows in those states. 

“The science has advanced so greatly in the last couple of years that even the medicinal use of cannabis clearly now has harms that far-outweigh any benefits, and if any pharmaceutical drug was found to be doing that much damage it would be immediately pulled from the market.” said Mr Christian.  “For a political party to promote the recreational use of a substance with such gratuitous harm suggests a lack of due diligence by this political party.”

Contact:   Gary Christian – Taskforce for Drug Prevention              0422 163 141

As the Western World continues rail against the ills of tobacco – the legal and socially accepted drug that still does the greatest harms to public health – we, ironically, are being subject to an assault in a contrary and counterintuitive direction.

A small, but clamorous and well-funded Cannabis lobby, continues in their relentless War FOR Weed, and ‘public health and well-being be damned’. Along with those casualties, public safety is a close second causality for this pursuit of pot.

The single most significant reason Tobacco (and alcohol for that matter) do the greatest harms, is because they are legal and socially acceptable.

The Cannabis lobby want to have that psychotropic toxin added to the same genre of permitted substances, and ‘tell you’ it will not cause harm!

Cannabis and the Violent Crime Surge

Allysia Finley (Wall Street Journal editorial board.)

The stigma once attached to marijuana has vanished. Nineteen states have legalized cannabis for recreational use, and politicians of both parties increasingly treat it as harmless. Asked during the 2020 presidential campaign about her pot use in college, Kamala Harris giggled and said marijuana “gives a lot of people joy” and “we need more joy in the world.” But the public needs an honest discussion of its social and public-health risks, which include violence and mental illness.

Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, pointed out that the New York Times had curiously removed from an article about the Uvalde school shooter a former coworker’s recollection that he complained about his grandmother not letting him smoke weed. The Times didn’t append a correction to the story as it might be expected to do when fixing a factual inaccuracy.

Assuming the elided detail was accurate, it would fit a pattern. Mass shooters at Rep. Gabby Giffords’s constituent meeting in Tucson, Ariz. (2011), a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. (2012), the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. (2016), the First Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas (2017), and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (2018), were reported to be marijuana users. It could be a coincidence, but increasing evidence suggests a connection.

Isn’t pot supposed to make you mellow? Maybe if you smoke only a joint on occasion. But youth nowadays are consuming marijuana more frequently and in higher doses than their elders did when they were young.

This is leading to increased addiction and antisocial behavior. THC, the chemical that causes a euphoric high, interacts with the brain’s neuron receptors involved with pleasure. Marijuana nowadays on average is about four times as potent as in 1995. But dabs—portions of concentrated cannabis—can include 20 times as much THC as joints did in the 1960s. It’s much easier for young people to get hooked. One in six people who start using pot while under 18 will develop an addiction, which doctors call “cannabis use disorder.” As they use the drug more frequently to satisfy cravings, they develop psychological and social problems.

That’s what happened to Colorado teenager Johnny Stack. His mother, Laura, wrote a harrowing book chronicling his descent into cannabis addiction. He started smoking weed at 14, after Colorado legalized it, and progressed to using more-potent products such as dabs. He gradually withdrew from social activities and developed psychosis. Substance-abuse treatment and a stay at a mental hospital failed to cure him because chronic marijuana use permanently rewired his brain. Delusional, he jumped off a six-story building and killed himself. Alas, he’s not an anomaly. “People who have taken large doses of the drug may experience an acute psychosis, which includes hallucinations, delusions, and a loss of the sense of personal identity,” the National Institutes of Health notes.

Roneet Lev, an addiction specialist who previously led the Emergency Department at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, said in a recent interview with the American Council on Science and Health that California cannabis emergency-room visits climbed 53% in the three years after the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2016. Daily marijuana emergency-room visits in San Diego nearly quadrupled between 2014 and 2019. Cannabis-induced psychosis, she said, is fairly common. Some patients she treated experienced cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome from long-term use, which causes “scromiting”—screaming and vomiting. There’s no antidote. Some patients spend weeks in the emergency room waiting for placement in mental-health clinics.

Countless studies have also linked chronic cannabis use to schizophrenia. A meta-analysis in January examining 591 studies concluded that early marijuana use among adolescents was associated with a significant increase in the risk of developing schizophrenia. Researchers have yet to prove a causal relationship, but the weight of evidence is hard to dismiss. Some legalization proponents claim that other countries where marijuana is widely available have fewer mental-health problems than the U.S. But a study from Denmark last summer found that schizophrenia cases associated with pot addiction have increased three- to fourfold over the past 20 years as marijuana potency rose 200%. Young people are especially vulnerable to cannabis’s effects because their brains are still developing. Scientists in a recent study reviewed scans of teenagers’ brains before and after they started using pot. They found that parts of the brain involved in decision making and morality judgments were altered in pot users compared to nonusers.

But can pot make people violent? A study last year found that young people with such mood disorders as depression who were also addicted to pot were 3.2 times more likely to commit self-harm and die of homicide—often after initiating violence—than those who weren’t. A meta-analysis found the risk of perpetrating violence was more than twice as high for young adults who used marijuana. It’s possible that pot can trigger dangerous behavior in youths who may be predisposed to it for other reasons such as prenatal exposure to drugs. Also worrisome, legalization seems to be leading to more pregnant women using pot. About 20% of pregnant young women in California tested positive for marijuana in 2016. THC crosses the placenta and can impair neurological development. Prenatal exposure to marijuana has been linked to behavioral problems, mental illness and lower academic achievement in children and adolescents.

Maybe it’s time that lawmakers and voters rethink their pot-legalization experiment before more young lives are damaged.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9462911/

Marijuana_Use_and_Violence.AALM2022pdf.pdf

Also see

• Persistency of cannabis Use Predicts Violence following acute Psychiatric Discharge
• Cannabis & Violence An Understated & Disturbing Reality
• Association Between the Use of Cannabis and Physical Violence in Youths: A Meta-Analytical Investigation
• Ten Cannabis Induced Psychotic Violence by Men Against Women
• Smoking cannabis DOES make people more violent: Project confirms for the first time that using the drug is the cause of crimes
• FORMER New York Times WRITER’S NEW BOOK WARNS OF MARIJUANA, VIOLENCE, MENTAL ILLNESS!
• Attackers Smoked Cannabis

Investigating the veracity of a sample of divergent published trial data in spinal pain

PAIN: April 25, 2022 - Volume - Issue - 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002659

Abstract In Brief: Evidence-based medicine is replete with studies assessing quality and bias, but few evaluating research integrity or trustworthiness. A recent Cochrane review of psychological interventions for chronic pain identified trials with a shared lead author with highly divergent results. We sought to systematically identify all similar trials from this author to explore their risk of bias, governance procedures, and trustworthiness. We searched OVID MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, and PEDro from 2010 to December 22, 2021 for trials. We contacted the authors requesting details of trial registration, ethical approval, protocol, and access to the trial data for verification. We used the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool and the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth group's Trustworthiness Screening Tool to guide systematic exploration of trustworthiness.

Ten trials were included: 9 compared cognitive behavioural therapy and physical exercise to usual care, exercise alone, or physiotherapy and 1 compared 2 brief cognitive behavioural therapy programmes. Eight trials reported results divergent from the evidence base. Assessment of risk of bias and participant characteristics identified no substantial concerns. Responses from the lead author did not satisfactorily explain this divergence. Trustworthiness screening identified concerns about research governance, data plausibility at baseline, the results, and apparent data duplication. We discuss the findings within the context of methods for establishing the trustworthiness of research findings generally. Important concerns regarding the trustworthiness of these trials reduce our confidence in them. They should probably not be used to inform the results and conclusions of systematic reviews, in clinical training, policy documents, or any relevant instruction regarding adult chronic pain management.

For more go to https://journals.lww.com/pain/Abstract/9900/Investigating_the_veracity_of_a_sample_of.70.aspx

On that basis we designed a protocol to systematically identify trials in this field from this author and explore aspects of the trustworthiness of the trials. We use a tool developed by the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth group for this.  To summarise our findings, we found 10 trials and identified a number of concerns across those trials that included: a lack of trial pre-registration, baseline values that did not seem consistent with randomisation, cases of erroneous (impossible) p values in baseline tables, extremely large effect sizes at both short and long-term follow up, (which is something that is really not common in the field of chronic pain and certainly not seen in other trials of CBT), and notably low or zero attrition in some studies. In addition we identified identical, and highly similar data across 3 trials reported as independent studies. On that basis we recommended that these trials should probably not be used to inform the results and conclusions of systematic reviews, in clinical training, policy documents, or any relevant instruction regarding adult chronic pain management. Neil O’Connell

For complete commentary go to Pain researchers lose three papers after Cochrane group questioned data – Retraction Watch

Also see

• Medicinal cannabis blacklisted by Australian pain specialists
• NICE will not recommend medical cannabis for epilepsy and chronic pain
• Cannabis and cannabinoids for the treatment of people with chronic noncancer pain conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled and observational studies
• Cannabis and Pain – Helpful – What is the Evidence?
• False hope driving claims medicinal cannabis is magic pill
• Doctors accuse Britain's first medical cannabis clinic of making unfounded claims over pain relief
•  Cannabis & Pain - 2018 Papers

Dalgarno Research Team

Closing the Loophole on Hemp-Derived Cannabis Products: A Public Health Priority (Journal of American Medical Association)

…due to limited regulation, psychotropic, hemp-derived cannabis products have marketing features that may appeal to youth. For example, such products are available as chocolates, gummies, cookies, and brownies and the packaging and advertisements often use bright and colorful designs. In addition, hemp-derived cannabis vape cartridges come in a wide range of sweet and fruity flavors, which increase appeal among youth and young adults. Because of their similarity to candy and food products, accidental exposure by children, adults, and animals is a concern. Between January 1, 2021, and February 28, 2022, national poison control centers received reports of 2362 cases of Δ⁸-THC exposures, of which 40% involved accidental exposure to Δ⁸-THC (82% among youth), 70% required evaluation at a health care facility, 8% were admitted to a critical care unit, and 1 pediatric death was reported.² Animal poison control centers have also seen an increase in reports of accidental pet exposure to Δ⁸-THC.²

The increasing marketing of psychotropic, hemp-derived cannabis products makes clear that a regulated hemp market that manufactures and sells products with more oversight and stricter safety standards is urgently needed. Many of the potential harms of hemp-derived cannabis products stem from a lack of regulation, including the potential for harmful contaminants, accidental exposure, cross-product sale with tobacco and alcohol, and youth appeal.

State and federal regulators should prioritize new hemp policies that ensure prohibition of sale to minors; set requirements for testing, packaging, and labeling; and place limits on potency and concentration of psychotropic products. The public health implications of psychotropic, hemp-derived cannabis products remain understudied. However, the lack of regulation over the marketing and synthesis of these products, combined with the widespread availability, warrants national surveillance and new hemp policies that close loopholes and prioritize public health.

For complete research Closing the Loophole on Hemp-Derived Cannabis Products: A Public Health Priority | Adolescent Medicine | JAMA

Cannabinoid Epigenotoxicity and Genotoxicity (A Response to Harlow)

Whilst the observations of Harlow and colleagues are welcomed, by failing to mention cannabinoid epi/genotoxicity they radically understate the case against multiple cannabinoid isomers.

It was shown long ago in vitro that many cannabinoids are genotoxic ¹ a finding which has since been confirmed in multiple human epidemiological studies ^2,3.  Moreover cannabinoid genotoxicity is widely agreed upon by producers, marketers and regulators and is referred to in FDA warnings for cannabinoid medicines.  Indeed it can be argued that it is the established fact of cannabinoid genotoxicity which makes an alternative parallel universe for cannabinoid regulation necessary given obviously serious concerns from FDA and comparable drug regulators internationally.

Cannabinoid genotoxicity has been classically expected to be expressed in terms of cancer, congenital anomaly and aging (CaCAAg) data ^2,3.  A growing body of evidence across all three domains provides strong support for the clinical implications of all three areas of potential public health relevance. 

Most concerning of all is an increasing stream of evidence from human, rodent and human embryonic stem cell data for epigenomic changes which implies multigenerational impacts to brain, heart and body wall development, cancer incidence and aging ^4,5.

Whist we are used to seeing studies across the CaCAAg spectrum performed in each of the three domains the most recent studies from leading groups indicate that genotoxic outcomes across the three CaCAAg domains can co-occur simultaneously.  Thus in a recent paper examining prenatally cannabis exposed (PCE) mouse heart development hearts were shown to be smaller at birth but then underwent a rapid growth spurt to become larger and more fibrotic and stiffer in the pre-adolescent period phenocopying aspects of cardiac aging, a syndrome which is known to predispose to later increased heart disease, the highest ranking killer disease internationally ⁵.  This finding potentially links teratogenesis, aging, adult disease and death.

Similarly in epigenomic studies both of human (and rodent) sperm and differentiated spermatogonial stem cells both autism and cancer-related genes (Prenatally Expressed Genes 3 and 10) were implicated following (modelled) PCE ⁴.  This finding links teratogenesis, neurotoxicity and cancerogenesis.

Other studies show that the pro-aging effects of cannabis on cellular age increase with age and age-squared across the lifespan.

These indications of the simultaneous effects of cannabis across the three CaCAAg domains suggest that cannabis epi/genotoxicity is a major public health player and implies that cannabinoids generally should urgently be regulated in line with all other known major epi/genotoxins.

Albert Stuart Reece, MD, PhD | Department of Psychiatry, University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University

References

1. Nahas GG et al. Effects of cannabinoids on macromolecular synthesis and replication of cultured lymphocytes. Federation proceedings. Apr 1977;36(5):1748.
2. Reece A.S., Hulse G.K. Cannabis, Cannabidiol, Cannabinoids and Multigenerational Policy Engineering. 2022; In Press.
3. Reece A.S., Hulse G.K. Epidemiological Overview of Multidimensional Chromosomal and Genome Toxicity of Cannabis Exposure in Congenital Anomalies and Cancer Development Scientific Reports. 2021;11(1):13892.
4. Lee, K., Laviolette, S.R. & Hardy, D.B. Exposure to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol during rat pregnancy leads to impaired cardiac dysfunction in postnatal life. Pediatr Res 90, 532–539 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-021-01511-9;
5. Robinson GI... Maternal Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol Exposure Induces Abnormalities of the Developing Heart in Mice. Cannabis Cannabinoid Res. Oct 17 2022.