Cannabis industry

The cannabis industry is composed of legal cultivators and producers, consumers, independent industrial standards bodies, ancillary products and services, regulators and researchers concerning cannabis and its industrial derivative, hemp. The cannabis industry has been inhibited by regulatory restrictions for most of recent history, but the legal market has emerged rapidly as more governments legalize medical and adult use.[1][2] Uruguay became the first country to legalize recreational marijuana through legislation in December, 2013.[3] Canada became the first country to legalize private sales of recreational marijuana with Bill C-45 in 2018.[4][5]

Market value

The world economic market has been broken down as follows, showing that the cannabis industry can be considered a multibillion-dollar component of a larger pharmaceutical industry. The exact value of cannabis sales worldwide remains unknown as the vast majority of the market remains illicit. With movement around legalisation of Cannabis, it is attracting more investments from alcohol and drug companies.[6]

University involvement

Involvement from universities has increased as the industry gains legitimacy worldwide. Northern Michigan University initiated their Medicinal Plant Chemistry Program in 2017, the first undergraduate degree program preparing students for work related to the production, analysis, and distribution of medicinal plants.[25] Daniele Piomelli, a professor at University of California, Irvine, developed an interdisciplinary cannabis research program called the Institute for the Study of Cannabis with the mission to advance cannabis knowledge in academia.[26]

Green Wolverine, founded at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 2017, is a nonprofit corporation composed of university student organizations centered on acquiring knowledge related to legal business activities in the cannabis industry. The mission is to discover opportunities for success for university students in cannabis or related fields through education, networking, and recruiting.[27]

Hocking College (Nelsonville, OH) has an accredited Cannabis Lab Technician associate degree as part of their Lab Sciences Program. It was developed by Dr. Jonathan Cachat in 2018.[28]

Administration and regulatory involvement

The Agricultural Technical Advisory Committees offer technical advice and information on specific product sectors to the Secretary of Agriculture and the U.S. Trade Representative on negotiating objectives and positions, and other matters related to the development and administration of U.S. agricultural trade policy. In 2023, one of the six Agricultural Technical Advisory Committees was renamed "Tobacco, Cotton, Peanuts, and Hemp" to recognize the position of hemp in the post-prohibition U.S. agriculture economy.[29]

Congress established the advisory committee system in 1974 to ensure U.S. agricultural trade policy objectives reflect U.S. commercial and economic interests. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) jointly manage the committees.

The Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee has senior representatives from across the agricultural community and provides advice on general trade policy matters.[30]

Cannabis accessories

Selling accessories related to cannabis is not explicitly illegal in most countries, and such products has been gaining popularity for several decades. As legal cannabis continues to spread, accessory sales have been growing rapidly.[31][32]

Women in the industry

Most research, both governmental and privately funded, does not investigate women's roles and placement within the extremely lucrative and growing marijuana industry. Women have been historically blocked and subjugated to "feminine" work in the cannabis industry. According to the report Women & Minorities in the Marijuana Industry, "The percentage of women holding executive positions at cannabis businesses has fallen considerably over the past two years – down 9 percentage points from a previous Marijuana Business Daily survey conducted in October 2015 – though it remains higher than the average across the larger U.S. business landscape."

There is often little to no mention of women among cannabis businesses in statistical reporting or business journals unless the focus is specifically on women or minorities. Since the first states in the U.S., Colorado and Washington, legalized marijuana in 2012, the industry has undergone extreme growth both in terms of wealth, and in terms of employment. In 2017 only 26.9% of executive positions in the industry were held by women.[33] Also in 2017, the legal adult cannabis industry in the United States was worth around $7.7 billion and annual sales were expected to grow more to more than $24 billion by 2025.[34] Slightly more current data by Forbes Magazine's 2019 survey of 166 cannabis businesses in 17 different states across the America finds that 38.5% of employees self-identified as female. While this number clearly rose since 2017, unfortunately the number of women who held "Director" or "Executive" roles in 2017 dropped to only 17.6%. Shockingly, 74% of companies surveyed have 10% or fewer female-identifying employees. More than 12% of the 166 companies had no females in "Director" or "Executive" positions while over 41% of them only had one woman in those categories.[35] In 2021, Leafly, trusted cannabis education and location website, released their yearly job report stating that the legal cannabis industry supports 321,000 jobs with more than 77,000 new jobs created since 2020.[36] While about 38% of women suffer from chronic diseases, only 4% of research and funds are used towards women's healthcare and services. This leaves women to seek out alternative therapies. Given that women make up around 85% of all consumers purchasing and 85% of healthcare decisions, “women are central to the currently semi-legal developing cannabis market.” As females are consuming cannabis at higher rates than ever before, there is huge purchasing power related to health and wellness decision.[34] The rapid growth of the industry presented by these number demonstrates it is essential to consider women in this industry as their purchasing power is the strongest when compared to other demographics.

Circling back to the earlier years of the industry (prior to wider legalization in the US around 2010), women were commonly pushed into more "feminine" work such as tending crops, trimming, clone work, and other more tedious tasks.[37] The separation of women into these types of female ascribed work, contributed to a long history of gender-based barriers faced by women in the cannabis industry both in access to employment, raises, and equal pay. These gender-based barriers are key to examining women's place and access to the industry in present day, which is often overlooked or goes unacknowledged. Understanding women's historic and current place within the cannabis industry is key for all those a part of the industry as well as those interested in joining the industry, to combat discrimination and prejudice in the rapidly growing market.

In more recent years of the industry (from 2010 to 2021), some have theorized women's role within the industry is changing and argue the industry has become female friendly. This claim is disputed among scholars as some find women to be less concerned about risk factors than in the early years of the industry. As the cannabis industry continues to grow, there is evidence of higher numbers of female owners and executives compared with other United States businesses as a whole. According to data analysis expert Giadha DeCarcer, "The cannabis industry is so new that there are very few barriers to get in, especially for women [entrepreneurs]".[38] It seems that women in the industry, in some ways, are starting to perform opposite to prior literature, displaying increased appeal for uncertainty and risk which is common among this industry.[34] While the new evidence within the industry demonstrates growing numbers of women and confidence against unpredictability, which some could infer as greater access, there are still many gender-based barrier present in the industry that block women from equal treatment and acquirement.

See also

• List of celebrities who own cannabis businesses

Sources

• (chapter 15)