As more and more people turn to marijuana for relief, it’s become clear the legalization of cannabis plant growing and the drug product has opened up a new industry—in fact, the market size of the marijuana business is expected to skyrocket and reach $55.8 billion by 2025.
There’s nothing a cannabis cultivator enjoys more than harvesting the dense, fragrant buds at the end of a successful grow. However, getting there takes a touch of finesse, as well as an understanding of basic plant biology. Getting the early parts of the growing process right is essential to reaping a dream yield.
Yona Levy is the CEO of Alvit Pharma, an Israeli-based company specializing in the development of pharma-grade cannabis products. With over 20 years of experience in business management and investment banking, Levy has brought his skills to the cannabis industry, and with the team at Alvit, they aim to lead the world in the standardization, optimization, and delivery of products alternative to smoking medicinal cannabis.
It's not uncommon these days to see former chemists and molecular biologists move from the pharmaceutical industry into cannabis. It's just a logical next step into a growing sector. But to see a former NASA funded scientist, like for Shellene Suemori, move into cannabis, is an interesting move.
James Eichner and Ron Basak-Smith, like many other grad students at the University of Colorado-Boulder, worked as a team on a class project in Sustainable Venturing and Business Plan Development in the Fall of 2016. While many grad school projects never materialize past graduation, Eichner and Basak-Smith’s vision blossomed into real opportunity – not only for themselves, but an opportunity for the hemp industry, cannabis retail, the American farmer, and the environment.
Regardless of the product, when a new industry emerges, opportunities arise for early adopters to jump into highly rewarding positions in an exciting new field. With industries as promising as cannabis and hemp, many people are finding new ways to incorporate skills and expertise, learned from more mainstream industries, to forge a new path during the early days of the Green Rush.
Blockchain technology is best known in the cannabis industry for its implications to the financial sector and the possibilities it presents to get around the red tape of cannabis banking. However, blockchain technology may also present a multitude of possibilities for the agricultural aspects of the industry as well.
Part II of II: One of the biggest reasons that integration of cannabis is not going smoothly in Germany (besides an outrageous price still driven by supply chain inefficiencies, bureaucracy, and imports). MS is the only on-label condition that more or less automatically gets insurance coverage for cannabis. Everyone else has to rely on their doctor’s ability to persuade insurers to cover a stigmatized, trial-to-mainstreaming drug for conditions that range from ADD to cancer.
True commercialization of hemp-based plastics could be just around the corner in North America. Hemp is experiencing a revolution, its popularity as a raw material has exploded in recent years thanks to deregulation of hemp in the United States and the growing acceptance of the cannabis sativa plant family as a whole.
Tissue culture cultivation represents a transformative approach to propagation in the cannabis industry. The science of tissue culture (TC) was commercialized roughly four decades ago and is widely used across agricultural sectors. Until recently, the technology had not been adopted by the marijuana industry, perhaps due to a lack of knowledge sharing between industries or the long history legal barriers. Today, the popularity of TC in the cannabis sector is a far different story.
For the last several decades, cannabis research in the United States has been severely restricted. Despite the growing movement for legalization, federal restrictions on the research of Schedule I substances have effectively prevented research facilities and universities from studying the plant. However, emboldened and driven by the newly legal, recreational market of California, UCLA is pioneering academia into a new era of cannabis research.
