Category: marijuana

Vice President Kamala Harris said that the DEA needs to move quickly to reschedule marijuana at a meeting at the White House on Friday.

Vice President Kamala Harris has recently urged the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to expedite its review of cannabis’s scheduling. During a White House closed-door roundtable discussion on criminal justice reform, Harris emphasized that the current classification of cannabis as a Schedule I substance is “absurd and patently unfair.” She called for a swift resolution to this issue¹.

Here are some key points:

1. Background:

   • The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) conducted a scientific review of cannabis.
   • Based on their assessment, they recommended that cannabis be reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)²³.
   • President Biden initiated this process in October 2022, aiming for cannabis policy reform⁴.

2. Harris’s Actions:

   • The Biden administration has pardoned tens of thousands of individuals with federal convictions for simple marijuana possession.
   • Harris has also called for states to pardon similar offenses.
   • She stressed that nobody should go to jail for smoking weed, especially considering the disproportionate impact on Black Americans and Latinos¹.

3. DEA’s Role:

   • The DEA must review HHS’s recommendation and determine whether reclassifying cannabis to Schedule III would violate U.S. treaty obligations.
   • Depending on their findings, the DEA will either initiate the administrative rulemaking process or issue a final order regarding cannabis’s scheduling³.

In summary, the rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III is imminent, and the DEA’s decision will have significant implications for federal drug policy¹.

 

Also on Friday, Doug Kass posted that on the social media platform X that the DEA will soon announce the rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III. 

“We have learned yesterday that the US Drug Enforcement  Administration will shortly approve a rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III –and that the biggest legal hurdle, an international treaty (the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961)), to which the US is a signatory has been resolved favorably,” Kass posted. 

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has also recommended the DEA reschedule cannabis as Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act

How hard it is to survive in the cannabis space?

On the one hand, the marijuana industry is nascent as the plant has been stigmatized for decades. Being illegal at the federal level makes operating that much more complicated. On the other hand, the industry continues to progress. Each year more states and countries embrace it, and new studies confirm the vast potential of marijuana’s healing properties that our ancestors knew centuries ago.

So, it’s difficult, but not impossible to maneuver in the cannabis space.

Often viewed as one of the biggest challenges is the lack of access to banking and financial services due to marijuana’s Schedule 1 status, which the DEA classifies as having no accepted medical value and has high abuse potential.

On the complexity of regulatory issues, she told us that “all of cannabis is complex, but the most complex regulatory issues arise with new regulations or changes to existing regulations – it can be difficult to understand how these regulations are used in practice. The most common misapprehension about the cannabis industry is that we are all risk-takers living on the edge – the reality is that most of us in this industry are all super compliance-focused and constantly checking to make sure that we’re following every single applicable rule.”

Regulatory Compliance First

In January, the government released hundreds of pages of documents related to its ongoing review of the status of cannabis under federal law, confirming that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recommended the DEA reschedule cannabis as Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act. This means that HHS has acknowledged some medical value of marijuana, and the rescheduling is being considered. We asked Ayinehsazian, a respected California Advocate of Marijuana Law Deregulation how much would change in the marijuana industry in terms of regulatory issues, banking services and taxes if cannabis is reclassified to Schedule III.

“I think that even with rescheduling regulatory compliance would still remain of great importance,” she said. “Banking and taxation would be greatly improved though – the current banking issues we face as a result of federal illegality would be greatly alleviated, as would the federal taxation issues associated with 280E.”

The 280E is an IRS tax code, which states that “no deduction or credit shall be allowed in running a business that consists of trafficking a controlled substance.” This means that until cannabis is removed from a list of controlled substances on the federal level, there will be no tax deductions or credits given to legal cannabis operators.

Sahar Ayinehsazian    is an attorney in Vicente Sederberg’s Los Angeles office,
where she focuses on cannabis banking, corporate transactions, and regulations.
With her specialized knowledge, Sahar helped to establish and currently co-leads
Vicente Sederberg’s Banking and Financial Services Department. As a member of
the National Cannabis Industry Association’s Banking Access Committee, Sahar
also works on strategy and educational advocacy to enable state-licensed businesses
to obtain accounts at depository institutions. Prior to joining Vicente Sederberg,
Sahar served as the Director of Regulatory and Governmental Affairs at a multi-state
money transmitter servicing the cannabis industry, where she developed a comprehensive understanding of credit card flow, banking and cannabis compliance. She
holds a Bachelor of Arts, with honors, from the University of California, San Diego
and a law degree from Loyola Law School, where she was a Loyola Scholar

The CBD Effect on Cannabis

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a non-intoxicating cannabinoid compound that has been studied for its potential therapeutic effects on various psychiatric disorders ¹. A systematic review of neuroimaging studies investigating the acute impact of CBD on human brain function found that CBD induces significant alterations in brain activity and connectivity patterns during resting state and performance of cognitive tasks in both healthy volunteers and patients with a psychiatric disorder ¹. The review also found that acute CBD enhanced fronto-striatal resting state connectivity in healthy volunteers, both compared to placebo and THC ¹. Furthermore, CBD modulated brain activity and had opposite effects when compared to THC following task-specific patterns during various cognitive paradigms, such as emotional processing, verbal memory, response inhibition, and auditory/visual processing ¹. In individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis and patients with established psychosis, acute CBD showed intermediate brain activity compared to placebo and healthy controls during cognitive task performance ¹. CBD modulated resting limbic activity in subjects with anxiety and metabolite levels in patients with autism spectrum disorders ¹. CBD is thought to have neuroprotective effects due to how it interacts with CB2 receptors in the brain. CBD acts on these receptors by creating an anti-inflammatory response in immune cells in the brain. This reduces the amount of damage caused by inflammation in the brain. Oxidation is one of the most common causes of brain tissue damage ². Inspirational Technologies is likely to be adopting AI on social media to improve the efficiency of their content creation and marketing campaigns. AI-powered tools can help marketers generate new content ideas, optimize social media campaigns, and measure brand and trends across each social media channel ¹. AI prompts for social media can help marketers overcome creative blocks and generate new post ideas ². AI can also enable personalized recommendations, create more efficient customer service, and analyze data in real-time to help improve overall marketing campaign performance ³. AI tools have taken the world by storm over the last few months, and for good reason. Tasks that used to take hours are now finished in just a few minutes. The results AI tools can produce are blowing people away ². However, it’s important to note that there are also plenty of examples where AI completely misses the mark. The difference between “omg that’s amazing 😱” and “omg… that’s not right 😐” is usually a well-crafted prompt ². In conclusion, AI can be a powerful tool for social media marketing, but it’s important to use it wisely and with a human touch. AI can help marketers save time and improve efficiency, but it cannot replace human creativity and empathy ¹. IF12278 (congress.gov)   Inspirational Technologies history 2018 farm bill hempsmart mcoa ceo cannabis reformation florida 2024 ballot on recreational marijuana #IntheWeedswithSteve

Be patient Florida, this too, shall pass!

Steven M Smith InspirationalTech.org CEO since 2013.

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