Regulating cannabis like fish? Excuse me, what? According to Leah Heise, the cannabis industry can learn much from commercial fishing.

An accomplished cannabis exec, Leah’s been the CAO of Ascend Wellness Holdings, the CEO of Women Grow, CXO of 4Front Ventures and President of Chesapeake Integrated Health Institute.

While at Ascend, Leah focused on growing the business from 73 employees to more than 1300 in less than 18 months, taking the company from $19M in revenue in 2019 to a $1.6B market cap in 2021.

Leah is also a medical cannabis patient, having discovered the herb after being hospitalized over 35 times for pancreatitis.

Leah Heise is a cannabis expert. Her expertise is unparalleled, unlike the so-called “experts” in the media who spew drug war propaganda.

So when she says the cannabis industry has much to learn from commercial fisheries, our ears perk up.

Regulating cannabis like fish? Say what?

Regulating Cannabis from Stigma 

Having experience in the regulatory landscape, Leah knows what’s working and what’s doomed to fail. And unfortunately, most legal states have been regulating cannabis from a position of stigma.

“We do everything by piecemeal, by litigation. It’s very costly to the system and there’s just a better, more streamlined way to do it,” says Leah. “And I think that potentially regulating it similar to a commercial fishing industry may be the way to do it.”

Of course, Leah points out that there are other options, and this is just one of many ideas. But, she says, “These regulators need to understand the things they are regulating.”

“They’re doing it from a place of stigma and lack of education,” Leah says. “We have to turn back one hundred years of stigma and propaganda.”

Whether it’s racial stigma or false beliefs that cannabis will rot your brain, Leah emphasizes education. From scientific papers proving cannabis’ efficacy to patient stories to studies that associate legal cannabis with fewer cases of domestic abuse and alcoholism.

“The industry and the plant need a rebrand,” says Leah. “It’s not Cheech and Chong. It’s everyone; it’s diverse. Anybody could be using this, from your great-grandmother to your child, depending on what they have. It’s not going to make their brains die or reduce IQ.”

Regulators Need Education

Simply put, the public (and many regulators) are uneducated on cannabis. Drug warriors amplify its alleged harms while marginalizing its medical and therapeutic benefits.

But how would regulating cannabis like fish help? Leah admits that if the feds get involved, a strong regulatory body needs to be created.

“Or just let the states do it,” she says. “We don’t necessarily need another layer on top.”

But suppose the federal government does step in and institute national cannabis regulations. What can we learn from the commercial fishing industry?

Regulating Cannabis like Fish

What can the cannabis industry learn from commercial fishing? How does one regulate cannabis like fish?

“Fisheries is a highly regulated industry,” says Leah. “Because the government’s trying to balance the interests of the environmental groups with the interest of the commercial fishing industry.”

Yes, they are separate products, but both are natural and come from the Earth. Likewise, generations of people work in the industry, whether it’s multiple generations of fishermen (and women). Or the legacy farmers in the cannabis industry (especially in black and brown communities).

With the commercial fishing industry, there’s the problem of overfishing. “In an effort to save the planet, and the fisheries themselves, the federal government has stepped in,” says Leah.

And she sees opportunities for the cannabis industry and its regulators to learn from the commercial fishing industry.

Commercial fishing regulators don’t regulate from a place of stigma. “I haven’t seen a single state,” says Leah, referring to legal cannabis states, “where there’s not a massive lawsuit. And even with Schedule III, there’s going to be lawsuits.”

Learning from the Commercial Fishing Industry

Leah prefers a more comprehensive way of regulating cannabis, which borrows from the successes of the commercial fishing industry.

“They design things called fishery management plans,” she says. “Scientists in the government will come forward and say, ‘okay we’re starting to see Atlantic sea scallops start to collapse. We’re seeing a decline in the number of new pollock. And we need to come up with a fishery management plan to work this.’”

Leah says the commercial fishing industry has councils with different stakeholders, from environmental groups to commercial industries to recreational groups.

“They come together to regulate themselves,” says Leah. “It speeds up the process and really eliminates a lot of the issues in terms of getting sued, because stakeholders at least feel like they have a voice.”

“Nobody walks away happy,” Leah adds. “Which is kind of what happens with any real decent negotation, right? Everybody’s giving a little.”

Leah thinks having a board of stakeholders would prevent things like canopy caps or taxing inside the supply chain. Things that ultimately hurt the industry and only empower illicit markets.

The problem, says Leah, is that current cannabis regulators “aren’t holistically looking to see what the impacts are,” of the various regulations they’ve instituted.

Regulating Cannabis like Fish – Unintended Consequences?

Is there any state already doing this? What are the odds D.C. will create cannabis regulations that embody the principles of the commercial fishing industry?

One of the biggest problems, says Leah, is the lack of money on the enforcement side. From her regulator days, Leah recalls:

We were handed often times very dense regulations to enforce. But we weren’t given the money that we needed to be given to it, to hire the people, and train the people we needed to actually enforce those regulations.

The result is cannabis operators openly flaunting the rules because paying the fines is sometimes cheaper than observing the regulations.

There’s also debate on how heavy cannabis regulations should be. Should we regulate it like alcohol? Or should we consider cannabis a vegetable no more dangerous than a carrot?

“I think that the polarization that exists in this industry exists in the country,” says Leah, so there’s no easy answer.

Unintended Consequences

But one thing to watch out for is the unintended consequences of regulation. Leah recalls visiting Africa, particularly Botswana, about a year ago.

“The Gates Foundation had contributed billions of dollars worth of mosquito nets,” Leah recalls.

They thought that giving people mosquito nets would eliminate malaria. But what they didn’t understand is that [the Bostwanans] needed food. So what the people did was they used the nets to fish with. But the nets were covered with pesticides. It killed off all the fish. And you still have malaria, and you have no food, and it’s because there wasn’t really a holistic decision in that instance. [The Gates Foundation] wasn’t informed enough to answer what the real primary need was.

Unintended consequences are an unavoidable fact of life. In Canada, for example, the government legalized cannabis from a position of stigma and propaganda. The result is a thriving black market catering to consumer demands the legal market can’t fulfil.

With that in mind, we asked Leah how likely, on a scale of one to ten, would the United States legalize and regulate according to rational and holistic principles? Will authorities regulate cannabis like fish?

If ten is the ideal and one is stigma and propaganda, what’s the verdict?

“I think it’s going to be less than 5,” says Leah. And like the situation in Canada or the more restricted US legal states, the consequences of regulating from stigma suggest a robust illicit market.

“You can decide to go the legal route or you can decide to go the illegal route,” says Leah. “But you’re not going to make it go away.”

The SAFER Banking Act has passed a critical Senate Committee hearing with a vote of 14-9. The renamed bipartisan bill would allow banks to work with cannabis businesses without penalties from the federal government.

The U.S. cannabis industry has long been waiting for SAFER Banking to pass the Senate. Alongside 280E tax burdens, the lack of access to essential banking services has unnecessarily handicapped the industry.

With SAFER Banking passing the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, this marks the first time Senate members have voted in favour of cannabis banking reform. The House of Representatives has voted for the bill seven times before.

But now what? What’s the next step in reforming cannabis banking in the United States?

SAFER Banking Act Passes Senate Committee

While the SAFER Banking Act passing a Senate Committee is undoubtedly good news, it’s not the end of this lengthy saga.

After passing the Senate Committee, the SAFER Banking Act will head off to the Senate and the House for more debates, amendments, and votes. Assuming this goes smoothly, the bill will eventually land on the President’s desk, where everyone expects him to sign it.

The recent Senate Committee vote clears the path for the bill to make it to the Senate floor. Passing the bill would mean cannabis businesses in legal states would no longer have to operate as cash-only enterprises. Handling massive amounts of money in cash is inconvenient but also dangerous. Cannabis operators have been vulnerable to theft and fraud.

Hence, industry stakeholders applaud the Senate Committee for decisively voting for SAFER Banking.

 “[It’s] a historic step towards final passage of a critical policy building block for the cannabis industry,” said Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA) President Kaliko Castille.

MCBA has been committed to ensuring that the House and Senate not only pass the SAFER Banking Act but also contain provisions to aid minority entrepreneurs who have been the primary targets of the drug war.

“The committee’s approval of the SAFER Banking Act gives hope to thousands of compliant, tax-paying businesses desperately trying to access the basic financial services other businesses take for granted,” said National Cannabis Industry Association CEO Aaron Smith. “This uniquely bipartisan legislation has the potential to save lives and help small businesses; it’s time for Congress to get it to the president’s desk without further delay.”

What Next?

The Senate Committee’s passing of the SAFER Banking Act may have been influenced by recent cannabis news coming from Washington, D.C.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services officially recommended that the DEA move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III in the federal Controlled Substances Act.

That change wouldn’t affect banking, but it would relieve operators of the burdensome 280E tax. The potential rescheduling gave a shot in the arm to pot stocks. Perhaps it also lit a fire under the butts of American Senators.

SAFER Banking would give the U.S. cannabis industry better access to financial services, including depository services, electronic payments, lending, and other access to capital. 

Even Canadian cannabis companies will benefit from banking reform in the U.S. Currently, Canadian banks take the same drug-war mentality despite the herb’s legal status north of the 49th. Canada’s oligarch banks have a significant presence in the American economy that they don’t want to compromise.

Advocates are hopeful the Senate will eventually pass the SAFER Banking Act, as it has bipartisan support among Republicans and Democrats.

The United States has legal cannabis in 23 states, the District of Columbia and two territories. Every state has a medical cannabis program except Idaho, Wyoming, Kansas, and South Carolina.

Three in four Americans live in a legal cannabis state. At this point, federal cannabis legalization seems less of a question of “if” and more of a matter of when. 

Is cannabis addiction a treatable medical condition? According to one doctor, “cannabis addiction is a real and treatable medical condition.”

She claims the “cannabis legalization movement” has successfully pushed back against this narrative due to the drug war.

Fortunately, Dr. Salwan is not one of these old-school drug warriors. She knows cannabis doesn’t turn people into criminals and that cannabis prohibition has led to the mass incarceration of peaceful (mostly black) Americans.

Dr. Salwan represents the new school of drug warriors. The kind that promotes more opioids to wean people off opioids. That labels drug use as a “treatable medical condition” rather than an activity.

To her credit, Dr. Salwan recommends cognitive behavioural therapy as a solution to “cannabis use disorder” since that’s where the evidence leads her. (But not without mentioning the “promising” FDA medication that will “reduce cannabis cravings.”)

However, Dr. Salwan is on the education faculty for the American Society of Addiction Medicine. In other words – it is tough for Dr. Salwan to see substance use as anything but a medical condition.

What is Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD)?

Is cannabis addiction a treatable medical condition? What is a “cannabis addiction,” anyway? “Cannabis use disorder” (CUD) is a topic we’ve covered before. It’s a myth that refuses to die.

The belief that outside forces determine our thoughts, behaviours, and actions is only becoming more prominent in the culture where neuroscientific theories of consciousness are accepted as “science” despite their philosophical shallowness.

But let’s get to the crux of Dr. Salwan’s argument. “To shake the collective disavowal of cannabis addiction,” she writes, “It helps to understand the clinical paradigm of all drug addictions, or substance use disorders (SUDs).”

So, whether we’re talking about cannabis, alcohol, or opioids, the hallmarks of SUD are always the same, categorized as the three Cs.

Craving: A strong desire to use the substance 

Consequences: Negative consequences of using the substance 

Control: A loss of control when consuming the substance (or in the pursuit of). 

Other residual SUD “symptoms” include developing a tolerance and experiencing withdrawals. But by this definition, nearly every American suffers from caffeine use disorder and a refined sugar addiction.

Is Cannabis Addiction a Treatable Medical Condition?

Of course, “cravings” are just thoughts. Perhaps you’ve “craved” ex-partners when visiting areas that remind you of them. It’s a common human experience. You don’t have to associate your stream of consciousness with your ego and attach yourself to each and every thought.

Especially if you’re breaking a long-term drug habit (or trying to get over an ex).

Likewise, determining whether the consequences of your actions are negative is up to you. So-called “addiction experts” are supposed to be neutral, value-free scientists.

You could drink a case of beer every night. Destroy your liver, your marriage, turn your kids against you, lose your job and house, and end up living on the street. These all sound like negative consequences of drinking.

But if you frame the experience as positive, then who the hell are “addiction experts” to tell you otherwise? It may seem irrational to us, but many prefer to live on the street and use drugs like fentanyl.  

This fact of life is lost on many advocates of taxpayer-funded supply of “addiction medicine.” They want to dehumanize someone’s choices and consider them “mentally ill” because they don’t conform to specific social values.

I find it hard to believe that the left-wing advocates making this argument have ever read (or understood) Foucault. Although they’ll claim him as one of their own.

As for the loss of control – despite the persistence of this myth, it remains just that. A myth. No research worthy of the label “science” supports a loss of control.

Some Real Science to Drive Home the Fact 

G. Alan Marlatt was an American-Canadian clinical psychologist and researcher in the field of addictive behaviours.

One of his most well-known studies helps answer whether “cannabis addiction” is a treatable medical condition.

Dr. Marlatt took a group of heavy drinkers who qualified as having alcohol use disorder. He separated them into two groups in two separate rooms.

He gave one group cocktails without alcohol. But the cocktails tasted as if they contained booze. He told this group the cocktail did have alcohol in it. Obviously, the participants reported cravings for more, kept drinking, and some even began behaving intoxicated.

He gave the other group cocktails that contained alcohol. But the drinks didn’t taste like alcohol, and he told the group there wasn’t any in the beverage. This group did not report cravings for more and did not binge drink to excess.

Others have replicated Dr. Marlatt’s study. The 3 C’s of addiction are not scientific concepts. They are a belief system of “public health” masquerading as scientific knowledge. 

Contradictions in Dr. Salwan’s Article

Dr. Salwan doesn’t seem aware of the contradictions in her article. For example, she writes it’s “heartening that the prevalence of cannabis addiction among U.S. adults remained below 2 percent from 2002 to 2017, even as cannabis use increased from 10 to 15 percent.”

But how does that make sense? Especially since the THC potency has increased. If the drug itself is causing addiction, shouldn’t higher use rates also increase addiction rates?

Dr. Salwan solves this issue by recognizing that cannabis has – more or less – been destigmatized. If you’re not losing your job or falling behind on the bills, who cares if you engage in wake-n-bakes or smoke weed every night after work? 

Destigmatization, says Dr. Salwan, is a “desired social outcome.” However, she believes it comes “at the expense of engagement in treatment,” where only 4 percent of people received CUD treatment in 2019 versus 9 percent in 2002.

Think about that. The number of people who have sought treatment for problematic cannabis use has dwindled, and she believes that’s a problem. 

If you make your money from “addiction medicine” and by promoting rehabs and treatment centres – then yes, people not viewing themselves as helpless addicts who need your paid expertise is a problem.  

This phenomenon of people viewing their cannabis habits as habits instead of an addiction is a step in the right direction. Only ideologues believe “cannabis addiction” is a treatable medical condition. 

FDA Drugs vs. Changing Your Mind

As mentioned, Dr. Salwan pays lip service to “promising” FDA drugs to remedy cannabis addiction or CUD. But, as she writes in the article, all evidence points to cognitive behavioural therapy (and others) being more helpful.

And it’s obvious why. These therapies tend to challenge an individual’s thought process and patterns of thinking rather than affirm how they feel and look for a “root cause” somewhere in their childhood.

Cannabis addiction is not a treatable medical condition because addiction is not real, and problems of the mind are not medical conditions.

Addiction is a social construct that feeds into itself.

Much like race. We’re all homo sapiens. But you can divide people by skin colour, create cultures based on these skin tones, and then propagate and control populations according to the beliefs and values of the various “in” and “out” groups you’ve created with this social construct.

Addiction is the same way. Whether it’s cutting back on cannabis, social media or trying to create positive habits like exercising and eating right.

You can recognize your free will and autonomy or believe your habits and preferences are a “disease” or “disorder” of the brain. That you’re masking some underlying cause that only years of therapy and a cocktail of pharmaceuticals will cure.

Dr. Salwan worries that people have been denied access to CUD treatment because of its illegality or because their “symptoms were trivialized.”

And indeed, we’re not trying to trivialize someone who feels addicted. It’s incredibly frustrating. But, like poor race relations stemming from government policy, school indoctrination, and media coverage, this poor relationship between drugs and consumers results from “addiction experts.”

Dr. Salwan’s framing of the issue does not help.

Is Cannabis Addiction a Treatable Medical Condition?

“Cannabis use disorder” is a concept created and reinforced by these so-called experts.

But what about people (i.e. “cannabis addicts”) who strongly prefer the herb with their actions but not in their speech?

It could be they think cannabis helps them cope with some traumatic past.

And it could be that some people just like to get fucked up. For whatever reason, they want to feel numb. And drugs are an effective way of bringing about that state.

But it’s a leap in logic to blame the substance. It confuses cause and effect. It’s putting the cart before the horse in every sense of the term.