Public Health and Medicine’s Need to Respond to Cannabis Commercialization in the United States: A Commentary

ABSTRACT

Cannabis legalization has resulted in rapid commercialization, making this new market increasingly attractive to tobacco, alcohol and beverage, agricultural, and pharmaceutical multinational corporations, who are well positioned to capitalize on the synergy between cannabis and their products. The fact that cannabis remains a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act is inhibiting research, which consequently prevents evidence-based regulation of modern, more potent, engineered cannabis products and their use. Without a research exemption for legitimate studies of commercially available products, cannabis’ Schedule I classification makes it very difficult to conduct medical and scientific research to inform policymaking and regulation. As corporate commercialization looms large, public health organizations need to engage the issue of rapid commercialization of cannabis products and press for evidence-based policies based on public health best practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Cannabis
• public policy

Disclosure statement

CMB was a temporary contract employee for Green Rush Consulting (GRC), LLC that provides consulting services to applicants applying for cannabis licensure, as a copyeditor of technical writing from October–December 2017 and March 2018 for an average of 25 hours per month of active service. AYH and SAG have nothing to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by National Institute on Drug Abuse grant DA-043950 and National Cancer Institute grant CA-113710. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.