Investors: The Marijuana Boom Is Now

What’s behind the booming profit potential of legal marijuana? Let me start by paraphrasing something I heard a physician say in a televised interview during the early days of some US states allowing medicinal use.

When asked if marijuana could have medicinal value, he responded:

“For patients who have terminal conditions like cancer or AIDS, if marijuana eases their suffering, it would basically be barbaric to deny it to them.”

“Would I advise a patient to light a plant on fire and inhale the combustants in unknown dosage in an attempt to cure an illness? Absolutely not, because that’s simply not the way that the medical community administers any medicine. We demand much more precision than that.”

Those words were prescient, because although some of the early “medicinal” use was a thinly veiled attempt to make recreational use less illegal, marijuana has become the basis for drug compounds that promise to improve the health outcomes of patients and produce profits for the companies who produce them.

Where to Invest – THC or CBD?

There is a crucial distinction to be made between Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and Cannabidiol (CBD), the two primary active compounds in marijuana. (There are as many as 100 more cannabinoid compounds also sometimes present in the plant, based on the strain.)

THC is psychoactive and makes users feel high. CBD is not psychoactive and has no significant effect on mood or perception.

While some medical users also seek benefits from THC, it’s CBD that has shown the most promise in the development of drugs.

There are whole families who have moved to states where marijuana is legal in order to procure medicines that help their children. Specifically in the case of children who have certain forms of epilepsy that cause dozens of painful seizures daily, some strains of marijuana offer nearly immediate relief. These people quit their jobs, sold the house, pulled up the stakes and moved to Colorado to get drugs made from Cannabidiol – also known as “CBD”, a non-intoxicating compound in marijuana – because they have been able to reduce or eliminate the seizures, even when other medicines and surgery could not.

Surely you can imagine that political beliefs about marijuana legalization get thrown right out of the window when someone is forced to helplessly watch their child or grandchild endure a painful seizure and relief is potentially within reach.

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This is exactly the type of apolitical momentum that might make legitimate marijuana medicines more accessible, even independent of the laws about recreational use. In fact, the US Farm Bill, signed in December 2018, fully legalized the production of hemp – a variant of the cannabis plant that has significant industrial and textile uses and contains extremely small amounts of the THC but can be harvested for CDB to make non-psychoactive drugs for both the pharmaceutical industry and the over-the-counter health and wellness industry. (More on this later...)

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