‘Big Cannabis’ Goes Global. Think we can all see where this is heading…:
In America it has been a bumpy ride. The country long tried to effectively wipe weed off the face of the earth. But over the past decade or so, the pendulum swung: 24 states legalized recreational cannabis, and 41 states have legal medical markets. For a few years, venture capitalists poured their dollars into every hip-sounding weed company they could find, giving rise to the so-called green rush — a cannabis industry across the United States and Canada worth $30 billion at its peak.
But things were never steady. A patchwork of state laws, high taxes and overspeculation led to a cycle of boom and bust. Companies told their financial backers that federal legislation favoring the industry was imminent, but when that failed to materialize, investors pulled their cash. Profits stalled and stock prices collapsed. To many, it looked as though the cannabis industry would remain stuck in purgatory.
Then, at the end of last year, an unlikely savior arrived: President Trump. His executive order in December to reclassify cannabis promised to take the drug out of the category that includes heroin and place it alongside prescribed pain medications like codeine. It would also, importantly, spare companies from the heavy taxes that were strangling profits. (Stating the obvious–he made a shitload of money on this–somehow.) The industry perked back up. Now North American cannabis companies are taking their wares overseas. And Europe, the first stop on their campaign of global conquest, is not ready.
These are early days for legal marijuana in Europe. So far, only Germany, Malta, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic have legalized recreational cannabis. None follow the heavily commercialized model of North America, although there are pilot programs for retailing cannabis in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Medical marijuana, however, is legal in many countries, including Italy, France and Britain. Europe’s medical cannabis market is already approaching $1.7 billion in value.
With this influx comes challenges. In America, legalization — despite some of its social equity ambitions — has tended to place profit over public health. For the most part, the cannabis industry has adopted many of the same aggressive marketing practices associated with the tobacco and alcohol industries, including lobbying for favorable regulation, increasing the potency of products and targeting a small number of frequent users. The cost is clear. A recent study found that this underregulated and overcommercialized approach gives rise to increased use disorders and psychic distress. (Kinda like legalized gambling on everything?)
I leave the rest to you, the reader. Reading is good for you.
The Most Fascinating Obituary You Will Read All Week. Meaning, a fascinating life story:
Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, died on July 20 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 93.
Once called the “prettiest thing underwater,” Ms. Parry was among the first women to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, an achievement that led to a career in Hollywood, including doubling for Sophia Loren in the 1957 film “Boy on a Dolphin” and co-starring with Lloyd Bridges on the television show “Sea Hunt.”
The path to those roles began in 1951, when she was a secretary at Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, Calif. A colleague set her up with an engineer there named Parry Bivens, thinking that they would make a good match because they already had the name Parry in common.
Mr. Bivens was a polymath and had many hobbies outside of work, including scuba-diving and taking psychedelic drugs. He introduced her to both, and they courted in the water.
On dates, Mr. Bivens taught Ms. Parry to scuba-dive off Catalina Island. In the evenings, she read books on the science of diving, including the dangers of nitrogen narcosis, a state of altered consciousness that can impair the judgment of deep-sea divers. Soon, she was hooked.
“To be underwater and breathe there was remarkable — a wish to behold,” Ms. Parry said in the 2007 book “Diving Pioneers and Innovators: A Series of In-Depth Interviews,” by the diver Bret Gilliam. “Jumping into the ocean in those early days was sheer bliss.”
Above water, she participated in an LSD study conducted by Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who administered doses of the psychedelic drug to more than 900 subjects in Los Angeles, many of them up-and-coming actors. During her two dozen trips, Ms. Parry painted kaleidoscopic scenes of nature and water.
She credited LSD “with helping her to appreciate the intricacies and interconnectedness and beauty of life in the ‘underwater world,’” LA Weekly noted in 1998, calling Ms. Parry both an “accomplished pioneer diver” and “something of an acid queen.”
During the summer of 1954, Ms. Parry, Mr. Bivens and several other divers set off one Sunday afternoon to test a new mouthpiece valve. Ms. Parry offered to be the guinea pig. Everyone hoped she could set a record.
Three miles offshore, with the Coast Guard monitoring, she jumped in the water and headed down. She kept going, and going, until she reached the bottom, where she found an empty can of Schlitz beer.
The depth — 209 feet — was a world record for a female diver.
That, right there, is a life well-lived. A little Sea Hunt theme music, maestro, if you please:
Hmmm, didn’t realize they’d done a reboot. Must’ve come and gone in under a minute.
The Next Big One: We know where, we pretty much know when (soon):
Drive north from Los Angeles toward Las Vegas on I-15 and about one hour in you’ll find yourself snaking through one of the most geologically precarious parts of North America.
Cajon Pass, also known as the gateway to Southern California, has served as a natural navigable route through the towering San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountain ranges for centuries. It’s an industrial corridor, boasting major highways, train lines, aqueducts, underground gas pipes, and fiber optic cables. Each day, an average of 160,000 vehicles travel on the highway, while power lines above provide electricity to thousands, and natural gas flows in high-pressure pipes underground.
The pass also sits above two of the most dangerous fault lines in the world, poised for rupture: the San Jacinto and the San Andreas, where the Pacific tectonic plate and the North American plate meet.
Cajon Pass is a critical site for the next major earthquake that rips through this region, according to a new study that found tectonic stress is, in some parts, at its highest level in a thousand years. Scientists said that the pass could act as a potential “earthquake gate,” either blocking large ruptures from passing through both faults or allowing them to occur across the two systems.
The findings, released this June in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, have reignited longstanding concerns among seismologists and emergency managers about this Californian chokepoint, the lifelines that run through it, and what it can withstand when the next rupture occurs.
Far beneath us, the Pacific and North American tectonic plates are rubbing against each other. The Pacific plate is moving faster, snagging on the North American plate as it passes it. When the stress of those snags suddenly releases, we experience an earthquake.
The June study found that tectonic stress has steadily built along the two fault zones that meet at Cajon Pass, growing in some places to its highest level in 1,000 years. In the past, when stresses rose in concert, like they are right now, the pass has acted as a gateway, allowing the rupture to go through both fault systems, and producing a larger earthquake. The findings can’t help us predict the next catastrophic quake, but they do imply that when it comes, it could be major—around 7.5 on the Richter Scale.
“We are primed to have another one in our generation,” says Liliane Burkhard, lead author of the June paper and a geophysicist at the University of Bern. She added that her study could further refine investigations into how these fault junctions behave in other parts of the world. Turkey’s North Anatolian fault, for example, has certain branches that could be possible earthquake gates, says Burkhard, as do faults in China, Nepal, and New Zealand.
If a major earthquake was to rip through the southern part of the San Andreas fault, the results would be catastrophic. Seismology models have predicted more than 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries, and $200 billion in damage in the event of a 7.8 magnitude quake.
Many musical options here. I’ll leave you with two. You can choose your fave:
Um, I think we can do better than that:
