By Jole Dolce / Leafly
Published on June 14, 2017

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — This city is a nutty place, full of contradictions, a liberal bubble inside a conservative country. It has a thriving LGBT population, most restaurants offer a vegan menu, and there are more cannabis clouds on its clogged streets than in San Francisco or Denver.
Although Israel has no legal recreational market – it’s still against the law to sell bongs or vaporizers – many Tel Avivians are smoking spliffs in the bars, in the streets, on the beach, and outside the CannaTech conference I attended earlier this year. Mind you, in Israel the only people legally allowed to use cannabis are the 28,000 patients enrolled in the state medical cannabis program. The laws here, like most places in the world, haven’t yet caught up with reality.

The CannaTech gathering focused on the intersection of technology, pharma, and cannabis—and offered a peek at the future of cannabis delivery systems.
Here are a few tech innovations that I saw at the conference (and outside of it as well) that could be appearing in North American dispensaries in the not-so-distant future.

Yes, a Vibrating Vaporizer

Disposable oil-cartridge vape pens may be discreet and easy to use, but they break and clog too frequently. The oils, which are typically thinned with propylene glycol, scratch the throat, and the Chinese-made metal coils that heat them can break down at high temperatures.

The Kanabo VapePod offers an alternative for patients who want a metered, temperature-controlled dose. Kanabo has replaced the metal coil with a ceramic oven inside a cartridge. Especially useful to inexperienced patients is the way the device vibrates when you’re pulling and stops once you’ve reached the correct dose. You can also set the exact temperature through an app on your phone, which allows you to target specific cannabinoids, each of which has a different burning point.

Kanabo CEO and founder Avihu Tamir says he got the idea when he was prescribed cannabis for migraines but found the notion of smoking medicine “ridiculous.” A lot of smoke-averse patients would agree. Because the VapePod is initially aimed at the medical market, Tamir designed the product to be well-functioning and intentionally unsexy–although the product’s latest incarnation, pictured up top, has obviously undergone a design upgrade. I can see this translating to the recreational market fairly easily. Put a titanium finish on that vape, and you’ve got a potential winner in the expanding rec markets.

Is This The Future of the Dab?

It could be if medical cannabis gets restructured along a strict pharma model.

The developers at Panaxia have repackaged whole plant extracts into pills, inhalers, transdermal patches and yes, suppositories. Panaxia’s manufacturing facility is in New Mexico, but most of it R&D happens in Israel and is managed by scientists affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of Science, located south of Tel Aviv.

Companies like these are betting that seniors and other patients with severe illnesses won’t want to fiddle or futz with tinctures, oils or green capsules—and may fear a medicine that’s been criminalized for more than 80 years. I think companies like Panaxia stand a great chance of succeeding. After all, the pharma industrial complex has medicalized death, birth, and school. Why should cannabis be any different?
With its cutting-edge inhaler, Panaxia dresses up plant-derived THC and CBD in drab but familiar clothes. The inhaler has a 2.5 mg hit of THC, which Eran Goldberg, Panaxia’s CTO, claims hits as fast as a dab and offers immediate pain relief. In March, Panaxia announced that it had entered into a joint venture with Ultra Health, a New Mexico medical marijuana producer, to manufacture the inhalers, as well as tablets and suppositories, at a planned $1 million facility in Bernalillo, a few miles north of Albuquerque. The products may eventually be available in both New Mexico and in Nevada, as Ultra Health is working with the Paiute Tribe on their grow and retail facilities in that state.

Panaxia’s sublingual pastilles have a special heat-activated compound that helps cannabinoids absorb into the mouth tissues more quickly. The bitter taste of THC molecules in the lozenges are “wrapped” in a food grade polymer and camouflaged by menthol. Rectal suppositories are used for colitis or IBS; vaginal for menstrual cramps.

All of these developments are impressive, but there are two things missing: One are formulations with a ratio of THC to CBD. The mixing of these two compounds has been shown to yield better results than single-compound formulas. The second missing element: There no reports from patients who have used them yet, so we won’t know how effective they are for a while.

One thing is clear: the facility that produces these pills is one of the most secure pharma labs in the world. Did I say “facility?” Sorry, “fortress” is more accurate. The Israeli police insisted the company build a $1.5 million steel wall around its lab and then install a 24-hour armed guard to watch over the “raw product” stored within. No other lab—even those that produce opioids—is required to have this kind of security. Does it make sense? Of course not, but that’s the high cost of being a cannabis pioneer.

By Juliana Vandals / Albuquerque Business First
Published on July 7, 2017

The medical marijuana industry is getting pretty big in New Mexico. How big? In 2016, the top 25 medical marijuana companies made over $46 million in gross receipts and paid over $12.3 million in compensation to their employees.

One of the largest medical marijuana companies is R. Greenleaf Organics, which has 70 employees and nearly 10,000 patients who purchased in Q1 2017.

In total, 108,729 patients purchased from the top 25 medical marijuana companies on The List in Q1 2017. These companies have a total of 9,054 plants in production as of the same time period. The average price per gram among the top companies is $11.08, with the most expensive price per gram coming from Sacred Garden at nearly $30.

Marijuana has a history in the country of being a controversial substance. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 imposed a tax on the sale of cannabis, hemp or marijuana.

In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act classified marijuana as a drug with “no accepted medical use.” In 1976, activist Robert Randall petitioned for his use of medical cannabis being a “medical necessity.”

California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. New Mexico became the 12th state to allow medical cannabis with the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act in 2007.

The Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act allows for the “beneficial use of medical cannabis in a regulated system for alleviating symptoms caused by debilitating medical conditions and their medical treatments.”

By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Albuquerque Journal

Published on June 1, 2017

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A medical cannabis grower filed a federal lawsuit this week alleging that Expo New Mexico officials violated the firm’s free-speech rights by barring a wide variety of items from a booth at the 2017 New Mexico State Fair.
Ultra Health Inc., which owns a growing facility in Bernalillo, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court of New Mexico alleging that restrictions placed on the firm would prevent it from displaying photos or drawings of marijuana plants, or equipment used to cultivate or process the plants.

Ultra Health this year applied for an informational booth at the 2017 New Mexico State Fair that would include “education materials on the medicinal and economic benefits of cannabis,” the lawsuit said.

Expo New Mexico officials in May sent Ultra Health an email containing a list of prohibited items, including anything used to grow or manufacture cannabis, or images of plants, the lawsuit said.

“Ultra Health would be precluded from bringing a microscope, a test tube, a petri dish, or a mass spectrometer to its informational booth” or even a cardboard box, which could be used to store cannabis, the suit said.

The restrictions amount to a violation of free-speech protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit alleges. It asked a judge to order a permanent injunction on the restrictions, and award an unspecified amount of money in damages.

The lawsuit identifies the defendants as Larry Kennedy, chairman of the New Mexico State Fair Commission; Dan Mourning, general manager of Expo New Mexico; and Raina Bingham, director of concessions for Expo New Mexico.

Expo New Mexico responded in a written statement Thursday that Ultra Health’s application included prohibited items, including a “cannabis clone.”

Expo officials asked Ultra Health to resubmit its application, removing prohibited items, including those “used to plant, propagate, cultivate, grow, harvest, manufacture or produce” cannabis, the statement said.

Ultra Health declined to reapply to be a vendor at the fair this year, the statement said.

Duke Rodriguez, owner of Ultra Health, said Thursday that the firm did not intend to bring a live plant to the 2017 fair. He denied that the firm sought permission in its application to bring a cannabis clone.

The conflict between Ultra Health and New Mexico Expo has a history.

Ultra Health last year displayed a cannabis plant named “Dorothy” at a booth the firm rented at the 2016 fair, but the plant was ejected on the first day, Sept. 8, 2016, after fair officials and New Mexico State Police were notified. No arrests were made.

Andy Lyman / The NM Political Report

Published on June 1, 2017

A prominent medical cannabis producer in New Mexico filed a federal lawsuit against officials with the state agency that oversees the New Mexico State Fair and owns the fairgrounds.

In the complaint filed Wednesday, New Mexico Top Organics-Ultra Health accused top staffers with Expo New Mexico along with the chair of the state fair board of violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution for barring the medical cannabis company from bringing cannabis-related materials to an educational booth later this year. Chairman of the New Mexico State Fair Commission Larry Kennedy, Expo New Mexico General Manager Dan Mourning and Concessions Department Director Raina Bingham are named as defendants in the case. The state fair officials, according to the lawsuit, “implicitly chilled” Ultra Health’s “clearly established rights to freedom of speech and expression.”

New Mexico Expo officials, though, said they have the authority to implement their own rules and regulations.

The lawsuit is just the latest in a series of events that stem from last year’s state fair when Top Organics-Ultra Health put a cannabis plant on display as part of its educational booth. Within hours, fair officials told the cannabis company to remove the plant and later asked the company to leave the fairgrounds. Soon after the incident, New Mexico’s Department of Health, which oversees the state Medical Cannabis Program, sanctioned Ultra Health. A district court judge eventually suspended the sanction against the company, which would have forced Top Organics-Ultra Health to shut down for three days.

Still, Ultra Health President and CEO Duke Rodriguez told NM Political Report that Expo New Mexico invited his company to again rent a booth during the upcoming state fair later this fall.

“We received a written invitation,” Rodriguez said.

But this came with a heavily worded condition.

Bingham reportedly told Ultra Health that at the next state fair, they can “not bring any type of drug paraphernalia that could be used to plant, propagate, cultivate, grow, harvest, manufacture, compound, convert, produce, process, prepare, test, analyze, pack, repack, store, contain, conceal, inject, ingest, inhale or otherwise introduce into the human body any type of cannabis or other controlled substance.”

Ultra Health is asking the court to overturn these restrictions on the basis that the state is violating the company’s right to free speech. The company also cites a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment based on its guarantee of First Amendment rights on the state level.

The lawsuit adds that the specific restrictions imposed by Expo New Mexico go far beyond cannabis and would exclude everyday items.

“By the plain language of Ms. Bingham’s statement, Ultra Health would be precluded from bringing a shovel to its informational booth, and would also be precluded from bringing a picture of a shovel, since a shovel may be used to ‘cultivate’ or ‘plant’ a cannabis plant,” the complaint reads.

Ultra Health is represented by Egolf, Ferlic and Harwood, one of the partners of which is New Mexico’s Speaker of the House Brian Egolf.

Spokeswoman for Expo New Mexico Erin Thompson confirmed to NM Political Report that Bingham sent an invitation to Top Organics-Ultra Health and later issued the long list of prohibited materials.

“Once they received clarification, Ultra Health declined to re-apply to be a vendor at this year’s fair,” Thompson said in an email.

Thompson also cited a state law that allows Expo New Mexico to adopt and enforce their own rules and said the rules are enforced uniformly and consistently.

“We continuously monitor vendors throughout the event to ensure they are in compliance with these restrictions, and if a vendor is in violation, they are required to remove the prohibited item or they are not allowed to continue as an exhibitor at the New Mexico State Fair,” Thompson wrote.