It is almost touching when two natural soulmates finally realize they belong together. For years, prohibitionist moralizers have warned that cannabis would destroy society, while pharmaceutical boardrooms quietly dreaded the prospect of patients trading expensive patented medications for cheap, natural cannabinoids. Now, Smart Approaches to Marijuana and biopharma developer MMJ International Holdings have officially joined forces at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, demanding a complete halt to the Trump administration’s plan allowing Medicare providers to cover up to $500 annually in hemp-derived CBD. It is the kind of partnership so glaringly obvious in hindsight that it is hard to believe they weren’t publicly sharing a trench years ago.
Their coordinated assault arrives after a federal judge threw out the lawsuit for lacking standing, dryly pointing out that MMJ doesn’t actually have a commercial product on the market to suffer competitive injury, nor are prohibitionists physically harmed by an elderly stranger receiving CBD oil. Undeterred, the crusaders and the patent-holders returned arm in arm, arguing that MMJ’s millions spent on clinical development grant it standing and that government-sponsored over-the-counter hemp disrupts the pharmaceutical pipeline and misleads seniors. Culture-war rhetoric and corporate protectionism have merged into a singular legal strategy, exposing a mutual panic: moralists lose their bogeyman if grandmothers take hemp without consequence, and drug companies lose their captive pricing power if simple plant extracts are recognized as viable, accessible medicine.
Dabbin-Dad Newsroom
