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Cannabis Supply Chain Shortages Becoming More Prevalent

by The Real Dirt | Dec 13, 2021 | Blog, Business, Cannabis Business, Cannabis News, Industry News, Legalization

Getting basic materials like ceramics, stainless steel and computer chips from China has gotten so difficult that its about to hit one of the few industries that has so far been insulated from supply-chain woes: U.S. cannabis.

Rolling power outages in China have affected about six out of the 13 components that go into vape hardware made by the Blinc Group, according to Chief Executive Officer Arnaud Dumas de Rauly. There are also widespread problems with shipping. All of this may start affecting the price of cannabis vapes, but on top of all of this, Lunar New Year is coming. With it, disruptions and delays are expected to intensify as workers take long holidays, Dumas de Rauly said.

“I believe this issue will go on at least until the end of May,” Dumas de Rauly told me. “It’s not just vape devices. The raw materials for the equipment that fills them with cannabis, the LEDs for the grow houses — all of it comes from China.” The company has noticed shortages of chip sets, which are used in most technology devices, including those for vaping marijuana.

The cannabis industry has so far been shielded from supply-chain woes because most of it is hyper-local. Since it’s a Schedule I substance, companies risk legal imbroglios unless they grow and process it in the state where it will be sold. But state-specific supply chains can only protect the industry for so long.

4Front Ventures, a company with operations in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington, hasn’t seen shortages of raw materials yet, but is already suffering from shipping delays from items such as vape cartridges and specialty packaging, including tin boxes.

“We’re trying to order ahead — we’re not paying more, but we’re paying up front, also we’ve begun to source domestic pools of inventory,” said Josh Krane, the company’s vice president of operations for California. This November, he made orders and paid deposits for goods that he won’t need until April, May or even June, he told me.

So far, both 4Front and Blinc say they’ve managed to avoid passing costs on to consumers by finding alternate suppliers and prepaying far in advance for orders. Whether consumers see an impact will hinge on the multistate operators and dispensaries that sell the end products. Thanks to market dynamics, however, many of them have some wiggle room.

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Study Reveals Humans Domesticated Cannabis 12,000 Years Ago

by The Real Dirt | Jul 19, 2021 | 420 Culture & Travel, 420 News, Blog, Broscience Mythbusters, Cannabis News, Culture

study shows domesticated cannabis could be over 12,000 years old

Cannabis was first domesticated around 12,000 years ago in China, researchers found, after analyzing the genomes of plants from across the world.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, said the genomic history of cannabis domestication had been under-studied compared to other crop species, largely due to legal restrictions.

The researchers compiled 110 whole genomes covering the full spectrum of wild-growing feral plants, landraces, historical cultivars, and modern hybrids of plants used for hemp and drug purposes.

The study said it identified “the time and origin of domestication, post-domestication divergence patterns and present-day genetic diversity”.

“We show that cannabis sativa was first domesticated in early Neolithic times in East Asia and that all current hemp and drug cultivars diverged from an ancestral gene pool currently represented by feral plants and landraces in China,” it said.

Cannabis has been used for millennia for textiles and for its medicinal and recreational properties. The evolution of the cannabis genome suggests the plant was cultivated for multipurpose use over several millennia.

The current highly-specialized hemp and drug varieties are thought to come from selective cultures initiated about 4,000 years ago, optimized for the production of fibers or cannabinoids. The selection led to unbranched, tall hemp plants with more fiber in the main stem, and well-branched, short marijuana plants with more flowers, maximizing resin production.

‘New insights’

The study was led by Luca Fumagalli of the University of Lausanne and involved scientists from Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Qatar and Switzerland.

“Our genomic dating suggests that early domesticated ancestors of hemp and drug types diverged from Basal cannabis“, around 12,000 years ago, “indicating that the species had already been domesticated by early Neolithic times”, it said.

“Contrary to a widely-accepted view, which associates cannabis with a Central Asian center of crop domestication, our results are consistent with a single domestication origin of cannabis sativa in East Asia, in line with early archaeological evidence.”