China\u2019s arrival in the global cannabis industry became official this week, winning a headline in America\u2019s \u201cnewspaper of record.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChina Cashes in on Cannabis Boom,\u201d read the May 4 headline in the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>. \u201cChina has made your iPhone, your Nikes and, chances are, the lights on your Christmas tree. Now, it wants to grow your cannabis.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The southern province of Yunnan and the northern province of Heilongjiang are especially named as \u201cquietly leading a boom in cultivating cannabis to produce cannabidiol, or\u00a0CBD<\/a>, the nonintoxicating compound that has become a consumer health and beauty craze in the United States and beyond.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet, in a strange contradiction, they are doing so even though CBD has not been authorized for consumption within China, \u201ca country with some of the strictest drug-enforcement policies in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Quoted is Tan Xin, chairman of Hanma Investment Group<\/a>, which in 2017 became the first company to receive permission to extract CBD at its facility\u00a0in a Yunnan \u201crestricted zone,\u201d next to a weapons manufacturer. The hemp comes from Shanchong, a rural village west of Kunming, Yunnan\u2019s capital. Here Hanma\u2019s subsidiary\u00a0Hempsoul<\/a>\u00a0has 1,600 acres under cultivation. Tan boasts of the \u201chuge potential\u201d for his enterprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hanma has global ambitions, having acquired a CBD extraction plant in Las Vegas, with plans for second one in Canada \u2014 all using Yunnan hemp.<\/p>\n The report noted that China has cultivated cannabis for thousands of years.\u00a0The Divine Farmer\u2019s Classic of Materia Medica<\/a><\/em>, a 2,000-year-old pharmacopeia,\u00a0commented on the curative properties<\/a>\u00a0of the plant. Yang Ming, a scholar with the\u00a0Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Science<\/a>, is quoted on the use of hemp seed in traditional folk medicine in the region even today\u2014particularly to treat constipation.<\/p>\n But the People\u2019s Republic has taken a hard line on illegal drugs, and cannabis cultivation was effectively repressed after its founding in 1949. After China signed the UN\u00a0Convention on Psychotropic Substances<\/a>\u00a0in 1985, this ban was extended even to industrial hemp, long an agricultural mainstay in Yunnan. The prohibition on industrial hemp was only lifted in 2010 \u2014 initially to make uniforms for the People\u2019s Liberation Army.<\/p>\n At a press conference in Beijing last month, Liu Yuejin, deputy director of the National Narcotics Control Commission, said that in response to international moves toward legalization, China\u2019s authorities would \u201cmore strictly strengthen the supervision of industrial cannabis.\u201d The stringent security and surveillance measures at the Hempsoul facility are described. The company is one\u00a0of four in Yunnan that have received license to process hemp for CBD.<\/p>\n Others are about to get on board. Preparing to launch operations in Yunnan are\u00a0Conba Group<\/a>, a pharmaceutical company based in Zhejiang province, and\u00a0Huaren Pharmaceutical<\/a>, based in Qingdao, Shandong province. Jilin province, bordering Heilongjiang on the south, is also about to begin hemp cultivation.<\/p>\n This July, the\u00a0Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences<\/a>\u00a0is \u00a0to host the first\u00a0China International Hemp Industry Forum<\/a>\u00a0in that province\u2019s northern city of Harbin, billed as \u201chigh level networking opportunity for professionals worldwide in CBD and Hemp industry.\u201d<\/p>\n But if space is rapidly opening for hemp cultivation and CBD extraction in China, space for actual marijuana use has only closed since the more relaxed atmosphere of 20 years ago. Under President Xi Jinping, China is becoming in many ways a more rigid place and tolerance of illegal drugs is certainly no exception.<\/p>\n In its recently released annual review of global use of the death penalty,\u00a0Amnesty International<\/a>\u00a0actually has some good news to report. After several years of rising, worldwide \u201cknown executions\u201d actually dropped by over 30% in 2018. But there\u2019s a catch. The term \u201cknown executions\u201d is used because no figures are available from China \u2014 believed to be far and away the world\u2019s greatest executioner.\u00a0<\/p>\n States Amnesty: \u201cAs in previous years, the global totals do not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believed were carried out in China, where data on capital punishment is classified as a state secret.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2009, Amnesty stopped publishing its estimated figures for executions carried out in China, calling on the Chinese authorities to actually release the real numbers.\u00a0<\/p>\n And many of these literally untold numbers of executions are for illegal drugs. Amnesty notes that in several countries the death penalty was used last year \u201cfor crimes that did not involve intentional killing, and therefore did not meet the threshold of \u2018most serious crimes\u2019 under international law.\u201d At least 96 executions were known to have been carried out for drug offenses in four countries: 60 in Saudi Arabia, 25 in Iran, 11 in Singapore \u2014 and again, no figure given for China, with its unknown number of such executions not even factored into the total.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whatever that number is, be it hundreds, or possibly thousands, it almost certainly includes executions for cannabis. As we have\u00a0noted<\/a>, the quantities sufficient to land you before a firing squad in China are 10 kilograms of resin (hashish<\/a>) or 150 kilograms of herbaceous cannabis (marijuana). But when it comes to trafficking rather than simple possession, judges appear to have discretion to impose the death penalty even for considerably smaller quantities.\u00a0 But anonymous thousands go the firing squad for nonviolent offenses each year. Recent months have seen\u00a0grisly spectacles<\/a>\u00a0of drug convicts sentenced to death before hundreds of assembled viewers in stadiums. Most of these convictions appear to have been for methamphetamine.<\/p>\n Perhaps not surprisingly, one enthusiast for Beijing\u2019s execution state is Donald Trump<\/a>. Speaking April 24 at the National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit in Atlanta, Trump praised China for meting out the death penalty for opioids link fentanyl. \u201cIn China, unlike in our country, the highest level of crime is very, very high,\u201d he said according to\u00a0C-SPAN<\/a>. \u201cYou pay the ultimate price. So, I appreciate that very much.\u201d<\/p>\n Actually, you can also get the death penalty for drug offenses in the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 including for trafficking 60 kilograms of heroin or 60,000 kilos of marijuana.<\/p>\n But if corporate control of cannabis contrasted with a continued anti-drug police state for the commoners is seen in many places around the world, it is hard to believe this trend is anywhere more advanced than in China.\u00a0<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you think China will revise its drug policy?<\/p>\n The post China Boasts \u2018Cannabis Boom\u2019 \u2014 But Still Metes Out Death Penalty for Marijuana<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s arrival in the global cannabis industry became official this week, winning a headline in America\u2019s \u201cnewspaper of record.\u201d \u201cChina Cashes in on Cannabis Boom,\u201d read the May 4 headline in the\u00a0New York Times. \u201cChina has made your iPhone, your Nikes and, chances are, the lights on your Christmas tree.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,136,696,9925,3711,95,7495,9926,9927,9928,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35153,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35152\/revisions\/35153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Yunnan as Global Cultivation Center\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
More Provinces Get on Board<\/strong><\/h4>\n
China\u2019s Executions Unabated \u2014 Bucking Global Trend<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Sensi Seeds<\/a>\u00a0website, in a report on cannabis China, notes that a Nigerian national was sentenced to death in 2009 for selling just six kilograms to local dealers in Guangdong. More perversely still, the UK\u2019s\u00a0Daily Mail<\/a>\u00a0reported last November on the case of an American college student, Matthew Fellows, who was sentenced to death by a court in Nanjing merely for passing a joint, technically deemed \u201ctrafficking.\u201d Fortunately, after eight months in jail, he was released and sent back home to Maryland after the conviction was reversed in light of evidence that he was framed by a jealous love interest.<\/p>\nDonald Trump Applauds Execution State <\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: China Boasts \u2018Cannabis Boom\u2019 \u2014 But Still Metes Out Death Penalty for Marijuana<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"