Northern Swan, a New York investment house specializing in the cannabis industry, just announced the appointment to two prominent political figures to its advisory board.<\/p>\n
One is former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The other is former Rep. Joe Crowley \u2014 the long-entrenched incumbent who was famously defeated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 Democratic primary.<\/p>\n
Northern Swan<\/a>, with a corporate kicker of \u201cGlobal Investments in Legal Cannabis,\u201d\u00a0is the financial muscle behind\u00a0Clever Leaves<\/a>, a Colombian company that hopes to export\u00a0CBD<\/a>\u00a0products to the European market. With a\u00a0shipment of samples for testing<\/a>\u00a0last month to German wholesaler\u00a0Cansativa<\/a>, Clever Leaves became the first Latin American cannabis company to complete an export to Europe.<\/p>\n As\u00a0Bloomberg<\/a>\u00a0reports, Daschle and Crowley have been hired to help guide Northern Swan as it works to open Europe, Canada and potentially the U.S. to Colombian cannabis products. \u201cBecause we view smart cannabis investing as smart regulatory investing, I think it was important to bring to bear some seasoned experts around Washington to help us expand our business,\u201d chief executive officer Kyle Detwiler told Bloomberg.<\/p>\n Northern Swan has raised almost $100 million in financing and hopes to go public late this year or early in 2020, according to Detwiler.\u00a0<\/p>\n Clever Leaves has about 900,000 square feet of cultivation capacity in the Colombian town of\u00a0Pesca, in the central Andean department of Boyac\u00e1. Juli\u00e1n Wilches, the company\u2019s director of corporate affairs, is a former drug policy advisor to the Colombian government, again pointing to a corporate culture of drawing from public-sector officialdom. In a recent interview with Bogot\u00e1\u2019s\u00a0City Paper<\/a>, he boasted that the company is the biggest employer in Pesca, with women, mostly single mothers, making up 75% of the workforce.<\/p>\n It is slightly amusing that news of Crowley\u2019s appointment to Northern Swan comes weeks after Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (now representing his old district in the New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx) protested that legal cannabis is disproportionately benefitting the white and wealthy, as opposed to those communities that were disproportionately impacted by prohibition. <\/p>\n AOC, as she is popularly known, made her comments during a February hearing of the House Financial Services subcommittee on the question of\u00a0banking services<\/a>\u00a0for the burgeoning cannabis industry. As\u00a0Huffington Post<\/a>\u00a0reported, she charged that way the legal industry is unfolding is \u201ccompounding the racial wealth gap,\u201d with non-white communities \u201clast in the door.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n AOC cited statistics from Colorado and Washington, the first two states to have legalized, that 73% of cannabis business executives are male and 81% are white. She broached a policy of \u201caffirmative-action licensing,\u201d so that \u201cfrontline communities\u201d can \u201creap the benefits or recoup some segment of costs that they bore in the 1990s during the war on drugs.\u201d Calling the question a \u201cjustice issue,\u201d she insisted: \u201cCommunities decimated by mass incarceration need to see investments with legalization.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0Drug Policy Alliance<\/a>\u00a0praised AOC for her comments. \u201cWe must legalize marijuana in a way that recognizes and repairs the disastrous, disproportionate harms of the drug war\u2026 on people of color,\u201d the organization\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0after the hearing.\u00a0<\/p>\n It should be noted that neither Crowley nor Daschle had the worst voting records on drug policy questions.\u00a0On The Issues<\/a>\u00a0website finds that Crowley did vote to send drug war aid to Mexico, but nonetheless had a \u201c+10\u201d rating from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML<\/a>), characterized as a \u201cpro-drug-reform stance.\u201d As he\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0last year, he was a co-sponsor of the\u00a0Marijuana Justice Act<\/a>, even bemoaning: \u201cThe war on drugs has created vast racial inequality in America\u2019s justice system \u2014 we must reverse its devastating impact here in #NYC and across the nation.\u201d But political figures far more problematic than Crowley and Daschle have also been riding the proverbial revolving door into a legal industry whose very emergence they all too recently opposed. Last April, former GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner \u2014 long an opponent of legalization \u2014 took a position<\/a>\u00a0on the advisory board of\u00a0Acreage Holdings<\/a>, a British Columbia-based cannabis investment firm.<\/p>\n Upon the announcement, Boehner\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cmy thinking on cannabis has evolved. I\u2019m convinced de-scheduling the drug is needed so we can do research, help our veterans, and reverse the opioid epidemic ravaging our communities.\u201d But he said nothing about reversing the social damage caused by cannabis prohibition.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was perhaps even more surreal when it was\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that former Trump media mouthpiece Anthony \u201cThe Mooch\u201d Scaramucci attended the Cannabis Pavilion on the sidelines of the\u00a0World Economic Forum<\/a>\u00a0in Davos, Switzerland, in January \u2014 at the invitation of Israel\u2019s former prime minister Ehud Barak. Israel has also been witnessing the revolving-door syndrome, and Barak is one\u00a0two of the country\u2019s ex-prime ministers<\/a>\u00a0to join the cannabis business \u2014 along with Ehud Olmert.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, in February, it was\u00a0an<\/a>n<\/a>ounced<\/a>\u00a0that George Papadopoulos, a former advisor to Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign (who\u00a0served a short prison term<\/a>\u00a0last year after\u00a0pleading guilty<\/a>\u00a0to lying to the FBI in the Russiagate probe), was joining the board of advisors of the\u00a0controversial<\/a>\u00a0California cannabis company\u00a0C3 International<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s Roger Stone, the notorious GOP \u201cdirty trickster\u201d who is\u00a0facing charges in the Russiagate scandal<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and has paradoxically embraced the weed.\u00a0After a\u00a0boycott<\/a>\u00a0got him dismissed from a panel at the\u00a0Cannabis World Expo<\/a>\u00a0in Los Angeles in September 2017, Stone\u00a0promised to speak anyway<\/a>, at a vape lounge near the confab. Stone, who began his career as a political operative for Richard Nixon back in the day, famously\u00a0has a tattoo of Tricky Dick on his back<\/a>. Nixon, of course, is the president who launched the Drug Enforcement Administration and first coined the term \u201cwar on drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n Scaramucci\u2019s\u00a0prediction<\/a>\u00a0that Trump would legalize cannabis after the midterm elections has yet to show any sign of coming true more than seven months after the polls.<\/p>\n But at least these Republican born-again marijuana enthusiasts are supporting legalization on strictly free-market grounds, without any pretense of concern for the social injustices wreaked by prohibition.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, does it bother you to see former political figures enter the cannabis industry?<\/p>\n The post Northern Swan\u2019s Newest Appointees Vindicate AOC\u2019s Critique of Cannabis Legalization<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Northern Swan, a New York investment house specializing in the cannabis industry, just announced the appointment to two prominent political figures to its advisory board. One is former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The other is former Rep. Joe Crowley \u2014 the long-entrenched incumbent who was famously defeated by AlexandriaContinue 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":[3922,7591,10057,50,216,592,170,7464,10058,3899,3092,208,146,7476,218,10059],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35532"}],"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=35532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35533,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35532\/revisions\/35533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}AOC Disses White-Dominated Industry<\/h4>\n
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Yet he has still become an exemplar of how legal cannabis is leaving intact those racial iniquities.<\/p>\nConservatives Jump on Cannabis Bandwagon<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Northern Swan\u2019s Newest Appointees Vindicate AOC\u2019s Critique of Cannabis Legalization<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"