Legal cannabis industry adopting strategies of the tobacco industry.

Recent actions and statements by the cannabis industry in the US should have public health advocates concerned as they mimic strategies adopted by the tobacco industry decades before them.Namely the cannabis industry is: (i) targeting regular daily users as ‘the backbone of the industry’; and (ii) pressuring regulators to weaken pesticide regulations. Several jurisdictions have shifted away from the criminalisation and prohibition of cannabis towards legally regulated markets. Currently, 25 state governments in the US have enacted some form of medical cannabis legalisation. Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, Alaska and Washington DC have implemented laws allowing recreational consumption by adults [1] and other states have legislation pending [2]. In the 2016 US Presidential election, California and several other states will vote on legalising non-medical cannabis use by adults [3]. Elsewhere, the Canadian government is poised to legalise cannabis for non-medical use [4] and Uruguay is in the midst of implementing a state monopolymodel for cannabis [5]. Governments of other nations such as Australia, France, Czech Republic, Jamaica and Mexico have, or intend to, amend laws to support provision of cannabis-based medicines [6]. It has been noted that public health lessons for regulating cannabis should be drawn from previous experience of regulating alcohol and tobacco [7]. However, regardless of whether lessons have been learned by those responsible for regulating legal cannabis markets, the cannabis industry has learned well from the tobacco industry about how to grow a market and subvert regulations that might be considered ‘bad for business’. In Colorado, the first state to implement a ‘seed to sale’ legal cannabis market, tension is apparent between profit seeking and public health [e.g. 5,8]. Most concerning from a public health perspective is Colorado’s ‘collaborative approach’, which allows and actively encourages the cannabis industry to have input into developing regulations [9]. The logic behind this ‘work group’ approach is ‘the lack of historical precedent’ [10, p.245] and need for input from multiple stakeholders to find solutions [10]. However, it appears that the adverse effects of industry influence on regulation of alcohol and tobacco have gone unheeded. For example, documents from prominent cannabis industry press indicate that, much like the tobacco industry 50years earlier [11], the cannabis industry is strategically targeting daily users as the majority of their market share. Thus, a recent report by Marijuana Business Daily [12] was succinct in its description of market trends and strategy: