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Here, we bring you our top five recent articles covering medical cannabis in Texas, cease-and-desist letter response, pardons in Maryland, cannabis in Thailand, and research on autism and cannabis. 

Best of the Week: June 20 – June 26, 2025

Results included improvements in aggression, hyperactivity, and communication, but a strong placebo effect was also observed.

Randomized Clinical Trial Tests Effects of CBD on Behavior in Boys with Severe Autism

Here, we bring you our top five recent articles covering medical cannabis in Hawaii, a new dispensary in Connecticut, pesticide testing in California, a cease-and-desist letter to a dispensary on Long Island, and a global survey on cannabis for endometriosis.

Best of the Week: June 13 – June 19, 2025

The study tested the effects of real-world cannabis products categorized by four modes of administration: dabbing, vaping, bong-like, or joint-like products.

Study Highlights Role of Administration Modes in THC Exposure

A survey of nearly 900 endometriosis patients across 28 countries highlights cannabis as a preferred alternative to pharmaceuticals, despite legal, social, and medical communication barriers.

Global Survey Examines Cannabis Use over Pharmaceuticals for Endometriosis Symptom Relief

Daniela Vergara, PhD, discusses the high genetic diversity of the cannabis genome and data legal challenges.

Cannabis Genome, Diversity, and Legal Challenges: Daniela Vergara, PhD

Now, when you started kind of researching cannabis genomics, what were some of the kind of takeaways, what were some of the things you learned from that? What are some of the things you know, what were your goals as you were kind of studying the genomics and, you know, the work that needed to be done in cannabis at that time?

That's a loaded question, because so first, it was actually my husband's idea to work with cannabis. He was like, "when we moved here all the way, because cannabis is legal and and why sunflowers? No one cares about sunflowers. Why not cannabis?" So in any case, that's how it started. This was a Friday night, and so that weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I went online and I looked up the resources that were available. And for me, kind of this has always been a plant that is so common, right? And everyone uses it, so at least that's what I thought back then. Now things have changed, but the way everything should be known about this plant, which was totally not true, because of illegality, right? 

Then there was a genome that was sequenced by a group in Canada that was led by Jonathan Page, who's one of the big cannabis researchers. He had a paper, where he was a senior author, I believe, van Bakel, et al, 2011 where theysequenced the genome, and they had an assembly. Assembly is when you kind of put the genome together into, you know, like a puzzle, right? You take all of the little pieces after sequencing, and you kind of build a puzzle, and the puzzle was very fragmented, right? So just imagine that your puzzle is just little pieces, but it's not close together, it has a ton of gaps, so it was very fragmented. 

So there was something that could be done there, and we did. I started working with Steep Hill, they wanted me to work with the cannabinoid gene. So first, I was working again in host parasite coevolution when I was in Indiana, and that there's a big question in evolutionary biology in general that Darwin himself posed, which is, 'why do organisms reproduce sexually,' right? Why are there males and why are there females? Why do females not clone? 

One of the answers, which was the one that I was related to, is because you need diversity to escape from parasite pressure, especially if you have a very virulent disease. A disease that kills you or a disease that castrates you, and your fitness is going to be zero. One of the reasons to have variation, and guess what? Males provide that diversity, right? That's why you and your brother are different. Unless you're identical twins. 

So, I was coming with that mindset, and I was really intrigued by the fact that cannabis has males and has females, but it also has malicious individuals. And in plants, you don't see that, that often. Plants are usually, you have the perfect flower where you have the male parts and the female parts. 

But in cannabis, you don't have that. You have something that is called dioecy, where you have males and females. And I just got a paper published on that, actually, on a review on on dioecine cannabis and what's out there. So, that was what intrigued me the most. I did not realize that working with cannabis was going to be such a hassle, right? That one of the first things that I had to do was meet with lawyers. It's like, well, we're downloading data from the internet, right? This is DNA. Could be an elephant. It could be a palm tree. You just see on the on the screen ATGCs, millions and millions of them. 

In any case, I didn't realize that it was gonna be a legal issue, that everyone had opinions. Everyone has opinions, right? Everyone, like your neighbor, probably has opinions. And not only that, but also, well, the legality, but also that it was an entire industry. This was an entire industry where you have accountants, architects, engineers, and marketers. I had never met a marketer in my life before, until I started. I didn't realize that it was an entire industry. For me, it was a plant, and instead of growing a tomato or like your plant in the living room, it was cannabis. All of those things started shifting while I started working.

It's really interesting. Like, when you think about genetics particularly, I mean, it exists in other spaces, but particularly in cannabis, genetics is a really, like, a lot of it is about branding, right?

I think it's interesting. I think it's funny because at the end of the day, for me, the names do not mean much, right? And then it's like, okay, so what strain is this? And it's like, well, it's the strain Pepe Le Pew. Doesn't really matter. Do you want to change the name? You can change it. Sure, change it. Then when I say these things out loud to people, because throughout my research, we've found that many of the strains are misnamed. So you have a blue dream that's more closely related to something else. 

People are very attached to their names. And I kind of in a way I understand it because your name's Sebastian, and you're not named John, and your parents named you Sebastian, right? And if your middle name is John, because your grandfather was named John. So that name means something to someone. That doesn't mean that you're related to another Sebastian, at all. You are not related whatsoever. And in cannabis, is the same situation. 

There are some strains that you do see that. Maybe these were clones because they're closely related, but for many, I participated in, 'let's name this strain'. And then it's like, 'Oh, it smells like mango. Let's call it Mango Tango', right? That's how the name was born and then the best name gets a t-shirt. At the end of the day, those names really do not mean much. When people ask me those, I'm just like, 'Yeah, sure. Is this an indica or is this a sativa? What do you want it to be?' I said, 'Well, it's a hybrid'. That's exactly it. It's a hybrid. And I tell people rename, it. You won the High Times Cup last year. Just rename it and rebrand it. And then sometimes people take this as I'm being offensive. I'm like, No, doesn't mean much. Just rename it and then win it again.

How does that in terms of, like, genetic diversity of cannabis is like, I mean, that must be interesting from a genetics perspective, but then, like, does it like become a hassle as a researcher and how you study it?

Yes because there's a lot of diversity. So according to my rough estimates cannabis could have as much diversity as I mean, there's other species that have as much diversity, but probably two times or three times as much as the human species. So it is pretty diverse. It does make it difficult, for example, to put the assembly, the puzzle together, because sometimes you don't know, it's hard to differentiate whether these are two different alleles, right? So these are two different forms of the same gene. It's the same gene, but the two different forms I want from mom and from dad are so different from each other, that you think that they are two different genes. So it's like, 'okay, so this is one gene, this is another gene'. And then you can see that in the assemblies that are out there. There's probably 15 right now that are that are out there. And since 2011, well, I started working this in 2013, 2014, since then to now. There's been a ton of new resources and the assemblies have gotten so much better. So, so, so much better. There's still a ton of work to do, but, there's really good assemblies now. 

If you see the assemblies that are right now, you can see how the improvements have been done. But I was with Steep Hill, for example. We tried to assemble a male, a pineapple, banana, Baba Kush. Back in 2017, or so around that time, and we depended on a grower that was growing it for us. Because we're in a university, so we depended like it was, many things were out of our hands. Then when we sequenced it and we tried to assemble it, it was a mess. It turns out that the guy had decided, he told us that it was a fourth generation inbred, which makes it easier when you have inbreeding to do an assembly. But it turns out that he had decided at the last time to cross it with something else, so it was a mess. It was out of our hands. Until then, we did the best we could do, but at the end of the day, that assembly is a very fragmented assembly for that reason, so it is what it is.

Videos

Cannabis Genome, Diversity, and Legal Challenges: Interview with Daniela Vergara, PhD

With many years of experience in the cannabis industry, Steve Fuhr, Director of Sales at 

, offers a unique perspective in extraction laboratory development and product innovation.

, Fuhr discusses the potential impacts of cannabis rescheduling, explaining the need for standardization of extraction methods manufacturing to produce high-quality products. He predicts a shift towards nutraceutical-grade products with Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) certification that will allow for new delivery methods. He also highlights cold extraction methods, new compounds, and Nano emulsification, while acknowledging the paradox of obtaining cannabis research and data due to its illegal status.

Watch the video, read a partial transcript below, and 

In this interview, Steve Fuhr of SciPhy Systems, discusses the upcoming impacts  cannabis extraction.

Advancements in Cannabis Extraction and Concentrate Production: An Industry Expert's Insights

What innovations are you envisioning for the future?

: The biggest innovation I'm seeing is the stripping down of the concentrated oils to their constituent parts. And what I mean by that is using various forms of things like liquid-to-liquid chromatography or HPLC chromatography, to separate THC from CBD, and in fact, separate THCA from THC as separate chemicals. To separate the terpenes, the myrcene, the pinene, the limonene, and then putting them back together again in very specific doses so that they can really start to study very specific doses and really call them medicine.

The other thing I see, we talked about this briefly, and I didn't hit on this enough, is extraction methods that are better at capturing those acidic cannabinoids—the THCAs, the CBDAs—where you need to have a process that's very cold and the same is true for terpenes. This is where hydrocarbon is starting to become the dominant extraction method is because it's very cold. The other thing you're going to see is isomerizations, and in fact, there are sub chemicals in cannabis, one in which they're studying, which is supposedly 100 times more powerful than morphine. It's not a cannabinoid, by the way. It would enable us to create pain medicines that are non-addictive and still very powerful. So I think that's what you're going to see, is the breaking down of the plant into its constituent parts, teasing out those elements that we don't even know the name of them yet in many cases, and making them true medicines.

And then the last thing I've seen that's exciting is this concept called Nano emulsification, which is certainly not a new process, but there are new surfactants, new coding systems that will enable edibles, which normally take 30 to 45 minutes, to hit you almost immediately. So that's kind of what I see on the horizon.

I will leave you one last thought, is you have the FDA and many other federal organizations saying we want more data, but on the other hand, it's illegal to do studies. We've had college professors lose their tenured positions because they actually got grants to study cannabis and ended up getting fired by the Board of Education at the college they worked for. And yet, with those two paradoxes, cannabis is the most studied drug on Earth. There's more peer reviewed reports written on cannabis than any other drug worldwide, and so I'm looking forward to these studies coming out and real data being provided. It's a much safer drug. It's got some great potential, and we're looking forward to bringing that potential to the public.

In this interview, Steve Fuhr of SciPhy Systems discusses the upcoming impacts  cannabis extraction.

, offers a unique perspective in extraction laboratory development and innovation.

, Fuhr discusses his experience and predictions in the world of cannabis extraction. In particular, he explains challenges and opportunities faced by cannabis companies in the real estate sector with securing proper permits, properties, and dealing with restrictive banking regulations. Fuhr also highlights the importance of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) regulations for enabling recalls and exporting products to countries with stricter standards.

Watch the video, read a partial transcript below, and check out 

In this interview, Steve Fuhr of SciPhy Systems, discusses cannabis extraction methods, products, and research.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Future of the Cannabis Extraction Industry

Why do you feel 9 out of 10 extraction facilities will shut down in the next 2 years?

: It's interesting. I've made what we call “armchair predictions” on what's going to happen, and now suddenly, a lot of other people making the same predictions. There are three reasons. The first is this whole issue of cannabis companies having been relegated to the worst pieces of real estate, most markets, most of the time. And the problem that creates is when rescheduling occurs and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts to enforce GMP guidelines, they're in buildings that will never practically be GMP or they'll have to spend $1.6 million fixing the $1 million building that they don't own, right? And because of current 280E taxes, and all the issues facing cannabis, competing with black markets. People think cannabis owners are making millions of dollars. They're really losing millions of dollars. They don't have that money. So it's that building quality issue that's going to hurt a lot of people.

The second is going to be that when the interstate commerce barriers come down and cannabis entities are able to sell interstate. The bigger, more efficient players are going to start to take big market share very quickly. I'll be one of them in New York, where I'll be able to produce a liter of oil for $33, call it $35. Most people on the East Coast—I know because I work with them—are spending $3,000 and $4,000 to produce that same liter. They will not be able to compete with me—they might, but they're going to have to spend a million and a half on their facility.

And an interesting side point to that: to my knowledge, New York is the only state that is requiring processors to be GMP out of the gate, and that's significant. No other state that I know has mandated that. New York's going to have an edge, even though it's in a very difficult situation right now with licensing, they will have a huge edge over the other players in the country. By most people’s guess, much less than 1% of current processors are GMP.

So, you're going to have real estate issues, you're going to have problems competing with GMP, and you're going to have competition issues, which are going to really force people to scale up, not only make their facility GMP. I'll give you an example, working with a group in Colorado right now where they have a column that's a three-pound column. So they put three pounds of biomass in that column every time they do a run. They can't compete with somebody that does 50 or 150 pounds per run. They just can't. So, those would be the three big reasons.

As keynote speakers for Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024, Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk will take us on a deep dive into their multiyear study, the Science of Smokeability (SOS), a multiphase experiment into the variables that contribute to the cannabis smoking experience. Dr. Justice conducts photobiology research and co-founded the Hemp Mine, an innovative hemp farm and product manufacturer. Dr. Kirk is a natural product chemist with a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences. She previously presented on 

ongoing cannabis education and psychedelics at Cannabis Science Conference Fall 2023

Check out the video, read a partial transcript below, and 

register here for Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024

! See you in Kansas City, Missouri May 7–9, 2024!

Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk share a preview of their keynote research presentation for Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024.

Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024: Interview with Keynote Speakers Allison Justice, PhD an Riley Kirk, PhD

Here, Dr. Kirk explains details of their study:

: So it's the science of smokeability. It's something that our industry has needed for a really long time. And as Dr. Justice was saying, this isn't just one experiment. This is going to be like a 20-30 part experiment where we're looking at these different variables that really contribute to the smoking experience, and also help explain why so many people, especially medical patients, prefer smoking over other consumption methods.

I think the group that's working on this project, Science of Smokeability, is the perfect group of people. There's a lot of medical doctors or physicians or maybe other researchers that would look at smoking and say, “That's objectively bad for you. Don't do it.” Right? Period. That's it. People are still going do it, and they're always going to do it because it feels better, and it works better for them. So we're not trying to say, “hey, you should smoke or you should not smoke.” We're trying to say, what is so unique about the smoking experience specifically for really good flower? How can we cultivate a really good product and make that smoking experience a very positive experience from the feelings, but also reduce the amount of harm entering your body by understanding if there are cultivation metrics, or if there are drying cure metrics that can allow for a healthier product to be produced so that when the smoke enters your body, it's not producing a lot of the harmful compounds, more of the beneficial compounds, and then we can start to kind of delve into like what that chemistry is. Once we learn that chemistry, we can dive into this way deeper if we want to, but it's really just about learning more about the smoking experience because our industry has not done any of this really baseline fundamental research in understanding from plant to smoke entering the body, what is happening on a biochemical level? What is happening with these different molecules? Are there different levels of transformation happening? And can consumers actually pick up on these little nuances? Or can they not? So we're going to learn a lot about the palettes of consumers as well.

Each study is probably going to have a different number of participants. But I don't think we're going to have any trouble getting people to participate in the study. The first video we put out saying, “Hey, we're looking for people to participate,” got so much attention that we're already closing phase one, and moving on to recruiting for phase two of the study, because, you know, we only can accept so many people into each phase. So I'm most excited about how excited other people are for this research. Because really talented cultivators like Dr. Justice here, she knows that some flower smoke is really, really good, it feels really good. Consumers know this too. And then some flower is harsh, it hurts, it burns hotter, there's differences in the feeling, and in the chemicals that are present in these different experiences. And we're trying to dive into the nuance of what makes a quality smokeable product.

Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk share a preview of their research project that will be presented at Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024.

Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024: Interview with Keynote Speakers Allison Justice, PhD and Riley Kirk, PhD

In honoring Women’s History Month, Cannabis Science Conference (CSC) Spring keynote speakers Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk discuss the various roles of women in the cannabis industry, how they connect with each other, and the education they provide.

Dr. Justice conducts photobiology research and co-founded the Hemp Mine, an innovative hemp farm and product manufacturer. Dr. Kirk is a natural product chemist with a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences. She has previously presented on 

. Their keynote presentation at CSC in Kansas City, Missouri May 7–9, 2024, will bring us on a deep dive into their experiment, the Science of Smokeability (SOS), a multiphase experiment into the variables that contribute to the cannabis smoking experience.

Check out the video, read a snippet of the discussion below, and 

Keynote presenters Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk share how they have seen women effect change in the cannabis industry.

Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024: Keynote Speakers Allison Justice, PhD and Riley Kirk, PhD Discuss Women in the Cannabis Industry

Here, Drs. Justice and Kirk discuss their insights on women in the cannabis industry:

: So for me, growing up in a very male dominated industry—agriculture, horticulture—it's kind of been the norm. And cannabis being also agriculture, horticulture, it's always been in that realm of being male dominated. But what's been really cool for me to see, especially the past two years or so, is the community of women in this industry, that have come together on social media platforms, which was really kind of being that union for us. All with similar backgrounds, education, and just being a method to work together. Really, what's brought Riley and I together is ultimately connecting on Instagram and Tik Tok and whatnot, and saying, “oh, yeah, you like this, you do this? Well, let's get together and do something together.” And that's really where the SOS speared from is us women getting together and wanting to cause a bigger change.

: I couldn't agree more, I was going say the same thing. When I go on social media…I am just always absolutely amazed by the educational skills that women have in this industry. And they're absolutely dominating the research and the education fields of cannabis specifically. I think a lot of that, as Allison saying, is we come from these male dominated fields. I was in academia before I was in the cannabis industry and Allison was in horticulture, and it's very male dominated, and that just kind of the norm. When we moved to cannabis, we really want to use our voices to boost each other up, because we've seen what happens when we don't have that luxury, essentially. An example is, with my podcast: if I am looking for an expert to talk on something, I am always going to look for a woman to speak on it, or some other marginalized community. And I often do still have men and that's totally fine—they are experts and they're great communicators, too. But there's so many women who are also just amazing at what they do, and they don't have the opportunity to show their voice in that way. So that's definitely a huge part of it.

And then I think another part is the cannabis plant. The part that we use is the female plant. It is like we're embracing femininity every single day, when we talk about this plant, and we talk about the beauty, we talk about the medicinal power. Women have always been healers in our society, that has often been the role of women in our society. I think that's really obvious in cannabis, because healing is not just, here's a drug. It's more of the nurturing, the empathy, the listening, treating people as a whole, treating the plant as a whole, and seeing where that intersection happens, and what other wellness tools and life skills can we learn to really embrace wellness and healing in ways other than just selling a product or pushing a drug. That's what women continue to be so good at, and it just shines in this industry so well.

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