Marijuana has become a banker's business, highlights Marcelo Tognozzi in article

The journalist and independent consultant for 20 years, Marcelo Tognozzi, published an opinion piece on the Poder 360 portal to discuss the economic movement of marijuana and how the plant has caught the attention of the global financial market, receiving investments from various sectors and large companies.

In the midst of it all, the Brazilian government resists. The most conservative wing of society as well. But it has been a while since marijuana became a business for bankers and large international investors like billionaires George Soros and Sean Parker, a 40-year-old businessman with a net worth of 2 billion dollars.

Three of the largest Spanish banks (BBVA, Bankinter, and Caixa) already have significant investments in marijuana-producing and processing companies, the so-called cannabis industry. In late November 2017, BBVA bought 58 thousand shares of the Canadian group Canopy Growth for 1 million Euros.

At the end of last year, the company tripled its stock market value. At the same time, Aurora Cannabis bought competitor Canimed Therapeutics for 1 billion dollars. Bankers can smell profits from afar.

In 2010, Soros wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal (“Why I Support the Legalization of Marijuana”), in which he praised former President Fernando Henrique, among other leaders, as one of the supporters of legalization. The billionaire has been lobbying for the legalization of cultivation for medicinal and recreational use in Brazil and other countries in Europe and Latin America. He uses his NGO, the Open Society, for this purpose, or others under his influence like Viva Rio.

The cannabis industry in the United States and Canada already employs about 200 thousand people and generates annual revenues of around 20 billion dollars. It is expected to reach 200 billion in 2026 according to estimates from the Bank of Montreal.

These numbers prove that marijuana is already a globally recognized agribusiness sector with shares listed on major stock exchanges. Recreational use is not the main business. What really makes money are medicines, oils, beverages, foods, and even cosmetics that use cannabidiol, the active ingredient in marijuana.

This is a discussion that bothers conservatives, churches, and security agencies, but it is necessary to face the issue head-on. Condemned for decades as a drug distributed by organized crime, through the drug dens of the slums, marijuana has gained social and economic status, transformed into a darling of bankers and billionaires. Ben Klover, one of the heirs of the distillery that produces the world-famous bourbon Jim Beam, has already announced the launch of a product “spiked” with cannabis. Imagine the effect of that.

Americans may be very conservative about certain customs, but they are way ahead when it comes to money. They have already understood – certainly researched exhaustively the habits, needs, and tastes of wholesale and retail consumers – the size of the business and will steamroll ahead.

The government needs a good strategy to negotiate Brazil's entry into a market that will continue to grow. Denying that the economic issue tends to prevail over customs, especially when it comes to medicine production, is not the best policy.

Photo: Poder 360