An international market for marijuana that had been ‘flying’ just a few months ago is now slipping into decline and prospects for the future of the Jamaican market now appears to be ‘going soft’ according to sources close to the industry, including the Director of the island’s Cannabis Licensing Authority Delano Seiveright.
The Jamaica Gleaner reported in its last weekend’s business section that the once high-flying Canadian cannabis company, Aurora, had sold out its once presumed highly lucrative cannabis assets in Jamaica for what, just months ago, might have been thought of as the piffling sum of CAD$4.5 million, a price reportedly agreed upon in order that the company could receive an immediate-term cash payment. Beyond that, the Gleaner also reported that Aurora had settled for CDN$3.4 million for its extensive property in the CARICOM island nation. The company has reportedly also been selling off some of its other marijuana-related assets elsewhere in order to focus on consolidation in Canada.
The Gleaner says that Aurora’s dramatic business pullback in Jamaica is a microcosm of a wider reassessment by other Canadian companies of their cannabis investments in Jamaica and elsewhere amidst what appears to be a wider slowdown of the trade in Jamaica itself. Seiveright is quoted as attributing this development to the fact that “some people overextended themselves” in what he described as “a new industry” in which “there are lots of learning curves.”
Figures published in the Gleaner relating to farmers selling to herb houses suggests that the volumes have been dropping. “In January, marijuana sales amounted to US$54,500; in February sales were at their highest at US$123,400; that dropped to US$47,500 in March; and fell even further in April to US$18,000,” the newspaper reports.
Having spent decades buried beneath a formidable social stigma in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the research-yielding medicinal properties associated with marijuana has transformed its standing globally and by extension its financial value. Jamaica, which had long led the Caribbean in terms of its use as a recreational herb, seemed poised to reap significant benefits from marijuana particularly in the wake of the dramatic increase in its use in the developed countries of Europe and North America. Canada has taken a significant lead ahead of the other developed nations with its social and legal acceptance of marijuana, though the US, for all its pushback against legalising it, remains one of the most lucrative markets in the world.
Around the globe the image of cannabis has undergone a dramatic sanitization, shifting from beneath the unwholesome label of simply placing helpless ‘addicts’ in a high to a place of respectability in the medicine, recreation and beverage industries, among others. Here in the Caribbean the weighty stigma that had been weighing down cannabis has been significantly lifted to a point where all but the arch conservative segments of the society and sections of the middle class (some of whom rail against it in public but also use it as a recreational option) now accept that marijuana can no longer be wished away.
