How public support for marijuana is reshaping business landscape

Businesses can not stay apart from social changes happening around them; similarly, growing marijuana support is reshaping business community’s attitude towards the weed. Marijuana is impacting business landscape and its affects are visible at two levels. First, how business community regards marijuana and what is their attitude towards pot-smokers. Second, how difficult it is to set-up a cannabis related business.

A glance at economic landscape reveals businesses attitude towards marijuana’ all across the nation, has changed dramatically. To catch up with swinging public opinion, two major life insurance companies in Canada, reversing their longstanding policy, decided to treat cannabis users as non-smokers offering them far cheaper premiums. This move is symbolic that shows businesses has started treating marijuana as a part of a normal life.

Now we have economic leaders like Sir Branson who is fervently supporting legalization of marijuana. Sir Richard Branson not only occasionally smokes but he actively advocates decriminalization of marijuana all over the world.

But yet there are companies such as Google, Facebook which

are lagging behind public opinion. Both Tech giants not only have a policy that prohibits cannabis related ads but they also haphazardly censor promotions for all kinds of other-marijuana related content including news stories, books about cannabis and pages that provide information about the law. Particularly, Google has a clear policy which includes cannabis among “dangerous products and services” and does not allow cannabis ads even in states where medical and recreational use of cannabis is legal.

Would these tech giants review their biased policies regarding marijuana in near future? The cannabis legalization advocates needs to turn their attention towards this point as it may prove vital in their efforts of decriminalization of the weed.

We fairly hope in coming days more and more businesses would reverse their longstanding biased policies towards cannabis and start treating marijuana as a normal fact of life.

To analyze with what difficulty/ease a cannabis related business can be established; it is important to note that historically unfair restrictions placed on cannabis industry have strangled its natural growth. It is only recently, legalization has allowed this industry to somewhat fair opportunities to operate under. 

With this new business landscape, burgeoning cannabis demand coupled with relaxed laws have encouraged many entrepreneurs to exploit exponential potential of the industry that is dubbed as the “weed gold rush” in US. 

Listing of cannabis company Terra Tech on Wall Street marks a symbolic development that shows businesses have belief in cannabis based business and the restrictions to set-up such business are melting down.

Talking about rapidly changing business landscape and growing popularity of marijuana, Mr Peterson who heads Terra Tech told Telegraph,

“Funding opportunities have increased. With the legal risk having dropped, it is far easier to raise capital”.

“In 2010 it took a year to raise $ 1m. Last year we raised $ 10m”.