It appears that, towards the end of 2020, many South American nations took serious steps to promote industrial hemp and medical cannabis. There was serious political action in terms of streamlining the process of creating hemp and medical cannabis industries in these countries. Six years after Uruguay legalized cannabis for recreational purposes, most South American governments recognized the economic benefits of partial legalization. Uruguay was cultivating and exporting cannabis to Canada as medical cannabis, and Canada was exporting medical cannabis to Europe and Oceania. The US had legalized industrial hemp in the 2018 Farm Bill and 38 US states had legalized medical cannabis. Mexico was on the brink of cannabis legalization for recreational use. Argentina, Brazil and Colombia had kickstarted their medical cannabis markets through acts of legislation. It was probably widely recognized through South America that the Germans, Australians and Americans had started to reject their own synthetic pharmaceutical medicines and were switching to cannabis as medicine to treat a host of illnesses and to replace an array of expensive and harmful synthetic pharmaceutical drugs. In terms of industry, industrial hemp was making serious inroads into areas dominated by the petrochemical and fossil fuel industry - such as plastics, construction, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, medical equipment, fabrics and textiles, biofuels, etc. - slowly eating into these markets. The US, China and France had emerged as the leading producers of hemp for industrial purposes, exporting their product world-wide, even as hemp found increasing uses in not just the above-mentioned areas, but also in food, beverages, wellness, animal feed, etc.
This shift in global momentum towards cannabis, even though it was in forms that benefitted the elites -medical and industrial - was sufficient to frighten the synthetic pharmaceutical, fossil fuel and medical industry. From industrial and medical cannabis, recreational cannabis was only a step away. With recreational cannabis, huge masses of the global population that was dependent on these industries, besides alcohol and tobacco, would move away for good. The hold that the elites of the world had on the masses of people would be loosened and the lower classes could very well create a social revolution upending the class order of the world. To prevent this, the fake pandemic Covid was unleashed on the world at the end of 2020. It worked in terms of significantly boosting the wealth of the synthetic pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries while almost completely stalling efforts across nations to move towards cannabis for medicine, industry and intoxicant.
All this is mirrored in the two articles that I have come across regarding Ecuador's cannabis initiatives in the recent past. One is a report by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) stating that Ecuador's government was streamlining processes for industrial and medical cannabis. It reported in November 2020 that 'After five years of negotiations, Ecuador continues the process to approve the production of hemp for industrial and medicinal purposes. The Ministry of Agriculture is currently developing the regulations for planting. The Ministry of Health is modifying their regulations to allow the use and consumption of hemp and hemp products'. Reuters reported in August 2021, as the fake Covid pandemic was dying out that 'Declining sales spurred by the coronavirus outbreak dealt a heavy blow to Ecuador's flower sector, one of the Andean nation's traditional export industries, leaving farms cutting output or seeking to reinvent themselves. The Boutique Flowers farm in Tabacundo, an hour north of the capital Quito, has built cannabis greenhouses to take advantage of recent legal reforms that allow for cultivation of the plant - even though marijuana remains illegal. Marijuana contains higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the cannabinoid that causes a high - than hemp. Ecuadorean law requires that cannabis have less than 1% THC.' It appears that this is where things more or less stand with Ecuador.
Ecuador must make up for lost time by not just accelerating its industrial hemp and medical cannabis initiatives, it must also bring about complete legalization of cannabis at the earliest. This is because, as I stated earlier, industrial hemp and medical cannabis primarily benefit only the elites of society barring a few cultivators that have license to cultivate medical cannabis or industrial hemp. For cannabis to benefit society. as a whole, its legalization for recreational purposes is essential. Only then can the complete range of benefits from cannabis be availed. delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the most medicinal compound in the cannabis plant. The banning of high-THC cannabis is not based on any scientific rationale. The main purpose of keeping high-THC cannabis banned, and for keeping recreational cannabis banned, is so that cannabis does not reach the majority of the people, the sections of society who need it the most - the poor, the indigenous communities, the working classes, the minorities, women, the elderly and the sick. Through this, the elites ensure that these sections of society remain dependent on alcohol, tobacco, opioids, synthetic pharmaceutical medicines and the illegal drugs - heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, synthetic cannabinoids, novel psychotropic substances (NPS), etc. All this vastly benefits the power structure that keeps cannabis prohibited.
Cannabis legalization will enable the world to move away from the unsustainable industries that destroy the planet and push the world to the brink of climate disaster. But the current power structure in most nations is designed to benefit the elite classes opposed to cannabis. The power structure's enabling elements are: politicians, the medical industry, religious orthodoxy, cannabis prohibition groups, the media, law enforcement and drug enforcement, the armed forces, to name a few. The increasing awareness that almost all anti-cannabis propaganda is false, created by selfish interests, is one of the key factors. Growing scientific information is debunking all the myths that kept cannabis prohibited globally for nearly a century now. Some of these myths are: cannabis causes insanity; cannabis is addictive and harmful; cannabis is more harmful than alcohol, opium and tobacco; cannabis is used by criminals and causes crime; cannabis is used by the lowest classes and castes of society; women who use cannabis are prostitutes; cannabis legalization will destroy the youth; and so on. Most of these myths were debunked more than 150 years ago itself, by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894-95 set up by the British colonial rulers of India in order to prohibit cannabis and promote their alcohol, opium, tobacco and western medicine. But that did not stop the world from still going ahead and prohibiting cannabis, since the elites of the world who control global drug policy had amassed great wealth and power through the sale of their preferred drugs - alcohol, opium and tobacco - and had also grown vastly rich in the industries that thrived in the absence of cannabis, namely the petrochemical industry, the synthetic pharmaceutical industry, the petrochemical-based fertilizer and pesticides industry, the fossil-fuel based construction industry, the petrochemical-based non-biodegradable plastics industry, the synthetic fabric and cotton industry, the timber-based paper industry, and so on...
In December 2020, the UN voted to remove cannabis from its most restricted Schedule IV category of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It does, however, still remain in Schedule I, which is the least restrictive. This one move by the UN itself should be sufficient to bring about the recreational legalization of cannabis in every nation and an overhaul of national drug laws. Morocco, in recent times, has legalized cannabis cultivation for export purposes but keeps it illegal for use by the local population. In 2024, Germany and South Africa legalized cannabis for recreational purposes, joining Canada, Uruguay, Malta and Luxembourg. In the US, 24 states have legalized cannabis for recreational use (at the time of writing). The US cannabis industry is projected to have a $100 billion footprint in 2025 despite it being illegal at the federal level. Canada's legal cannabis market overtook the black market within two years of legalization. Germany and Canada cited reduction in crime and the protection of the youth as primary reasons for legalizing cannabis. While South America's cannabis legalization will cater mainly to the markets within the continent and North America, the Middle East and Africa's cannabis legalization will cater to European markets besides local markets.
Only when Ecuador fully legalizes cannabis for all purposes, including high-THC cannabis, will the country benefit from the powers of the awesome plant, and its people and nature enjoy the well-being that comes through completely embracing the cannabis plant...
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'After five years of negotiations, Ecuador continues the process to approve the production of hemp for industrial and medicinal purposes. The Ministry of Agriculture is currently developing the regulations for planting. The Ministry of Health is modifying their regulations to allow the use and consumption of hemp and hemp products'
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/ecuador-industrial-hemp-report
'Declining sales spurred by the coronavirus outbreak dealt a heavy blow to Ecuador's flower sector, one of the Andean nation's traditional export industries, leaving farms cutting output or seeking to reinvent themselves.
The Boutique Flowers farm in Tabacundo, an hour north of the capital Quito, has built cannabis greenhouses to take advantage of recent legal reforms that allow for cultivation of the plant - even though marijuana remains illegal.
Marijuana contains higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the cannabinoid that causes a high - than hemp. Ecuadorean law requires that cannabis have less than 1% THC.'
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