The Politics Of CBD In A Technofascist Age
For a plant compound touted as “miraculous,” there’s no shortage of dirty horrors hidden behind the weeds of the online CBD world
2019: The Year of Playing Whack A Mole
With everyone and their mama selling CBD oil today, including Kim Kardashian and Martha Stewart, it’s safe to say that this highly prized cannabinoid, better known as CBD, has become ‘insanely popular,’ officially making it into the mainstream.
“The hemp and CBD industry has taken off like a rocket ship in 2019,” says Rod Kight, cannabis business attorney.
About 64 million Americans have already tried CBD and almost 3/4 (which would be 75%) found it at least mildly effective, according to Consumer Reports. The hemp-derived CBD market is estimated to be worth $23 billion by 2023.
But while some brands (many substandard) sell this naturally occurring plant constituent without a hitch, others on the front lines of the online dietary supplement CBD space, including my magazine and marketplace Honeycolony.com, have gone through technofascist hell.
“I’ve been doing market research for years and covered everything… This is definitely the craziest market I’ve ever covered,” Bethany Gomez, director of research for the Brightfield Group, told Rolling Stone in September 2018.
CBD: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
CBD dietary supplement manufacturers who sell CBD from industrial hemp exist in a legal gray area when it comes to selling CBD online. For many, the rollercoaster ride began in December 2016, when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) published a rule that cannabis extracts, including CBD, was an illegal Schedule 1 substance.
Suddenly, hemp with no psychoactive properties was being lumped into the same category as firearms, heroin, and porn. According to the government, CBD was now “dangerous,” offering no medical benefits, despite a growing body of research illustrating otherwise.
The most common obstructions online companies experienced included successive merchant processors shutdowns (i.e. Paypal, Stripe, Quickbooks), getting blacklisted, being banned from advertising on social media platforms, theft, and fraud.
Back in 2019, we started to get scrubbed off of sites like GoFundMe, and got deranked by Google. Years of hard work quickly disintegrated.
Without a merchant processor, a business’ ability to transact on their e-commerce platform is disabled. Just two weeks of lost income is enough to greatly impact a small business, let alone months on end.
“No one is speaking up about those leading the way in the revolution to legalize CBD and how the system is preventing business owners to take payments in the process,” says Kimber Mc, CEO of multi-brand hemp and CBD distribution company Natural Healthy CBD. “Law-abiding, tax-paying citizens have been without PayPal and most without processing since we’ve been a legal industry.”
I’ve experienced this firsthand. I lost PayPal privileges on my site and I was also personally ‘banned for life’ even though I’ve never sold CBD via my personal account.
A lot of this over-reaction stems from confusion about what exactly CBD is. Cannabidiol (CBD) is a plant compound found in hemp that acts on the body’s own endocannabinoid system (ECS) — a vital “cellular-signaling system” involved in modulating pain, appetite, mood, memory, and cellular life and death cycles — to promote homeostasis. Unlike the compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana, CBD has no psychoactive properties whatsoever.
“The easiest way to think about it is that CBD is to hemp as THC is to marijuana,” writes the publication Racked. Hemp and marijuana are derived from two different strains of the cannabis plant, but one is grown for its psychoactive effects and the other for industrial purposes. (Although to further confuse things, you can get CBD from marijuana plants that also contain a tiny bit of THC.)
“The concept of putting cannabidiol (CBD) on schedule 1 of the drug schedule, saying that it has no medical use, and it’s highly dangerous, just flies in the face of fact and science and knowledge,” says Dr. Margaret Gedde, a Stanford-trained pathologist, and award-winning researcher.
Ironically, our same government — the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to be exact — also patented CBD as an antioxidant and neuroprotectant in 2003.
It is hypocritical and absurd.
In December of the same year, the Hemp Industries Association, Centuria Natural Foods, and other hemp businesses (collectively, “HIA”), thought so, too, and filed a petition against the DEA seeking a court order either striking down the ruling or clarifying it.
Predictably, the court did neither in rendering its decision on May 1, 2018 — less than two weeks after FDA advisors voted to recommend approval for GW Pharma’s expensive fake CBD called Epidiolex.
All was unraveling according to plan: Big Pharma wanted a piece of the action.
(This ruling only refers to CBD oil derived specifically from marijuana, leaving the question about the status of industrialized hemp with less than 0.3% THC, which was supposed to be protected under the 2014 Farm Bill.)
According to Health Freedom News, the Farm Bill of 2014 recognizes that industrial hemp is different from marijuana and allows states to cultivate industrial hemp and CBD. Yet, on December 14, 2016, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) ruled in 2016 that cannabis-derived extracts should be tracked as a Schedule-1 narcotic.
At the core of these challenges exists an arguably asinine system that caters to Big Pharma, hidden agendas, disinformation, fear, corruption, sickness, and greed.
Melissa Mentele, a 40-year old mother of three in South Dakota, has fought to help bring CBD to many sick patients as an alternative to pharmaceutical painkillers.
“… Big Pharma wants to swoop in and use an unfair monopoly and an inferior product to profit off the backs of catastrophically ill and dying people. It is disgusting,” she told Vice in June 2017.
Big Pharma is also arguably aware of the evolving healthcare market that’s drifting away from conventional medicine in favor of holistic and functional approaches.
Consider that the dietary supplement industry is estimated at about $122 billion and growing, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a leading trade association representing dietary supplement and functional food manufacturers and ingredient suppliers.
“A few years ago, the sentiment was that all hemp drugs were snake oil, they were just trying to capitalize on trends,” says Gomez of the Brightfield Group. But it’s debatable whether or not a very sophisticated pharmaceutical product would be more effective than some of these products that are essentially OTC.”
TERMINATED
From 2015 to 2016, after adding our own premium liposomal organic CBD oil, our online sales blossomed from $200,000 to $1 million. After four years as a startup, our hard work was finally paying off. Sales continued to spike.
Until they didn’t.
I wasn’t alone in seeing this change. Financial institutions started cutting off CBD companies, telling them that hemp was too risky. Many banks didn’t want to get in trouble with the law for providing financial services to the CBD industry.
Instead of running a business, many in the CBD space found themselves frantically plugging up holes as if we were on a sinking ship.
After being shut down five times in six months, many processors wouldn’t even consider taking us. During a virtual operations meeting, I joked, “You’d think we were selling guns or opiates. It’s like we’re on some sort of shit-list.”
It turned out we were.
We were what is called “TMF’d,” a terminated merchant file.
Also called ‘Member Alert To Control High Risk (MATCH),’ this list is used to screen potential applicants, flagging anyone who has had credit card privileges suspended — for any reason.
“It is the most ridiculous thing ever,” Janet Schriever, owner of the CBD skincare line Code of Harmony who is one of those “blacklisted” on MATCH simply for selling CBD products.
Mastercard initially created the MATCH List to ban merchants caught engaging in blatantly fraudulent activity. In recent years, though, the list has been used more aggressively in merchant account for CBD products, leading legal experts to assert financial institutions may be overstepping their bounds for CBD payment processing.
“A lot of legitimate merchants are getting [placed on MATCH] right now,” says David J. Bartone, a lawyer whose firm specializes in e-commerce, credit card processing, and credit reporting. “Not all merchants who are placed on MATCH deserve to be.
Bartone also contends there is insufficient due process for those being placed on the MATCH List in merchant account for CBD products. Once on the list, a merchant is not able to obtain a merchant credit account for at least a five year period. It’s very difficult to get off the list before the five years are up. (I know, I’ve tried with the help of my attorney).
“I really do think the MATCH List is something that is a trade libel and something that is also used as a potential extortion tool in many respects, adds Bartone “To drive someone out of business, I think, has legal consequences.”
Eventually, we found a “merchant support facilitator” to help us circumvent MATCH if we agreed to certain restrictions such as getting paid once a week instead of every day and creating an entirely new website, SimplyTransformative, to solely house CBD offerings.
See more here substack.com
Header image: SHRM
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Frank S.
| #
My friend and former neighbor, Roger Christie and his wife Share, have been advocating for the legalization of marijuana and its derivatives in Hawaii for years!
Reply