Slowly, but surely, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is rolling out licenses to entities that want federal permission to grow cannabis for research. For more than fifty years, only one place could legally do so: the University of Mississippi. Then in 2016, the DEA announced it would approve new growers, which, as the result of twists and turns on which Cannabis Wire reported, didn’t finally happen until last year. In May of last year, three entities announced that they had signed a “memorandum of agreement” with the DEA, which is one step before final approval. They were Biopharmaceutical Research Company, based in California; Scottsdale Research Institute, based in Arizona; and Bright Green Corp., which is based in New Mexico, and which also received a statement of support from the state’s governor for its “$300M investment in high-tech cannabis manufacturing and research facility.” But the picture was still fuzzy. At the time, despite the company announcements, the DEA would not confirm which—or how many—applicants had received these memorandums of agreement. A sharper picture is beginning to take shape, though: In November, the DEA finally created a dedicated page on its site for this new program.
Nushin Rashidian, Cannabis Wire, 03/07/2022 19:00:00