“Pot with patents could plant the seeds of future lawsuits”

The title of this post is the headline of this reader-friendly piece by Craig Nard at The Conversation about the intersection of marijuana reform and intellectual property law.   Here is how the piece gets started:

It’s hard to make sense of cannabis regulation.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) continues to categorize marijuana as a Schedule I drug. That means the government believes it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” putting it in the same league as LSD and heroin.  The Trump administration has expressly voiced skepticism of marijuana’s medical benefits, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions calling them “hyped.”  Yet, legal pot has become a multi-billion-dollar industry that stuffs the coffers of eight states where voters have approved its legal recreational use.  And nearly 30 states have legalized pot for medicinal purposes so far.

This burgeoning industry has also witnessed the issuance of dozens of patents related to cannabinoids and various strains of cannabis, including ones on marijuana-laced lozenges, plant-breeding techniques and methods for making pot-spiked beverages.  Some of these products contain a significant amount of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana that makes people high.

As a professor who researches and teaches in the area of patent law, I have been monitoring how private companies are quietly securing these patents on cannabis-based products and methods of production, even though marijuana remains a Schedule 1 drug.  An even richer irony is that the government itself has patented a method of “administering a therapeutically effective amount of a cannabinoids.”

This engagement with the patent system raises several interesting questions as the legal pot industry grows and medical research on cannabis advances.