Cannabis Grow

The overwhelming majority of this sample reported using cannabis to treat multiple health conditions. This result is unsurprising given increased cultural attention to the wide range of conditions for which cannabinoids may be therapeutic. However, panacea-like use may prove problematic. The same cannabinoid preparation that might be helpful for one condition [e.g., high THC and neuropathic pain ] could exacerbate symptoms of another [e.g., high THC and anxiety ]. Indeed, the current study found limited variability in choice of cannabinoid content; the overwhelming majority of veterans preferred cannabis with high THC relative to CBD. This quantity and frequency of use are consistent with other populations of medicinal cannabis users. For example, Bonn-Miller et al. documented average rates of cannabis use of 2–3 times per day, consuming between 6 and 12 grams of cannabis per week, in a general sample of medicinal cannabis users. The sample’s strong preference for frequent use of high THC-containing cannabis raises concerns for long-term outcomes of self-medication. While THC-rich cannabis may provide acute relief for symptoms often experienced by veterans [e.g., nightmares ],metal greenhouse benches it is also more likely to cause intoxication and associated with increased risk of developing symptoms of CUD relative to CBD-rich cannabis . Indeed, CBD may reduce anxiety , depression , and inflammation , as well as improve cognition and extinction learning .

This dichotomy could explain why veterans who use cannabis to self-treat mental health symptoms, like PTSD, often show worse long-term outcomes and report higher rates of problematic use , despite preclinical and human experimental evidence of potential therapeutic utility of certain cannabinoids. Likewise, while the majority of participants preferred using an inhalation method for administration of cannabinoids, a nontrivial number reported that they prefer highly concentrated “dabs” , which is associated with greater risk of tolerance and withdrawal . Moreover, those who typically chose an inhalation method of administration reported a strong preference for smoking cannabis over vaporization. Smoking cannabis carries significantly greater health risks compared to vaporization . Perhaps more troubling is the finding that over 40% of the sample either didn’t know or didn’t care what type of cannabis they were using. This may be a function of the lack of sufficient science and education within this space. Given the historic barriers to conducting well-controlled trials with cannabinoids, even savvy patients have limited information to inform their choice of cannabinoid product, which might lead patients to choose at random. Moreover, while it is likely that many providers are rightly hesitant to make recommendations without the results of well-controlled clinical trials, there is also an enormous gap in the knowledge and training of those who interface with patients in terms of best practices given the current evidence base .

The primary limitation of the current study is that it assessed cannabis use and related behaviors entirely using self-report with no ability to verify cannabinoid constituents in products typically used. This is a major limitation of the current study because there is large variability in cannabinoid content within “strains” . Oversight of non-FDA approved cannabinoid products is lacking, and recent reports suggest that many of these products are often mislabeled . However, current legal prohibitions made collection and objective testing of participants’ products impossible. While using product names to assess preferred cannabinoid ratio provides only a gross approximation of possible cannabinoid content, the results of the current study offer more information on choice of cannabinoid products among veterans than exist in the literature to date. Substitution behavior was also assessed through self-report and was assessed broadly by asking participants if they had ever substituted cannabis for other substances. Substitution, however, can occur in a multitude of ways. It is unclear whether veterans who endorsed substitution were completely abstaining from the substance that they endorsed substituting cannabis for, or whether they interpreted substitution as reduction of quantity or frequency of use. Likewise, retrospective recall of substance use is often inaccurate . Substitution data collected via self-report might not reflect these veterans’ true behavior. Finally, the current study did not collect data on age of first initiation of use of these other substances. It is unclear whether these participants started using these substances before or after initiation of cannabis use, and whether substitution behaviors co-varied with combat exposure or other military-related experiences.

Despite these limitations, the current study’s findings highlight an ongoing issue among veterans, namely the possible gravitation toward addictive substances that provide acute relief yet potential long-term exacerbation of symptoms . Coupled with the need for improved science in this domain, findings highlight the importance of training providers in the nuances and differential effects of specific cannabinoids, as well as steering patients toward cannabinoid-based products that, while less rewarding in the short term, may be associated with reduced risk and long-term therapeutic gains. Future research might focus on the development of interventions that disseminate information on cannabis and cannabinoids to providers and patients. For example, vaporization of flower cannabis is associated with significantly lower risks of bronchial symptoms compared to combusted cannabis , but a very small proportion of this sample noted that they preferred vaporization to other inhalation methods. This suggests one specific target for possible intervention. The current study also confirms the findings of previous studies that have documented a trend in substitution behavior, where cannabis is substituted for other drugs, which, if associated with reduced harm, could be beneficial for overall health. Future studies might attempt to categorize which specific medications veterans who use medicinal cannabis are substituting cannabinoids for and whether those changes are associated with improvements in functioning. Cannabis sativa L. is a dioecious plant, producing male and female flowers on separate unisexual individuals . Although both male and female plants are capable of producing cannabinoids in equal concentrations , female plants produce greater floral biomass than male plants and thus are exclusively used in commercial marijuana production facilities. Moreover, after pollination, female plants alter their relative investment in phytochemicals by reducing the production of secondary metabolites like cannabinoids, flavonoids, and terpenoids . In the absence of pollen, stigmas on female plants continue to grow and thus produce more surface area on which cannabinoids can be produced . Because of this negative impact of pollination on cannabinoid yield, industrial growers rarely maintain male plants in production facilities, and instead propagate their stock of female plants by vegetative cloning . However, the “mother” plants used to produce clones eventually become non-regenerative and new mother plants are grown from seed, which necessitates pollination . Therefore, careful consideration must be given as to the most effective and efficient ways to collect pollen for controlled crosses while preventing pollen escape into production areas. Cannabis is anemophilous ,rolling greenhouse tables and therefore relies on air movement for pollen transfer from male to female plants, sometimes across long distances . Pollen dispersal mechanisms often reflect pollen ornamentation, as seen in C. sativa’s smooth exine layer, triporate morphology, and low mass—features intended to maximize pollen dispersal distance and chance of successful ovule fertilization . The aerodynamic morphology of C. sativa’s pollen highlights the difficulty associated with controlling its movement, as any airflow following anther dehiscence can result in pollen movement, a frequent issue when studying dispersal in anemophilous species .

It is therefore important to determine the most efficient method of capturing wind borne pollen upon anthesis, in terms of both the number of pollen grains collected and the time spent collecting pollen. Procedures for controlled pollen capture are typically required in crop breeding programs to ensure precise knowledge of paternity so as to breed progeny with preferred traits . For example, standard methods for maize breeding were established in the early 1900s, with an abundance of literature outlining the procedure for controlled crosses . However, because corn is monecious, breeding procedures prioritize avoidance of self-fertilization , with controlled capture of pollen samples as a secondary goal . Studies on controlled pollen capture in other species have developed methods based on species-specific traits, such as the clipping of large anthers in Eucalyptus L’Hér. . Although some literature related to maximizing pollen capture from trees describes methods that may be applied to cannabis , these would require modification based on the scale of collection and organismal size. In addition, most research on determining optimal methods for controlled pollination relates to pollen storage and germination conditions rather than optimizing controlled pollen capture. One of the largest barriers to comparing the efficiency of pollen collection methods is quantifying relative pollen yield. Previous research on pollen production in cannabis, which estimated the number of pollen grains per anther, relied on hemocytometers , a method frequently employed for counting pollen grains . More broadly, light scattering as a method for rapidly estimating particle abundance is well documented , and laser scattering has been used to analyze the physical properties of pollen grains . Relative to direct pollen counting using a hemocytometer, visible light spectroscopy could allow for the rapid quantification of particles in a liquid suspension. Here, we compared several existing methods used to collect pollen in other species, i.e., hand collection , vacuum collection , bag collection , and water collection , and explored their use in cannabis. Notably, we could not find any peer-reviewed publications that directly compared the efficiency of such methods , although many have examined pollen collection using a single methodology . Collecting pollen in large quantities may be of use in commercial crop breeding programs, especially when creating a repository of genetic stock for later use, and as such, we were interested in both the relative yield and efficiency of various methods. Hand collection, while simple in practice, may be inefficient because, in cannabis, it relies on pollen removal from individual flowers, one by one. Comparatively, vacuum collection may be more efficient but could be prone to sample contamination if male plants are not properly isolated from each other. Bag collection, similar to vacuum collection, is efficient, but the plant must be able to hold up bags; in the case of cannabis, male plants are so diminutive, and the flowers are so dispersed on a plant, that this is a difficult endeavor . Bag collection also could result in reduced yield if issues such as static charge of pollen grains are not sufficiently addressed .We used two hemp cultivars of C. sativa , both possessing an expected total tetrahydrocannabinol content of less than 0.01%; we grew CFX-1 in the first trial and CFX-2 in the second trial . Following germination in a two-tier terracotta germination pot , which took three days, we planted the seedlings in SC-10 containers filled with 200 mL of PRO-MIX BX mycorrhizae peat moss growing medium . A week later, we transplanted seedlings into 1-L pots filled with the same growing medium. We applied 250 mL of filtered water twice weekly and applied 250 mL of 0.4% diluted Miracle-Gro once weekly. For four weeks, plants grew under 24-h lighting from high-pressure sodium fixtures . Male floral development was visible in the third week, and we selected early-flowering males for use in our experiments to minimize variability in the number of inflorescences on each plant. We pruned the apical meristems of male plants twice, once in week 3 and once in week 4, to promote increased branching and thus inflorescence growth. After approximately four weeks, we switched plants to 12-h lighting to induce anthesis under visible spectrum LED fixtures .In the first trial, we used three pollen collection methods : hand collection , bag collection, and water collection . In the second trial, we maintained hand collection as a control and tested vacuum collection. To compare the yield and efficiency of collection methods, we imposed each pollen collection treatment on a randomly selected subset of experimental plants, each of which we collected three times during the course of the trial. Cannabis anthers dehisce non-concurrently, and as such we initiated pollen collection when at least 33% of visible male flowers were releasing pollen to ensure there was enough pollen to collect in the context of a breeding program. From each plant, we performed three collections over a seven-day period, where initial sufficient anther dehiscence occurred on day zero, the first collection occurred on day 1, and subsequent collections on days 4 and 7. In our first trial, we attempted to perform a fourth collection on day 10 but found that by this point the plants were no longer producing enough pollen to warrant a fourth collection from that point onward.

Even in the United States, new research is needed that more accurately evaluates real differences across the states in terms of the legal status of possession offences, how these laws are enforced and interpreted by police and prosecutors, how these differences get translated into arrest patterns, and how these differences in laws and their enforcement are perceived by citizens. Only then can we hope to accurately assess the real impact of a policy change on the primary outcomes of interest: consumption and harms. Strides are being made within particular countries to better understand these issues, but much work remains.Cannabis criminalization disproportionately harms minorities. African Americans composed 30% of cannabis arrests while comprising 14% of users between 1990 and 2002 . Despite consuming cannabis at similar rates to Whites in 2018, African Americans were 3.64 times likelier to face arrest for cannabis offenses . Criminal justice system contact negatively affects health , social welfare , and economic outcomes . Holding a criminal record imposes over 44,000 potential consequences . Criminal justice advocates have increasingly advocated for policies decriminalizing or legalizing cannabis possession and sales at the state level to reduce arrests; such policies prevent future harm but fail to assist existing record-holders. As a result, some states have provided general and cannabis-specific criminal record relief for former cannabis offenders . Forty-five states and Washington DC allow some degree of expungement , which is defined as the destruction or sealing of criminal records . Expungement lowers recidivism ,rolling greenhouse benches enhances earnings and employability , and improves people’s ability to obtain work, housing, and education funding .

Expungements are less expensive than work training programs , and improve economic outcomes since holding a criminal record lowers employability and earnings over time . Expungement is relatively underused. A 2020 study found that under 20% of eligible people with a record of conviction in 10 states petitioned for expungement . This low uptake is driven by a lack of awareness, the complexity involved in navigating the expungement process, and regulatory and financial hurdles . In 2016, the American Bar Association found that 13 states required either payment of a fee for expungement, or payment of all existing fines or fees related to their conviction, to qualify for relief . A majority of states’ expungement systems rely on petitions, although some, such as California, have automated expungement. Additionally, some states require that persons first obtain a Certificate of Eligibility to apply for expungement, which often requires its own process and fees. While some states offer expungement programs that address a broad range of offenses, other states offer expungement programs specific to cannabis records. There is limited research assessing how such programs operate in practice or the extent to which record-clearing processes are automated across states . We analyzed expungement statutes in states that decriminalized or legalized cannabis for medical and or recreational use to determine the availability and accessibility of expungement relief. We defined expungement as record sealing or destruction available to former cannabis offenders. We assessed whether states had automated or petition-based processes, as well as waiting periods, using model guidelines created by the nonprofit organization Alliance for Safety and Justice . We also reviewed policies to identify whether states that provide conviction record relief offered general expungement, general drug expungement, or cannabis-specific expungement programs.

We assessed whether states required Certificates of Eligibility to begin the expungement process, relied on pardons to grant relief, or vacated court rulings to provide expungement , a system known as vacatur. A review was also conducted of potential financial barriers, including administrative fees, and payments of existing financial obligations associated with convictions. Given the low expungement relief rates identified in previous research, we anticipated that most states would have expungement programs that allowed cannabis record relief, but that they would be petition-based and involve waiting periods and financial barriers.We conducted a retrospective qualitative survey of expungement laws in the US of states, and Washington DC, that had decriminalized or legalized cannabis use. Our goals were to determine whether states allowed expungement of prior cannabis offenses, whether states had generalized offense expungement regimes, general drug offense expungement regimes, cannabis-specific expungement regimes, or a combination of regimes, whether they had automated or petition-based expungement, the length of waiting periods required before seeking expungement relief, and the existence of financial requirements for persons seeking relief. Our focus on expungement automation and waiting periods were informed by guidelines produced by the Alliance for Progress and Safety . As of September 2022, 26 states and Washington DC had decriminalized cannabis possession , 38 had legalized medical cannabis and 20 had legalized recreational cannabis . We refer to the 39 states and Washington DC with some form of cannabis decriminalization or legalization, representing 40 jurisdictions, collectively referred to as “states” in this paper. To identify expungement policies, we collected each government’s statutes pertaining to general expungement, general drug expungement, and cannabis-specific expungement from state legislative websites or the NexisUni database.

We also coded the pardon application for North Dakota to capture its provisions, a web page from the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons to obtain relevant data for cannabisspecific pardon relief, and legislative text applying to cannabis expungement provisions in Vermont when the statute itself could not be located. Search terms included “cannabis”, “marijuana”, “expungement”, “record seal”, “set aside”, “vacatur”, legalization”, “recreational marijuana”, “retail marijuana”, “medical marijuana”, “decriminalization”, “statute”, and “pardon.” Google searches using these terms in combination with each state were used to find statutes from state government websites. Statutes that were not found through a web search were triangulated using government or legal websites that provided statute codes or names, then accessed through state legislative websites or NexisUni. If a state had expiring statutes that would be superseded by a new statute, we excluded the expiring statute and analyzed the new legislation. Only Washington State was in this category . Statutes were selected if they were relevant to general, drug, or cannabis-specific expungement regimes related to convictions, wait periods, fees, and fines. The research was approved by the University of California, San Francisco Institutional Review Board . The research used data that can be accessed freely by the public without special permission or application, the information was defined as not “private” and not involving human subjects. One author , who had previously written a report on state tobacco control policymaking that required interpreting legal regulations, and analyzing their impacts , imported the text of each statute into Atlas.ti for descriptive coding between February 25, 2021, and August 25, 2022. Statutes were iteratively coded to determine the characteristics and restrictions of state expungement programs until default codes were developed for program component themes. The identified themes included the type of substance , the mechanism , waiting period , and financial requirements . We indicated whether expungement was automated, and the presence and length of waiting periods for all states,commercial drying racks using guidelines created by the Alliance for Progress and Safety . Details relevant to waiting periods were further refined through a review of records. The resulting codes categorized statutes by whether they targeted relief for convictions, general offenses, general drug offenses, cannabis-specific offenses, or provided non-conviction expungement mechanisms. We classifiedprograms providing relief for cases that were deferred in exchange for probation, or for participation in treatment programs, as “conviction expungement” since a sentence was assigned, and served, to avoid entry of a guilty verdict into government records. Waiting periods were categorized by expungement program type, by their duration, and by the level of offense targeted . Financial requirements were coded to reflect whether they constituted an administrative fee or involved a financial obligation related to conviction that had to be resolved before expungement relief was received. The research team reviewed a subset of initial statutes together, then after an agreement was reached regarding themes and categorizations, the remaining statutes were read and reviewed by a single author . When there was uncertainty regarding the coding or categorization of a statute or law, the authors discussed it until they reached a consensus.General expungement waiting periods could extend up to 20 years. For violations and infractions, waiting periods ranged from less than 1 year to 5 years, for misdemeanors waiting periods ranged from less than 1 year to 10 years, and for felonies waiting periods ranged from 1 year to 20 years . States often set waiting periods that varied by offense and severity . In total, 33 governments set waiting periods for petition expungement, generally setting multiple durations based on offense level and type. The most common waiting periods were 1-2 years , 2-5 years , and 10 or more years .

Michigan automatically expunged general misdemeanor convictions after 7 years and felonies after 10 years, Pennsylvania expunged misdemeanors after 10 years, South Dakota expunged violations and misdemeanors at 5 years, and Vermont expunged convictions within 30 days for people who were between the ages of 18-21 years at the time they were charged. Arkansas permitted courts to immediately expungean offender’s record after completing drug or other court-ordered treatment . Four states explicitly established waiting periods for expungements after a pardon. Two states, Colorado and Illinois, allowed expungement at any time following a pardon. Alabama allowed expungement 180 days after a felony pardon, and Maryland required a 10-year waiting period before records associated with pardoned offenses were expunged.The 7 states that set waiting periods for cannabis-specific expungement programs set them to shorter durations relative to waiting periods for general expungement, as shown in Table 4. The 6 states with petition mechanisms set waiting periods ranging between no wait to 4 years. The 3 states with automated expungement waiting periods set waiting periods ranging between 1-2 years or tied waiting periods to the date of the offense. Three states with automated expungement, California, Illinois and New Mexico, set waiting periods for the expungement of cannabis records. Illinois automatically expunged certain cannabis-related offenses after 1 year, while California and New Mexico expunged certain cannabis-related offenses after 2 years. Illinois expunged cannabis offenses dated between 2013 and 2019 by 2021, offenses dated between 2000 and 2013 by 2023, and offenses dated before 2000 by 2025. Arizona and New Jersey imposed cannabis-specific waiting periods for expungement, with New Jersey also requiring a 3-year wait, completion of probation, or resolution of financial assessments, for cannabis offenses involving distribution or intent to distribute.Of the 34 states offering general expungement programs, 19 required that people pay administrative fees to procure relief, as shown in Table 5. Administrative fees collectively refer to filing and processing fees incurred during the expungement process. Among these 19, 11 charged a filing fee, 13 instituted a processing fee, and 5 states required both a filing fee and a processing fee. Nine of these 19 states charging administrative fees offered waivers for indigence. Oklahoma reimbursed filing fees upon expungement, and West Virginia waived administrative fees if an applicant participated in a treatment or diversion program. Nevada and Rhode Island did not charge administrative fees for expunging offenses that had been decriminalized at the state level. Compared to general expungement programs, cannabis-specific expungement programs were less likely to require payment of administrative fees. Among the 21 states with cannabis-specific expungement programs, only 4 required payment of a filing or processing fee . Three states required payment of filing fees to have records expunged, and 2 others required payment of processing fees. Delaware was the only state that set both filing and processing fees. Arizona offered an indigent waiver for cannabis offenses, and Virginia reimbursed filing fees after expungement. Three states required that a person seeking expungement first obtain a Certificate of Eligibility: Illinois, Louisiana, and Utah. Of these three, Utah imposed associated administrative fees but waived certificate requirements for offenses involving cannabis possession as well as for persons previously charged for using cannabis for qualifying health conditions. None of the pardon-based expungement programs required that pardon petitioners or recipients pay fees to receive an expungement. Seventeen states required that people seeking expungement pay other legal financial obligations to secure relief, as shown in Table 6.Of these, 16 required that any outstanding financial judgments, legal obligations, and restitution be paid before granting general expungement, and New Jersey required these obligations be paid before granting cannabis-specific relief . Although Oregon historically required that applicants for cannabis record expungement pay outstanding financial obligations, the state repealed that requirement in 2022. Only Illinois explicitly permitted the expungement of records if financial obligations remained unpaid.

The review not only examined the mechanisms by which odors induce a health response, but also identified effective risk-based approaches for regulating health impacts from exposures. The main outcomes of interest in the review were health symptoms, physiological responses, annoyance, mood and psychological health, quality of life, cognition , athletic performance, and brain activity. Alberta Health chose not to review animal studies, occupational exposures, hypersensitivity, commercial uses of aromas or potential systemic organ toxicity from odorant exposure. Of these gaps, occupational exposures are addressed in this paper due to their sentinel value for lower exposed residential populations. Non-sensory endpoints are addressed as well. Such information was found in other reviews and the post-2013 literature search.To understand the adverse effects from exposure to odors, the human sense of smell is introduced. Humans have around 5 million olfactory receptor neurons, and they are directly connected to the most ancient, primitive part of the brain. By comparison, dogs have around 220 million olfactory receptor neurons and rabbits have around 100 million. It takes around 1 second to respond to an odor. Olfaction relies on two neural systems and two routes of entry to the nasal cavity. Air enters either through the nostrils or the mouth . Volatile chemicals in the air bind to olfactory neuron receptors and to trigeminal neuron receptors . The combination of olfactory and trigeminal neuron receptors explains why menthol produces a minty smell as well as a tingling in the nose .

The human nose contains roughly 400 different types of receptor neurons,cannabis grower supplies each sensitive to specific types of odorants . The neural receptors signal the brain, which then associates the perceived odor with past experiences once the signal becomes strong enough. Environmental odors are typically a complex mixture of multiple odorants. The processing of odor mixtures involves activation of more brain regions compared to single odorants . Odorants can bind to one or more receptors, and receptors can bind to one or more odorants. Only a few odorants, however, are discerned within a mixture . Some odorants dominate while others are masked, and factors such as concentration, temperature and humidity all play roles.Human olfactory mucosa occupies 3% of the nasal cavity and is protected high in the nasal vault , so only an estimated 5 to 10% of air entering the nostrils reaches this region . The olfactory mucosa is composed of the olfactory epithelium and the underlying olfactory neurons. See Figure 4.2 for an overview.When sensed orthonasally, odors are perceived as coming from the environment, while when perceived retronasally, they are perceived as coming from food in the mouth . Our two nostrils help us stereoscopically locate the source of the odor . The sinuses, a connected system of hollow cavities in the skull lined with mucosa tissue that has a thin layer of mucus, may help humidify air in the nasal cavity. In 2015, a $15-million grant by the National Science Foundation kicked off further research into how animals, including humans, locate the source of an odor, such as food . The research focuses on how odors move in the landscape and how animals use spatial and temporal cues to move toward a target. The research is just one part of the federal BRAIN Initiative that studies olfaction as a window into understanding the brain, because olfaction is considered the most primal pathway to understanding brain evolution.

At present, such information is not available for e-nose development. The olfactory epithelium contains three types of cells: olfactory receptor neurons, their precursors and supportive cells. The cilia are constantly exposed to the nasal environment and are continually replaced, even their basal cells, possibly indicating frequent damage. A layer of mucus 10 to 40 µm thick coats the mucosa epithelium, and odorants must pass into this layer to interact with the sensory neurons through a series of poorly understood “perireceptor” events . Each sensory neuron, covered in cilia, projects down from the olfactory epithelium into the mucosa. The cilia form a network covered in receptor proteins. These proteins thread back and forth across the outer membrane of the cilia and interact with odorants. Various theories have been put forward on how exactly odorants interact with the proteins, and this remains an area of research. Receptor cells of the same type are randomly distributed in the nasal mucosa but converge on the same glomerulus. Each type of neuron frequently responds to more than one odorant, even from different chemical classes, so the overall odor signal must be integrated bythe olfactory bulb . Integration includes both olfactory and trigeminal signals, and workers often report odor and irritation as a combined, singular perception . The olfactory bulb also receives information from other areas of the brain to filter out background odors and enhance perception. Fascinatingly, none of the physical stimuli themselves ever reach the brain. Instead, a host of proteins transduces captured molecules into a small change in voltage that can be deciphered by the brain . The unpleasant and pleasant aspects of mixtures are represented separately in the brain .

Human sensitivity to odorants ranges across several orders of magnitude . Around 1 ppt appears to be a theoretical limit for sensitivity, and many odorants are not perceived until above 1,000 ppm. The major components of air are not sensed at all . Carbon dioxide is an interesting chemical because it is odorless at ambient concentrations yet selectively triggers only the trigeminal neurons and not the olfactory neurons when it reaches 200-fold above background levels . Describing multiple odor notes in mixtures is challenging. Fewer than 15% of the people tested could only identify one of the odorants present in a mixture, and identification of 3 to 4 components was the limit for trained experts . Even 90% of wine judges were unable to reproduce their scores . General variability in odor perception is high. Factors include age, sex, lifestyle, prior exposures, culture and health status . Approximately 3% of Americans have minimal or no sense of smell .Prolonged or repeated exposure to an odor can lead to a decreased response , which has the benefit of allowing a baseline reset in preparation for a new stimulus . Habituation happens as quickly as 2.5 second and is accompanied by decreased transduction by the neurons after 4 seconds . A growing field of research throughout public health is the microbiome, the microflora that contribute to gut, mouth and skin health. The nasal cavity, too, hosts microbes that contribute to normal functioning . Some microbes themselves emit odorants and can decrease the host’s sensitivity . Attempts to reverse engineer an odor based on the molecular properties of the odorant have been successful. Algorithms were able to predict the odor note of a given odorant based on its chemoinformatic features for 8 descriptors out of 19 total . Researchers using systems biology and computational techniques mapped odors to specific proteins on olfactory receptor neurons, which was dubbed the “odorome” . Risk assessment for estimating the non-sensory health risks of airborne chemicals has a large body of guidance and case studies. The primary focus of this paper is on the sensory health effects of odors that integrate both trigeminal response and olfactory response . In general, the olfactory pathway iscapable of informing the organism about the presence of an odorant while the trigeminal pathway helps inform the organisms about the risk of health hazards and injury .Cognitive bias plays a role in odor responses . Odors trigger memories of previous experiences and are influenced by the power of suggestion. If given a prior warning that an odor is harmful, increased irritation was reported. Fewer symptoms were reported if told the odor was healthful. Even when no odor was administered,dry racks for weed suggestion that there was a harmful odor led to symptoms. Prior experience with an odor introduces bias, too. Emotional baseline is also a factor . Sensitization to an odorant occurs when an acute exposure triggers subsequent, more-severe responses, often at lower concentrations . Desensitization can occur when chronic exposure to an odorant increases the concentration required to trigger a response. For example, workers who are habituated and desensitized to an odorant may be baffled by neighborhood complaints . The epidemiology evidence, however, indicated the full range of adverse effects from odor exposure . Such symptoms were self-reported, which means they may include bias. The distance from facility, an objective measure, contrarily did not predict the frequency of symptoms. Interestingly, the relationship between odor exposure and health symptoms appeared to be greatly influenced by odor hedonic tone, perhaps more so than odor intensity. The debate whether the purely odor-related symptoms are psychological or have an actual underlying physical cause is ongoing. In the same issue of Archives of Environmental Health in 1992, two opposing perspectives were presented. Shusterman concluded that the evidence of health effects was lacking beyond odors’ ability to inflict annoyance.

In the editorial immediately after his article, Ziem and Davidoff countered that odor, and chemical sensitivity in general, may well be based on underlying physiological responses, as was often found in the case of sick building syndrome. Both agreed that better ways to determine the impact of odors were needed, and well-controlled prospective case-control studies would be especially welcome. The psychological symptoms of odor exposure include tension, nervousness, anger, frustration, embarrassment, depression, fatigue, confusion, frustration, annoyance, and general stress . Odor frequency, odor intensity and feeling their concerns are not being heard all contribute to annoyance, which leads to stress. Health worries contribute as well. See Table 4.2.Changes in odor-induced frontal lobe activity has been linked to changes in mood, drowsiness, and alertness . Unfortunately, the studies of this connection were few and additional research in this area is needed. Odor-induced brain activity is complex, involving more than 30 different regions. Other studies reviewed found, however, that odors have no effect on task performance, so they concluded that the impact of odors on task performance may be odorant-specific. Increased prevalence of gastrointestinal symptoms were observed as a function of proximity to a wastewater treatment plant in Poland . The symptoms were correlated with both odors and microbiological pollutants and could not be disentangled to single out odors as the primary agent. Similarly, the negative effects of traffic noise and odor on residents in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, had a strong covariance between these two parameters and could not be differentiated .Some odorants and some co-pollutants within odors are considered hazardous air pollutants because they cause other adverse effects beyond smell and irritation .Air that contains odorants also is known to contain odorless co-pollutants such as particulate matter and endotoxins . There was a positive correlation between the presence of odors and the prevalence of self-reported health symptoms, such as headache and nausea, when communities near hazardous waste sites were compared . However, more serious health outcomes – cancers, mortality and birth defects – were not higher compared to the control sites .Dose-response relationships for odors aim to link the percentage of people experiencing adverse effects, such as odor annoyance and irritation, to the level of exposure. For toxic chemicals, adverse effects increase as exposure increases. Odors, however, can be more inconsistent. For example, hydrogen sulfide loses its characteristic “rotten egg” odor note as the concentration increases, leading to harmful levels going unnoticed .Such thresholds are called “suprathreshold” when above the odor is clearly perceptible. Different levels and locations of irritation may occur as well, which are also concentration dependent . Other health effects, including those from acute and chronic exposure, observe dose-dependent trends and have established thresholds by more complex, non-sensory based techniques often involving high-to-low dose extrapolation from animal studies. As an example, the thresholds for hydrogen sulfide are included in Table 4.4.The major goal of both risk assessment and odor assessment is to verify that exposures are below the thresholds of concern . For conventional risk assessment, the thresholds are health-based, often extrapolated from animal studies, and typically incorporate large margins of safety due to crude extrapolations and uncertainties. For odor assessment, achieving odorless air is the goal, yet due to the “lack of severity” of the effect, the acceptable limit is often set well above the odor-detection threshold. Given the wide variability in human response to odor, this approach is perilous, but a point of departure is needed, nonetheless.

The physical environment also plays a role. Varying wind direction and speed lead to the transitory nature of odors, and multiple sources in the vicinity lead to difficulty in source attribution. Even temperature and humidity play roles in the perception of odor, which is often overlooked during exposure sampling and analysis. In addition to the large number of chemical compounds present in malodorous air, their typically low concentrations challenge the limits of even the best instruments . Known as the “odor gap,” the human nose can usually detect odors well below analytical instrument detectors’ capabilities . Methods that use human panels to evaluate odors have been standardized over the years and can work well in parallel with traditional analytical instrument methods. The vision is to have analytical instruments that completely mimic the human nose and sense of smell. The measurement and evaluation of exposure to conventional air pollutants is considered more evolved than that for odors . The framework and methodology applied to conventional air pollutants – risk assessment – offers grounding principles and useful conventions that have evolved over time. Both fields evaluate human responses to chemicals in the air. Although risk assessments are often predictive of future events, they may also be conducted retrospectively as an investigative technique.Risk is, by definition,grow vertical is the probability of an adverse outcome and its severity. For chemical exposures, risk is a function of hazard and exposure .

The fundamental framework for risk assessment was established in the 1980s . Figure 3.1 provides an overview of the various steps. These steps begin with the generation of basic information, proceed through identifying the hazards of the chemical under evaluation, predicting how adverse effects vary with dose, and end with combining that information with exposure data to determine the incidence of adverse effects in a population. Beyond risk assessment, and beyond the scope of this paper, is subsequent regulatory, management and communication steps based on the risk assessment’s output and other factors. Given the variety of information required in a risk assessment, the field is truly multi disciplinary. The data and assumptions made along the way are evaluated for how much uncertainty they contribute to the results. Often an order of magnitude or more of uncertainty and variability are inherent in the output, which needs to be explained transparently to not “over sell” the results with a false sense of precision and accuracy.Risk assessment tends to separate exposures into acute and chronic , with sub-chronic falling in-between. A pragmatic approach to risk assessment is to first conduct a screening-level assessment based on crude approaches likely to overestimate risk. If the risk is found to be reasonable from such an approach, no further work is necessary. If not, then a more detailed, refined assessment is conducted. For the exposure assessment , the focus of this paper, a conceptual model guides the evaluation. The conceptual model traces the origin of the chemical , indicates how it is released, allows for transport of the chemical, includes possible routes of exposure, and indicates who might be exposed . Odors are released from a variety of sources, travel through the air and then are inhaled by local populations. Risk varies across a population due to biological differences , culture, lifestyle, level of exposure and prior exposures.

To protect vulnerable sub-populations, a safety factor is usually applied. Perhaps the greatest challenge for both odor assessment and risk assessment is mixtures. We are exposed to a wide variety of chemicals through food, medicine and the environment, yet risk assessment often focuses on a single chemical in isolation. Odor assessment follows suit, focusing often on only one odorant. Such an unrealistic approach is destined to produce highly skewed or biased results, probably in unknown directions . Odor assessment has the advantage of tests being performed by human panels, which can evaluate the whole mixture of the sample. Risk assessment relies on epidemiological reconstructions for human data.Risk assessment, however, has developed approaches for mixtures. A simple, screening level approach is to determine the risk-driver for the mixture. Adding up the individual effects is another crude approach. A simplifying aspect for odor exposure assessment is that human olfaction has evolved to differentiate between only a few significant stimuli. Typically, around 3 or 4 odors are sensed at a time, which decreases the complexity of the mixture . Those odorants that trigger intense, familiar or unpleasant sensations are more likely to be noticed while the remainder are lost in the signal “noise” or sensory filters. Or this limitation may due to inability to name a substance, rather than failure to detect the difference between odors . Both risk assessment and the evaluation of odors suffer from high degrees of uncertainty and variability. The personal nature of odor perception introduces fundamental variability. The health effects evaluated in risk assessment have a similar range of variability due to the biological variability of humans, which is increased further by the extrapolation of animal studies to humans. Therefore, each health effect benchmark value, such as a toxic reference dose, is typically presented with one significant figure due to the inherent uncertainty, which typically spans an order of magnitude. Exposure results, too, are uncertain due to modeling assumptions or analytical imprecision, as well as sample collection issues. In reality, one significant figure is a misrepresentation, and a range would be more accurate.

Making judgements using ranges, however, is difficult so single values are typically used. A sensitivity analysis helps show the possible range of results.Acknowledging uncertainties is key to interpreting results and making comparisons. Transparency each step of the way is paramount, otherwise overconfidence in shaky results may occur. Both the best practices and draft guidance include a tiered approach to odor evaluations. Such has long been used in risk assessment to streamline the work. First, a screening-level evaluation is performed using crude assumptions and approaches. If the exposure is deemed acceptably low, there is no need for further work. The same applies to odor investigations. If a straightforward evaluation by an air inspector identifies the source and resolves the issue, no complex further investigation need ensue. In both cases, if the screening-level approach identifies concerns, then a detailed analysis is undertaken.Describing an odor in detail is often difficult, so most complainants start with saying “something smells bad” and then struggle to give further details. Unlike other senses with broad vocabularies, smell is anchored in the source of the odor and the person’s history with that source. In a way, our sense of smell is learned. Attributing words and meanings to odors occurs over a lifetime and even changes over time. The food and beverage industry has attempted to make a science out of sensory description. Beer, wine and coffee are prime examples. Perfume formulation takes this to another level. To avoid complaints,vertical grow systems the drinking water industry has developed taste-and-odor assessment protocols.Environmental odors are typically mixtures of chemicals . The rare exception is the release of a single odorant from a chemical industry facility. The various odorants within a mixture trigger the olfactory sense in “concert” similar to the various notes in an orchestral piece of music. The perfume and fragrance industries are built largely upon this principle. The interplay of odorants in a mixture can be complex, with both synergistic and antagonistic effects taking place. Perfume has the function of covering up other odors. In odor terminology, this is called “masking.” Landfill and bio-waste sites are known to use scents such as “cherry” at their perimeter , yet in an evaluation of commercially available masking products only 4 out of 26 were able to mask odors successfully . All 4 were neutralizing agents that reacted with odorants. Within an environmental odor sample, certain odorants may mask others. Only upon dilution to a point where the major odorants are no longer perceptible are the minor odorants noticed. This dilution effect has been termed “peeling the onion” , where one layer of odor leads to another. Further discussion of this effect is in the section on odor intensity. The odorants within a mixture are subject to the same physicochemical processes and dispersion as any conventional air pollutant. The same exposure models, such as fate and transport, apply; however, the identities and concentrations of the individual odorants are often unknown, rendering such modeling impossible. To get around this issue, a pseudo-concentration approach has been developed, which is discussed in Section 4.2.

The overwhelming majority of the molecules in air are odorless. These include nitrogen, oxygen, water, hydrogen, helium and carbon monoxide. Rather uniquely, carbon dioxide is odorless until it reaches 200-fold above background levels , at which point is triggers the nasal trigeminal receptors rather than the olfactory receptors.Colors have agreed-upon descriptions, and graphic artists often use Pantone® numbers as specific identifiers. Musical notes have frequencies assigned to them and arranged into scales . Odorants, too, have descriptors, known as “notes,” the term used in ISO 5492:2008 . For example, “fishy,” “swampy,” “rotten egg,” “pungent,” or “tingly” are odor notes. An atlas of panel-derived odor notes has been published . The odor note, however, may change with the concentration . Hydrogen sulfide at levels above 20 ppm changes from its characteristic “rotten egg” odor note to a “sweet” odor note, and at even higher concentrations, which are toxic, hydrogen sulfide becomes odorless. The response to an odor is highly personal and depends on “odor memory” – previous exposure and knowledge about the odor source . Common descriptors associated with specific odorants, however, may aid in determining the source of an odor. Odor wheels have been developed for specific odor notes associated with certain sources, such as landfills, composting and WWTPs . Odors as mixtures make assigning odor notes more complex. As with wine tasting, several dominant notes may be present, along with several subtle notes. These, too, change as the mixture is diluted or ages, or as temperature and humidity change.As with sound and color, some odor notes may be perceived as pleasant or unpleasant. This is the “odor hedonic tone,” also known as the acceptability of the odor. Dravnieks published on this topic, and a scoring system is named after him. Odor hedonic tone is a highly subjective determination, open to large variation across a population and appears to be learned rather innate . Odor hedonic tone varies as the odorants increase or decrease, sometimes progressing through flip-flops between pleasant and unpleasant .Odor intensity – the magnitude or strength of an odor – has received considerable attention. Unlike odor notes and hedonic tones, which can be fairly subjective for the untrained, odor intensity is pursued as a quantifiable, even scalable, attribute of odor perception. The belief is that odor intensity is akin to brightness or loudness, which are quantifiable through physics, yet odors are a chemical sense with accompanying complexities. Nonetheless, two approaches have been attempted: assigning words or numeric scores to intensity levels, or determining the amount of dilution required until the intensity is no longer detectable. For a single odorant, intensity appears to be linked to the odorant’s concentration. In mixtures, such a link is tenuous or absent. Although odors are typically mixtures, it is much easier to study individual odorants. A simpler, although less-precise, formula is called the Weber-Fechner law . Fechner, a student of Weber, observed that the differences in the concentration of an odorant that caused “just noticeable differences” in perceived intensity was logarithmic, meaning an intensity difference is noticeable for a small change in concentration when the starting point is low and to achieve the same “just noticeable difference” at a high starting point requires a much larger change in concentration .Although this observation applies only to the region where an odorant intensity is readily perceived, researcher have expanded it to the lower end of the range, which may be highly unreliable. As the intensity approaches the point of disappearance, panelists give very different responses. At the odor-detection threshold, up to 1,000-fold differences in odor detection have been observed in controlled human studies . Trained panels tend to give lower results as they gain experience .Where the concentration is units such as ppb or µg/m3 , and k is a constant that is unique to each odorant. The linear intercept is either fixed to 0 , 0.5 or allowed to vary uniquely for each odorant, as represented by b . Whether the concentration is used directly or divided by a reference concentration does not impact the relationship between intensity and concentration.

Social science contributions to understanding multiple drug use have lagged behind those from the natural sciences . The regular and combined use of multiple substances is disproportionately practiced by some minority and socially marginalized groups, such as gender minority individuals . The particular risks and benefits associated with multiple drug use demand a better understanding of its unique characteristics, including its specific patterns, combinations, intentions, and contexts . We use the term multiple drug use to encompass both ‘drug use repertoires’ and ‘drug use combinations’. Drug use repertoires refer to the variety of substances a person ingests during a particular time frame . ‘Drug use combinations’ refer to the ingestion of two or more substances at the same time or in close temporal proximity so that overlapping psychoactive effects are produced . Prominent methods for researching multiple drug use include retrospective surveys that inventory participants’ drug use repertoires over the past month or year, and in-depth interviews and ethnographic field work that examine practices and experiences of drug use combinations. Increasingly, mobile and geo-enabled technologies are being integrated with qualitative research methods to ground drug use practices and experiences in their social and physical environments . In the spirit of creative research methods like these ,hydroponic rack we integrated geo-enabled smartphone survey data collection with a qualitative mapping interview method and piloted it to explain tobacco use disparities among bisexual young adults.

The pilot study revealed smoking patterns and situations that reflect young adult smokers, generally, but also the unique roles that smoking plays for bisexual young adults as they navigate differently sexualized spaces in everyday life . This brief report draws from preliminary data to demonstrate how the method may also provide integrated insights into the unique patterns, intentions, and socio-structural contexts of multiple drug use for different groups of people.Smartphone apps that repeatedly administer surveys to participants and record their locations over time are often used to research recurring and episodic behaviours. These approaches can ‘reach into’ the fabric of everyday life to collect data within participants’ natural environments and routines . Smartphone ownership is increasingly ubiquitous even among low income and rural groups, making this approach feasible with diverse populations. Mobile health research methods, such as these, minimize the retrospective recall bias that occurs when participants are asked to characterize their behaviours or experiences, and can be integrated into spatial frameworks and analyses when geolocation data are also collected . The value of mHealth methods for researching tobacco use is established mHealth methods are now used to research patterns and situational predictors of use of other substances, including cannabis, opioids, cocaine, MDMA, and alcohol . Because mHealth surveys must be kept short to reduce participant burden and encourage data collection compliance, they cannot capture the richness of individuals’ experiences of use contexts and practices, nor how individuals make sense of their drug use within the context of their broader life narratives.

Integrating qualitative mapping methods with mHealth momentary assessements can provide reliable and ecologically valid measures of substance use behaviours while also revealing the richness of experiences and contexts of use. Qualitative mapping, also known as qualitative Geographic Information System , integrates mapping techniques with qualitative methods to explain the processes that produce spatial patterns, relationships, and behaviours . It has been used in research on substance use, including to understand place-based practices and norms of tobacco use , the impact of area restrictions on people who use drugs , and characteristics of drug overdose contexts . Our mixed method approach leverages the “productive complementarity” of multiple methods, acknowledging that different ways of knowing about social phenomena, like drug use, are all inherently partial and are shaped by the conditions and actors involved in the creation of knowledge . We integrate real time, smartphone-collected surveys, location tracking, and subsequent in-depth interviews that are guided by viewing maps of participants’ own mHealth data in an explanatory sequential mixed methods approach . Participants use a smartphone app for a period of time to report on the substances they used and the situations they used them in via participant-initiated real-time reports of use, prompted momentary surveys about use and non-use situations, and prompted daily diary surveys. The real-time reports and prompted surveys collected multiple choice responses with write-in options. Subsequently, real-time reports of use and location tracking data are visualized in mapping software and brought into in-depth interviews to guide and ground discussion of drug use experiences within everyday contexts and situations of use. The interviewer and/or participant toggle between map layers and zoom in and out of places in Google Earth. Together, they identify apparent spatial clusters of use of different substances and discuss what those places are, what they usually do and experience there, who they interact with, and how it is that use of particular substances fold into those experiences. This is similar to the use of travel and activity diaries to guide interviews, but further ‘grounds’ interview discussion by interacting with spatially-visualized representations of participant data.

Quantitative and qualitative data are analysed separately and then integrated in a table. Visually organizing and juxtaposing the quantitative and qualitative data sets helps to identify threads of interest to explore across the data sets and to observe the convergence, complementarity, and/or dissonance between their depictions of participant’s everyday use of and experiences with substance use. We collected data in 2019-2020 with 32 young adults in California who regularly used both tobacco and cannabis with the mixed method . We draw from that study on tobacco and cannabis use to explore one participant’s data, which provided particularly informative insights into the complex patterns, intentions, and socio-structural contexts of multiple drug use repertoires and combinations. The participant did not respond to our request for feedback on the manuscript. To protect the participant’s identity, we use a pseudonym and have added fictional details about the participant that are not relevant to interpreting the data presented below. mHealth data were descriptively analysed using STATA statistical analysis software. Transcript analysis followed an inductive-deductive thematic approach . Transcripts were coded with NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. The initial transcript coding scheme was informed by our previous studies and the literature and was used to sort content by substance type, location, social identity, and roles/intensions of use. Emergent themes regarding roles and intensions of use were identified in a series of group readings of transcript excerpts, as we have done in the past .‘Jason’ was a transgender man in his mid-twenties who lived in a rural community, had a history of homelessness, and reported having autism spectrum disorder . He worked part-time in constrution and lived with his partner in a small house. Jason completed 70% of all prompted surveys during his 30 days of data collection. Jason’s mHealth survey data indicated that he smoked a daily average of 6.5 cigarettes. He most often smoked alone, and frequently smoked at home, in a vehicle, or at someone else’s home. On the minority of occasions that he smoked cigarettes with others,vertical growing systems it was usually with friends or his partner. Jason’s mHealth survey data indicated that he used cannabis almost every day ; 4.9 times per day, on average. He frequently used cannabis in his garage or backyard, someone else’s home, or in a vehicle. He was with friends or his partner during most of these sessions , and was alone for the rest. On most days of the study he reported using cannabis and cigarettes together some or most of the time. He used alcohol on only 15 days and most of those reports were for one drink. On only 5 days did he report using alcohol and cigarettes together some or most of the time. In short, Jason’s mobile data indicated that he used cigarettes and cannabis daily or almost daily, less regularly used alcohol, and that he often used cigarettes and cannabis at the same time.This one individual’s mHealth and map-led interview data set offered an integrated understanding of the complex use patterns, combinations, and intentions within his drug use repertoire , and linked these to his intersecting identities and the particular social and structural characteristics of his environment.

Specifically, it revealed relationships between how and why he uses multiple drugs and his day-to-day experiences as a transgender person with ASD living in a rural community. A key strength of this mixed method appears to be its capacity to go beyond examination of individual substances and individual drug use ‘risk factors’, to link use patterns and intentions of multiple drugs to the intersecting characteristics and place based experiences of different people. The perspective offered by integrating mHealth and qualitative mapping methods may help identify particular drug use patterns and combinations that increase risk of drug-related harm for priority groups, like gender minority individuals, as well as provide insight into the place embedded experiences that give rise to motives for those ‘risky’ drug use practices . Our findings suggest that participant narratives of multiple drug use patterns, intentions, and experiences can be enhanced and further grounded in context by viewing and discussing maps of participants’ own data during interviews. Maps that show where and how frequently participants use different drugs provide an avenue for the participant and interviewer to organize their discussion around the complexities and diverse factors related to multiple drug use. Moreover, similar to other creative methods that integrate images or other objects into interviews , the visual representation of drug use practices in map form may help depersonalize highly stigmatized use practices, like methamphetamine use, and reinforce the participant’s role as expert while cultivating an experience of discovery, reflection, and ownership over the interpreted ‘story’ of their data. This mixed method is limited, however, by being time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially with regards to participant and investigator time effort, as well as obtaining the smartphone data collection software and mapping software. Participant burden must be considered when designing the frequency and length of smartphone-collected surveys, the duration of data collection , and participant incentives. Moreover, great care must be taken to protect participant confidentiality when using any geo-enabled data collection method. This method could be used with a larger sample size by grouping participants for comparison rather than at the individual case level, and triangulating between the quantitative and qualitative data for each group. Future studies can build on research that has identified individual ‘risk factors’ related to multiple drug use , by gaining integrated and geographically-grounded insights into how these diverse and place-embedded factors intersect and interact with one another to shape drug use repertoires and combinations. In-depth knowledge like this can inform the resources and services directed toward and tailored to the needs of diverse groups of people who experience the unique pleasures, roles, and risks of multiple drug use.Over the past decade, perceptions of cannabis and cannabis use have changed radically, with 37 states and D.C. legalizing medical usage and 21 states and D.C. allowing adult recreational usage as of January of 2023. In 2019, Illinois became the 11th state to legalize recreational cannabis for adult use, and the first in the country to adopt a regulatory system for cannabis cultivation, testing, and sales. Texas is one of 13 states without a comprehensive medical cannabis law, only allowing patients with specific debilitating medical conditions to access low-THC medical cannabis products. In May of 2021 the U.S. House of Representative introduced the “Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act” that would legalize cannabis and expunge federal cannabis arrest and offenses from individuals’ records. This bill has huge implications for Black communities who are disproportionately impacted by incarceration for cannabis-related offenses. Recent reports estimate Black people are 3.64 times as likely as their white peers to be arrested for cannabis possession despite similar rates of cannabis consumption. Research has explored the risks associated with cannabis usage in Black men who have sex with men such as homelessness, incarceration, and high risk sexual behaviors. Cannabis and sexual risk behaviors maintain a complex relationship as cannabis is often coused with alcohol and other illicit substances. In one study people who used cannabis heavily were more likely to be unaware of their human immuno defficiency virus status; whereas, associations with other HIV outcomes were inconclusive.

When we found the same retailer or a branch of the same retail chain elsewhere in the same county, we kept the retailer in the data set. If a retailer disappeared and then reappeared in a later round of data collection, we kept it in the data set. If a retailer re moved its online price list, or moved its only location outside the original seven counties, we removed it from the data set for that data collection round . Between January 2017 and August 2017, we ob served significant attrition from the initial group of 542 retailers in the October 2016 seven-county sample. By August 2017, 389 of the original 542 retailers remained in the data set. As shown in tables 2 and 3, average prices for these retailers changed little during this 11-month period. We call this “attrition” because the data collection method was consistent over this time period. In our 2018 rounds of data collection, we impose the additional condition that retailers must be licensed, thus changing the data collection method . Thus, for 2018 data collection rounds, the percentage of retailers dropping out of the data set from the original October 2016 sample of 542 retailers should not be thought of as “attrition.” Some retailers may have removed their online price lists from both Weedmaps and Leafly but continued to operate. Attrition from the initial 542 retailers thus should not be interpreted solely as a measure of how many cannabis retailers left the legal cannabis segment. In November 2017, while continuing to track the original group of retailers that had been listing prices on Weedmaps since October 2016,flood tables for greenhouse we also collected data from all other retailers listing prices on Weedmaps in all counties of California.

These included the 169 retailers that by that time remained from the original panel; 700 additional retailers that had newly listed retail prices in the seven original counties after October 2016 ; and 1,652 retailers in other counties, for a total of 2,521 retailers across California.In January 2018, mandatory licensing laws went into ef fect, thus rendering illegal under state law any cannabis retailer without a temporary license from the Bureau of Cannabis Control. We verified licensing status by cross-referencing all Weedmaps and Leafly listings in California with the publicly available lists of temporary licenses granted by the Bureau of Cannabis Control. If both a Weedmaps and a Leafly listing were found, we used the Weedmaps data and dropped the Leafly data. In computing averages for our last three data collection rounds , we calculated “legally marketed” minimum and maxi mum price averages at California cannabis retailers that listed prices on Weedmaps and that had obtained temporary licenses to sell cannabis in compliance with state regulations at the time of each data collection round. For comparative purposes, we also collected a sample of about 90 unlicensed retailers in 20 counties from Weedmaps or Leafly, distributed similarly to the licensed retailers. We chose these retailers from within a set of 20 representative counties, approximately in proportion to the relative populations of those counties. We selected retailers for this “20-county unlicensed sample” arbitrarily from the first page of search results on Weedmaps for retailers in each of the 20 counties, but we did not use mathematical randomization to select the counties or the listings we chose within counties.These data may not be fully representative of legal cannabis price ranges for several reasons. First, as discussed above, not all legal retailers use Weedmaps or Leafly, and prices may not be representative of all prices. The price data we collected also may not fully rep resent the range of products in the market, which may have varied in different rounds of data collection.

As is suggested by the changing prevalence of 1-ounce flower packages and 500-milligram oil cartridge packages, product assortments may have changed within each of these categories. This problem plagues price data in many different industries, but changes in product assortments and price listings may have been especially rapid in the emerging cannabis market. The differences in price ranges we report here should not be interpreted as measures of price dispersion, because we are not observing maximum and minimum prices for exactly the same products at different retailers and thus are not comparing “apples to apples,” as is traditionally required to measure price dispersion. However, concrete differences in product attributes — such as potency or grow type for minimum-priced or maxi mum-priced cannabis — may also vary between retailers, and may correlate with price differences , even if price differences between agricultural products do not necessarily correlate with sensory characteristics . For instance, the minimum price for one-eighth ounce of flower at a particular retailer might represent a price for outdoor-grown cannabis with a THC concentration of 15%, whereas the minimum price for one-eighth ounce of flower at another retailer might represent a price for indoor-grown cannabis with a THC concentration of 20%. By analogy, if one were to collect minimum and maximum prices for all wine at retailers around California, the minimum-maximum range could not be used to measure price dispersion in a traditional sense; in order to measure dispersion, one would have to compare, for instance, the price of the same Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay at different stores. For our research, comparing prices for identical products across retailers would not have been feasible, given the Weedmaps format and our data collection methods. Our approach here, in reporting cannabis price ranges, is to make no assumptions about quality and assume that minimum and maximum prices are simply prices for different types of products. It would be interesting, in future work, to explore dispersion by collecting and comparing data on stadard product types across retailers.

Beyond requiring product standardization, an analysis of cannabis price dispersion with respect to geographic areas would also likely require a larger data set than ours. Hollenbeck and Uetake comment that regulatory barriers to entry can facilitate the exercise of monopolistic behavior by retailers. Dispersion measures, as proxies for competition, might help illuminate regulatory impacts. As more tax and sales data are released by government agencies, it might soon become possible for researchers to collect data sets of sufficient size and precision for dispersion to be measured.Table 2 shows average minimum and maximum prices over the course of the 21-month data collection period for the three product types that we studied, along with the number of observations in each period. In the last four rounds of data collection , we generally observe only relatively slight differences in both average prices and upward or downward movements among the three retailer groups . Both statewide and within the seven-county sample, average minimum and maximum prices for one-eighth ounce of flower and for 1 ounce of flower differed by 2.5% or less, but averages differed by up to 8.8% for 500-milligram cartridges. In table 3,indoor growing trays we report prices over the 21-month period for the non-attrited sample of the original retail store locations whose prices we collected in October 2016. These retailers may not be representative of overall state averages, particularly after the substantial attrition from the original group of retailers that we observed beginning in November 2017. However, this set of observations avoids potentially confounding factors introduced by the changing sample composition over time. Table 3 shows substantial attrition from the original seven-county sample of 542 retailers that listed prices on Weedmaps in October 2016. By July 2018, 21 months after the first round of price collection, only 74 non-attrited retailers from the original sample remained active on Weedmaps or Leafly. Local police crackdowns and municipal bans in some counties surely contributed to this 86% attrition rate, which should not be interpreted as representative of statewide attrition from Weedmaps or evidence of the general rate of business closures. What is more interesting, perhaps, is the basic observation that only 270 licensed cannabis retailers were listed on Weedmaps in all of California in July 2018, whereas in November 2017, near the end of the unregulated market, about 2,500 California cannabis businesses operated without the need for a license. This observation suggests, at least, that many medicinal cannabis retailers that had been operating legally in 2017 had not yet obtained licenses and entered the new legal market as of mid-2018. Figures 1, 2 and 3 show average minimum and maximum prices for one-eighth ounce of flower, 1 ounce of flower and 500-milligram oil cartridges for each round of data collection, both for legally marketed cannabis and for the 20-county unlicensed sample. In the 2016 and 2017 price data, before mandatory licensing, regulation and taxation, we observe relative stability in California cannabis price ranges for all three product types. In 2018, after licensing, regulation and taxation, we observe three patterns.

First, we observe falling prices for all products be tween February and May 2018, which may be related to retailers’ need to liquidate untested inventory that would become illegal as of July 2018. Second, we observe generally rising prices between May and July 2018, which may be related to the introduction of mandatory testing rules. However, because of the limitations and uncertain representativeness of the Weedmaps sample, as well as changes to our sampling methods in different rounds, we do not have a basis for inferring a causal relationship between testing rules or other regulatory events and our minimum and maximum price averages. Third, we observe rising maximum prices for 500-milligram oil cartridges over our last four data collection rounds. At all retailers statewide that listed prices on Weedmaps or Leafly, we observed a 33% in crease in maximum prices from November 2017 to July 2018. Table 2 shows that the latter pattern can be observed, with some variation, in prices both in the original seven counties and in all of California. We do not know to what extent the maximum price increases for cartridges might be attributed to the in troduction of new, higher-end products with differentiated sensory or functional attributes as the market has evolved; to differentiated packaging attributes; to price increases generated by increased high-end demand; to supply-side factors; or to other market effects. In general, the price patterns we observe demonstrate little evidence of seasonality, even though wholesale cannabis prices are known to vary seasonally because of the annual outdoor harvest and consequent increase in outdoor cannabis supply in the fall and winter months . We collected eight rounds of price data from the legal California retail cannabis market during a 21-month period of regulatory transition, as cannabis was being decriminalized, legalized and regulated in stages. Given the differences between the data sets we collected and the unknowns about Weedmaps that we have discussed above, readers should be especially cautious in interpreting the movements we observe as “trends.” We instead describe them as “patterns.” In general, one surprising result from our price data sets over time may be the relative lack of overall price movements in California cannabis prices, with the exception of rising maximum prices for cannabis oil cartridges in 2018. The data we report in this paper provides one source of unique information on the retail prices of cannabis flower and oil during the state’s period of transition to a regulated market environment. We hope that our data may useful to economists and other researchers who need to make basic assumptions about characteristics of the cannabis market. We did not collect price data for numerous products now available on the legal cannabis market in California, including edibles, waxes and topicals. The market has also changed in important ways since mid-2018. Many other basic reports on price data beyond ours are still needed to understand the economics of California’s rapidly changing cannabis market.Proposition 64 was really focused on the criminal justice aspects of cannabis prohibition — on [addressing] the negative impact of criminalization, primarily on people of color. It also focused on what happens to consumer safety and protection in the absence of regulation. It didn’t really prescribe regulation for the commercial sale of cannabis. The Legislature had already come up with a framework for regulating medical cannabis prior to Proposition 64 passing, and we didn’t have any reason to think that [the Legislature’s framework] would change drastically just because the criminal code had changed. We were right. You have to interface with a lot of agencies to be compliant. Those agencies are often over burdened and understaffed.

Employed was a combinatorial assembly of yeast toolkit parts and iterative design-build-learn-test cycles with strain selection guided by a mathematical model relating genetic design to monoterpene flux. To be functionally useful, the engineered strain needed to retain its ability to convert sugars to ethanol, and have precise, stable expression of flavor-determining monoterpenes linalool and geraniol. This work was in contrast to most metabolic engineering efforts which are commonly enlisted to maximize product titers. Multiple state of the art engineering techniques and iterative improvement schemes were employed to tune production of multiple commercially important metabolites without major collateral metabolic changes. For cannabinoids from C. sativa, an aromatic prenyltransferase catalyzes the formation of cannabigerolic acid from olivetolic acid and geranyl pyrophosphate . The pathway then branches again toward different cyclized products, such as tetrahydrocannabinolic acid , cannabidiolic acid , and cannabichromenic acid . Unnatural cannabinoid variants with tailored alkyl chains could also be obtained via feeding the engineered strain with hexanoic acid analogs, rolling grow trays demonstrating the substrate promiscuity of olivetolic acid pathway enzymes. Most notably, cannabinoid variants with an alkyne moiety were synthesized, paving the way for future click derivatization.

It has been shown that the cannabinoid alkyl side chain is a critical pharmacophore and may be a promising target for pharmaceutical discovery. Another study successfully reconstructed the entire β-bitter acid pathway by heterologous expression of two CoA ligases, a polyketide synthase, and a prenyltransferase complex in an optimized yeast system. A metabolon composed of two aromatic prenyltransferases was elucidated. Another key tool for increasing transgene expression and function for terpenoid biosynthesis is mutagenesis analysis, particularly for prenyltransferases given the plasticity and promiscuity of their active sites. Prenylated flavonoids are another subclass of plant phenolics, which combine a flavonoid skeleton with a prenyl side chain. Unlike other flavonoids, they have a narrow distribution in plants, limited to only several plant families, including Cannabaceae. Recent studies have demonstrated that hop terpenophenolics exhibit diverse bio-activities with a high potential for pharmaceutical applications 208. A prenylated flavonoid with a very potent phytoestrogen activity is 8-prenylnaringenin, produced in Humulus lupulus . 8-Prenylnaringenin was recently produced de novo as a proof of concept for yeast as a platform for biosynthesis of prenylated flavonoids . Recently, the importance of non-catalytic foldases and chaperones for terpenoid production in trichomes has been elucidates. THCA and CBDA are unstable and will be non-enzymatically converted to the decarboxylated forms, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol respectively. It is hypothesized that CsaCHIL, a chalcone isomerase-like protein lacking catalytic activity, potentially binds THCA and/or CBDA for stabilization in hemp glandular trichomes and limits negative feedback to upstream enzymes. It has also been shown that upregulation of multiple foldases and chaperones resulted in a 20-fold improvement of THCA synthase functionality in yeast and poses a promising avenue for optimizing microbial production 210 .

The progression of terpenoid biosynthesis in microorganisms is limited by the dearth of characterized terpene synthases as well as the CYPs and GTs that modify these terpenes. Computational biology has enabled the discovery of new enzymes, as demonstrated by the identification of 55 predicted terpene synthases from C. sativa. CYPs, in particular, are hypothesized to be a main driving force of terpenoid diversification in plants through hydroxylation, sequential oxidations of specific positions , as well as catalyzing ring closure and rearrangement reactions that significantly increase terpenoid complexity. Most CYPs react with a distinct carbon on the terpene backbone, reactions that are challenging for synthetic chemistry, making biosynthesis of oxidized terpenoids a preferable option for production. These CYPs are generally localized to the ER of the native host in close proximity to the terpene synthase producing the substrate for the reaction. Often included on the ER are GTs required for the glycosylation of the oxidized terpenoid, forming potential metabolons on the ER membrane. There are many inherent challenges with transferring into microorganisms CYPs optimized by nature to work in plant systems. This is a major hurdle when working in prokaryotic cell factories due to their lack of an ER and cytochrome P450 reductases responsible for transferring electrons between the CYPs and electron carriers in eukaryotes. Groups have successfully engineered E. coli with functionally reconstructed plant-derived CYPs by generating fusion proteins with membrane anchors suitable for prokaryotic cells along with the co-expression of a CPR. A major advantage of working in yeast systems like S. cervasiae and Yarrowia lipolytica for the production of decorated terpenoids is the endogenous ER system. This has been successfully demonstrated in S. cerevisiae engineered to produce oxidized casbenes, a medically important diterpenoid derivative, that required the optimization of six CYPs, achieving titers of over 1 g/L, building upon techniques initially demonstrated in the landmark paper producing artemisinic acid, a plant-derived sesquiterpene, in yeast.

The terpenoid target space can be further expanded through the introduction of GTs from plants into microorganisms for the glycosylation of oxidized terpenoids. Beyond adding new functionality, plants natively produce glycosylated volatile or toxic terpenes for long-distance transport as well as storage of “disarmed” molecules. Saponins, modified triterpenoids synthesized through varying oxiditions and glycosylations of a β-amyrin backbone, have garnered recent interest in both the industrial and human health spaces 221. The biosynthesis of β- amyrin has been achieved in both E. coli and S. cerevisiae, but the production of its oxidized and glycosylated derivatives has been limited to yeast. Recently, Wang et al. achieved 2.25 g/L production of ginsenoside Rh2, an oxidized and glycosylated triterpene generally harvested from Panax spp., by the directed evolution of UGTPg45. This was the highest titer reported to date for an in vivo production system. Advances in cell-free platforms have enabled the interrogation of GT function in vitro and was recently deployed for the production of novel cannabinoid glycosides. This method allows for the characterization of GTs that can then be introduced to a production host for large scale biosynthesis. A challenge for future engineering will be the availability of substrate, nucleotide sugars, for glycosylation reactions in heterologous hosts. Limited work has been done in microbes aimed at producing various nucleotide sugars, but the formation, interconversion, and salvage of these substrates has been extensively studied in plants, providing a framework for future microbial engineering efforts. A new paradigm of modifying the subcellular morphology of production cells rather than optimizing metabolic flux has successfully increased oxidized terpenoid production titers in yeast. Kim et al. overexpressed INO2, an ER size regulation factor,horticulture trays which resulted in an increase in ER biogenesis, ER protein abundance, protein-folding capacity, and cell growth while limiting ER stress response. This resulted in a 71-fold increase in squalene production and an 8-fold increase in the CYP-mediated production of protopanaxadiol compared to control strains. A similar goal was achieved by knocking-out PAH1, which generates neutral triglycerides from phosphatidic acid. This strategy also enlarged the ER and boosted production of β-amyrin, medicagenic acid , and medicagenic-28-O-glucoside by eight-, six- and 16-fold, respectively, over the control strain. These strategies will prove to be pivotal advances in terpenoid engineering and may be applied to any yeast chassis engineered for maximizing the biosynthesis of terpenoids derivatives. A potential hindrance of terpenoid biosynthesis in microorganisms is the potential for product or intermediate toxicity preventing the accumulation of high levels of a desired molecule. Achieving maximum accumulation will be essential when commercializing next-generation bio-fuel alternatives like the sesquiterpene bisabolene. Groups have engineered synthetic hydrophobic droplets within the cell that allow for the storage and accumulation of lipophilic compounds like terpenes while circumventing growth or toxicity issues. While this work was done in plants, there is potential to transfer these technologies to microorganisms. Lipid engineering in yeast was accomplished through the overproduction of triacylglycerol and a knock-out of FLD1, which regulates lipid droplet size, resulting in oversized lipid droplets that accumulate and store lycopene, an acyclic tetraterpene, resulting in record titers of 2.37 g/L 234 . These challenges have brought recent attention to Yarrowia as a production host for plant derived terpenes due to its capacity to accumulate lipophilic compounds and the potential to utilize technology developed for S. cerevisiae in this new host. A recent pivotal study harnessed peroxisomes to produce squalene at an unprecedented titer through dual cytoplasmic peroxisomal engineering. This study indicates that peroxisomes can function analogously to trichomes due to their pathway compartmentalization.

While there has been little exploration thus far of the capability of yeast peroxisomes to mimic the trichome metabolic environment specifically, they are a promising avenue for the optimization of heterologous production of terpenoids in yeast. Utilizing microbial biosynthesis to produce economically relevant terpenoids limits the need to grow, harvest, and extract plant material. This provides an environmentally friendly synthesis platform for specialized terpenoids and permits their production at high concentration and purity. Advances in technologies and strategies for the identification and heterologous expression of terpenoid biosynthesis pathways in microorganisms will provide numerous opportunities for future research. While there has been recent success in engineering prokaryotes for terpene production, yeast will prove to be the optimum production host for more complex terpenoid derivatives and should be a cornerstone for future efforts. The progression of metabolic engineering for terpenoid production is only limited by the identification and application of plant-derived terpene synthases, prenyltransferases, CYPs, and GTs for the biosynthesis and decoration of natural terpenoid scaffolds. By implementing techniques previously described there is potential to expand the latent target space beyond the natural/known terpenome, enabling the biosynthesis of synthetic terpenoids. Achieving this goal will require new breakthroughs in host engineering along with optimizing the expression and function of heterologous pathways. Additionally, generating host strains that produce various or specialized nucleotide sugars for glycosylated terpenoids will provide a chassis for the production of terpenoid glycosides, allowing for the microbial biosynthesis of compounds with altered and enhanced bio-active properties.The difficulty sourcing medicinal plant terpenes is exemplified by the Taxol story: clinical development of Taxol was an agonizingly slow progress due to supply shortages of the natural producer Taxus brevifolia in the 1980s and 1990s. The concentration of Taxol in the plant is very low , and harvesting of yew for extraction is not sustainable, since T. brevifolia is now endangered. As is the case for all complex plant terpenes, full chemical synthesis is also not currently a viable economic option as it requires many steps , gives low yield, and it not scalable for production. Taxol is currently manufactured either by semisynthesis from 10-deacetylbaccatin III extracted from the needles of Taxus spp., or by extraction from plant cell suspension cultures grown with elicitors to improve production. Both methods still rely on a plant source, resulting in a low and unstable yield, high production costs, and unwanted byproducts. There are many examples of medicinally relevant plant diterpenes that are currently facing similar sourcing issues, with Taxol and cyclopamine as lead example. This is particularly regrettable because plant terpenes can have unique mechanisms of action not demonstrated by any other class of compounds. For example, Taxol stabilizes microtubules by binding at a unique and specific site resulting in cell cycle arrest making it an effective cancer treatment. There are two major challenges that historically have limited the production of complex plant terpenes in yeast, low yields for the first step in the pathway and optimizing complex pathways for the elaboration of the terpene scaffold requiring multiple tailoring enzymes. Previous work with Taxol indicates that multiple products are produced in early stages of the pathway, a major cause of low yields observed in yeast. Additionally, enzymes such as P450s are a notorious challenge for yeast heterologous expression, especially when required to act in series, resulting in diminishing yields of products, thus limiting both pathway discovery efforts as well as the reconstitution of multistep pathways. Despite these challenges, the rational design of strains to tune coupling with redox partners can improve P450 activity in yeast. Along with improving redox dynamics, P450 optimization could be enhanced via augmentation of the ER anchoring regions to improve the localization and expression of plant derived P450s in yeast; or the inclusion of non-enzymatic ER scaffold proteins engineered to bind the P450s for the formation of pseudo-metabolons . Taxol biosynthesis in the native host T. brevifolia is a complex pathway requiring nineteen enzymatic conversions, with eight of these enzymes yet to be identified/characterized. This includes eleven ER anchored enzymes with the remaining predicted as soluble cytosolic enzymes.

Because of the mismatch in the volumes of fuel needed versus the volume of each individual therapeutic needed, it will be necessary to have a large number of crops, each producing the same bio-fuel precursor and different high-value products, which will be agronomically challenging. Biofuel production from lignocellulosic biomass relies on the microbial bioconversion of cell wall sugars and components into fuels and products . A major hurdle to efficient bioconversion is the recalcitrance of the feedstock material and the inhibitory effect that lignin has on this process. Cell-wall engineering has shown promise for decreasing overall recalcitrance by increasing the ratio of C6/C5 sugars, reducing lignin content, and reducing the acetylation of cell-wall polymers that limit the conversion efficiency of the feedstock material. While lignin is a major contributor of feedstock recalcitrance, it is also a promising substrate for specialized microbes that convert these aromatic polymers into usable products. The introduction of specialized microbial hosts into various processing systems has the potential to optimize the conversion of all lignocellulosic feedstock components into products with economic value, limiting the waste streams for bio-fuel production and increasing the viability for their use on a global scale. The synergistic application of these various strategies has the potential to make lignocellulosic bio-fuels economically viable while shifting the current paradigm of what an effective bio-fuel/bio-product production system achieves.

Through a multidisciplinary approach across all sectors,4×4 grow table we have the potential to revolutionize the manufacturing of bio-fuels/bio-products from lignocellulosic biomass ushering in a new era of green technologies. While the first and second generations of bio-fuels use light and CO2 to produce biomass in crops that is later fed to microbes, third-generation or algal bio-fuels combine energy capture and fuel production within a single cell of photosynthetic cyanobacteria and algae . Having the entire fuel-production process take place in one organism makes the process more direct and efficient with no energy invested in non-fermentable parts such as plant stems, roots, and leaves. The solar energy conversion in cyanobacteria and algae is higher than that in plants, reaching an efficiency of 3% in microalgae compared to less than 1% in most crops. Furthermore, many species can grow in wastewater or marine environments with simple nutritional requirements and therefore do not compete for land use with agriculture. It is estimated that microalgae can produce oil at a yield of 100,000 L/hectare/year, while palm and sunflower oil can only reach 1,000–6,000 L/hectare/year. Algal fermentation could also lead to 9,000 L/hectare/year of bioethanol production, compared to 600 L/hectare/year derived from corn. Despite these favorable comparisons, attempts at large-scale cultivations have struggled with high production costs. Unlike agriculture, which has been optimized over millennia by humans, the technology for mass scale cultivation of photosynthetic microorganisms is still in its early developmental stage. The cultivation can be done in either an open system like a raceway pond, or in a closed system such as a photobioreactor.Ideotypes are theoretical archetypes of crops which serve as a practical framework for plant breeders to critically evaluate what traits they should be targeting for specific applications.

With advances in plant biotechnology and a growing urgency to adopt more sustainable practices across our economy, new uses for crops as bioenergy feedstocks may pivot our definition of an ideal crop that is engineered for biomass and bioenergy production, in contrast to food production. Although there is a plethora of specific applications to which plant engineering efforts can contribute, here we highlight recent advances in two broad areas of research: increasing available plant biomass and engineering production of higher value co-products. Before our ability to genetically engineer plants, plant breeders were constrained to breeding and selecting from the morphological, physiological, and metabolic repertoire already preexisting in plant genomes. Initially, such efforts were focused on breeding out deleterious traits or on a narrow aim such as yield. Fifty years ago, the concept of an ideotype was proposed as an alternative regime. The ideotype is an idealized form of a particular crop, which could then be a target to breed towards, rather than merely breeding away from deleterious traits. This shift in mentality provided a much-needed framework to help set goals and target traits for plant breeding efforts. A useful ideotype must be ‘theoretically capable of greater production than the genotype it is to replace and of such design as to offer reasonable prospect that it can be bred from the material available. The discovery and development of plant genetic engineering technologies such as Agrobacterium-mediated and biolistic transformation expanded the scope of possible ideotypes, as plant engineering efforts can now draw on a much larger effective pool of genetic material, expanding from interfertile germplasm to all sequenced and characterized genes from across the tree of life.

Feedstock crops are harvested primarily for biomass, which is then used as a substrate for downstream processes . Thus, it becomes useful to frame plant carbon partitioning in terms of biomass composition, and what production or deposition of small molecules or polymers would be present in feedstock ideotypes. Using new synthetic biology tools to redesign carbon flow in plants, one may alter and optimize the composition of biomass and bioproducts in a way that cannot be achieved through conventional breeding methods, ultimately improving the scalability and feasibility of renewable feedstock crops. The ideotype for each crop may vary depending on its economics, growing region, and intended application. Here, we focus on carbon allocation as a metabolic/ physiological trait that may be modified to increase the utility and value of feedstock crops. Specifically, we focus on two aspects: 1) traits that may alter overall plant biomass and the usability of this biomass and 2) traits that may enhance the value of feedstock crops with the production of higher value co-products, paying special attention to advances within the last two years. The plant cell wall is a complex network of polymers and is one of the most effective carbon sequestering systems on the planet, with annual production of land plants estimated at 150–170 billion metric tons per year71. Cell walls represent a massive and largely untapped supply of six carbon sugars in the form of cellulose . However, cell walls are naturally recalcitrant to degradation and fermentation, limiting their use as chemical feedstocks rather than bulk materials. Lignin is a main inhibitor of saccharification in woody crops and hemicellulose limits saccharification yields in monocot biomass crops. Many engineering efforts have focused on decreasing lignin and improving fermentation characteristics. We are only beginning to explore ways to modify the composition and deposition of plant cell wall components to improve their ability to serve as biomass feedstocks. One strategy for reducing lignin accumulation uses 3-dehydroshikimate dehydratase from Corynebacterium glutamicum, which converts a lignin precursor into protocatechuate. Transgenic expression of QsuB in Arabidopsis thaliana plastids reduced lignin accumulation and improved saccharification yield by 25-100% depending on treatment method. Moreover, the six-carbon/five-carbon sugar ratio of the biomass also affects saccharification yields, with higher ratios performing better. The most highly accumulated C5 sugar is xylose, but xylan synthesis mutants show dwarfism due to xylem vessel collapse. This phenotype has been rescued by returning xylan synthesis specifically to vessel tissue,cannabis drying system leading to a 42% increase in saccharification yield compared to wild type. Acetylated cell wall components are converted during fermentation to acetic acid, which inhibits fermentation. RNA-interference has been used to decrease expression of genes responsible for acetylation, nearly tripling saccharification yields. Gene stacking has been used to generate engineered lines that contain multiple aforementioned traits. This demonstrates how modern bioengineering strategies can be used in tandem to modify the cell wall composition, a step towards engineering the optimum bioenergy crop ideotype. While ideotype specifics will vary by crop and intended application, in general an idealized biomass cell wall will have a high C6/C5 sugar ratio, low lignin concentration, and provide a favorable substrate for fermentation. Beyond modifying the molecular composition of the cell wall, others have also focused on engineering upstream metabolic processes to increase rates of photosynthesis, carbon fixation, and biomass production. Plants often absorb more photons than they can use for photosynthesis, leading to non-photochemical quenching that dissipates excess energy as heat but does not contribute to biomass. Mutation of light harvesting complex components results resulted in a 25% biomass increase in Nicotiana tabacum under field conditions78. It is also possible to modulate the NPQ process to shift more quickly from a heat-producing to a photosynthetic state, restoring energy capture via production of NADPH and ATP. Engineered N. tabacum over expressing the genes coordinating NPQ relaxation showed increases of ~15% in plant height, leaf area, and total biomass accumulation in field conditions.

These are promising results, as most plants use similar mechanisms making this technology applicable to bioenergy crops dependent on the maximum accumulation of lignocellulosic biomass. Another key process that limits the theoretical maximum for biomass accumulation is photorespiration. The primary cost of photorespiration stems from the process plants use to ‘recycle’ the unintended product formed via the oxygenase activity of RuBiSCO, leading to loss of both carbon and nitrogen. An alternative photorespiratory bypass based on the 3-hydroxypropionate bicycle was successfully engineered into cyanobacteria by expressing six heterologous genes from Chloroflexus aurantiacus. This bypass not only limits losses from photorespiration, it also fixes additional carbon and can supplement the Calvin-Benson cycle. Other photorespiratory bypasses have been demonstrated to work in planta yielding more than a 25% increase in biomass in field trials. Thus, the ability to modify both the rate of carbon fixation and the fate of carbon deposition in the form of various cell wall polymers have been shown to be complementary processes for increasing the accessible feedstock sugars from future feedstock plant crops. Lignocellulosic bioproduction offers a much larger potential supply of biomass than food-based fuels such as corn-ethanol, and reduces the conflict between food and fuels, materials, and other products which may be produced from biomass crops. Future biomass crop ideotypes should therefore be designed to ensure the use of lignocellulosic material is cost effective. Lignocellulosic bio-fuels have been slow to achieve commercial viability, in part due to low fuel prices and the chemical recalcitrance of lignocellulosic matter. A promising strategy to make lignocellulosic bio-fuels economically competitive is the co-production of higher value products directly in feedstock crops, which can be separated from the bulk carbon fuel source during processing. This can be achieved in two ways: either feedstocks for lignocellulosic bio-fuels can be modified so as to produce a higher value side product, or lignocellulosic bio-fuel can be produced from side products of other agricultural processes. The former is amenable to feedstock bioengineering efforts to optimize for bio-fuel purposes and will be discussed here. The ideotype of co-product crops will depend on the specific crop, but one important component is that the co product sells for more than the cost of extraction. Co-product value and market size tend are often inversely correlated, as shown in Figure 4.The base use of most biomass crops is production of ethanol, but plants have been engineered to produce co-products such as higher value fuels, commodity chemicals, and high value small molecules. Higher value fuel products include lipids for bio-diesel and jet fuel. Biodiesel-grade lipids have recently been produced in engineered sorghum that accumulates 8% dry weight oil in leaves in the form of lipid droplets85. These droplets can be extracted using simple, cheap techniques during the standard processing pipeline for lignocellulosic bio-fuels, minimizing additional purification costs. Jet fuel is also a high-volume product with an annual market size of 290 billion liters in 2015, with prices usually ranging around $1 per liter. There is no practical alternative available for liquid aviation fuels, which account for a small but rapidly growing fraction of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions- currently 2.3% and growing at approximately 6% per year. Jet fuels have been produced from the oilseed crop camelina, and efforts are underway to increase jet fuel yield. Another promising high-volume side product is 1,5-pentanediol, a commodity chemical used in polyester and polyurethane production. The present market value is around $6000/ton, with a market size of 18 million USD. Using plants as a production chassis for high value low volume products has received substantial attention in recent years, with several analyses suggesting plants may allow for cheaper production of edible vaccines, bulk enzymes, and monoclonal antibodies than alternative systems.

We received 101 responses, with variations in response rates among questions. Within this group, 36 growers provided feedback about their participation in state and county licensing initiatives, and 35 on the income they received from cannabis cultivation. We received feedback about the ways in which the legalization system could be improved from 30 participants. Although this is a small number of cannabis growers compared to estimates of the grower population, preliminary conclusions regarding grower perceptions can be drawn from this sample for the purpose of guiding future research on California’s cannabis policy.Of the 36 growers who provided feedback on their participation in state or county licensing initiatives, over half reported that they had not participated in them . Of the 35 growers who reported both on participation in licensing initiatives and income sources, 31% reported income from cannabis and had not applied for cultivation licenses, indicating their noncompliance with state and county regulations. Among the growers who had not applied for cultivation licenses and who also reported on income sources , 39% indicated that they obtained no income from cannabis, 11% received less than a quarter of their income from cannabis, 11% received between a quarter and half, 22% received between half and three quarters and 17% received more than three-quarters of their income from cannabis .

Among those who had applied for state or county licenses and reported income sources , 17% reported receiving no income from cannabis,vertical farming system 6% received a quarter or less, 6% received between a quarter and half, 12% received between half and three-quarters and 59% received all of their income from cannabis cultivation. Non-licensed growers who supported their livelihoods from cannabis cultivation and explained their noncompliance said they were unable to apply because of county cultivation bans or unformulated guidelines and cost constraints . Additionally, 20% indicated they planned to apply. A small grower from Siskiyou County explained, “I live in a ban county. I plan to apply in a nearby city once the city puts a cultivation ordinance on the books.” A small grower from Mendocino County specified that the plant “track and trace” provisions of the licensing system were cost prohibitive. Compliant and nonlicensed growers also commented on the state’s licensing system and how it could be improved . All respondents except one identified specific limitations of the system related to at least one of three themes: costs, regulatory inconsistencies or alterations needed to production practices.Of the growers who commented, 70% identified costs as inhibiting compliance with state legalization initiatives. A medium-sized grower from Mendocino County described the multi-agency licensing system as “Too many departments asking for too many fees.” A small, nonlicensed grower from Nevada County attributed increased costs to regulations around sales and transport: “I would be willing to pay my fair share of taxes on products sold if I could continue to be responsible to test and transport my own product, deal directly with dispensaries as I did for years.” Similarly, a small grower from Mendocino County, who had applied for a license, described lost profits from distributors controlling the pricing structure: “The distributor is controlling prices and gouging farmers because regulations prevent small farmers from taking their products to other licensees.”

Respondents identified possible inconsistency between county, regional and state production regulations as constraining their engagement with the legalization initiative. A large grower from Humboldt County said, “Often, one agency will approve a project, and the other agency involved doesn’t. Then, you are in violation with the approving agency if you don’t do the work, and in violation with the other agency if you do the work.” Respondents identified difficulties in altering their production practices to comply with the new regulatory system. A small grower from Mendocino County indicated that new regulations made previous standard practices illegal: “My situation is totally standard: well fenced-in area, no environmental impact. I grow tomatoes, etc., in hoop houses, and now, because I applied for a license, I suddenly must get a permit for hoop houses that have been here for 15 years.”Several survey participants suggested strategies for improving the regulatory system. A medium grower from Humboldt County, who had applied for two cultivation licenses, argued, “An opportunity to mitigate or a timeline to amortize costs will help small farmers who cannot afford the intense costs associated with regulations.” A small grower from Sonoma County, who was not licensed, suggested, “Keeping grows limited in acreage so that smaller growers can compete is crucial in my mind and will lead to a more diversified agricultural system.” Growers’ responses suggest high rates of noncompliance and characterize legalization as a system that legitimizes the cultivation activities of an exclusive set of growers: large growers with the financial resources to locate their farm in a legal jurisdiction, pay licensing fees, alter their practices and increase production to comply with new laws and remain competitive in legal markets. It is likely that rates of noncompliance within the broader cannabis grower population are even higher than reported in our data, as our survey reached only growers registered on industry listservs; and, even though it was anonymous, it covered illegal livelihood activities, creating potential disincentives to accurately declare practices.

Respondents’ accounts of small growers’ exclusion from newly regulated cannabis market opportunities — due to the misalignment of the regulations with existing practices and the costs of compliance — echo the literature on governmental and nongovernmental regulation and certification of production practices in other sectors, in which codification of regulations or standards has led to formal and informal exclusion of some growers from commodity markets . In the United States, for example, structural exclusion has been documented in the voluntary, third party certification of organic agriculture, because its particular standards and onerous costs have facilitated the dominance of agribusiness at the expense of small growers . Similar exclusionary tendencies are also a defining effect of the rise of the food safety regulatory regime, comprised of both state regulations and market-driven audit requirements . Our research indicates similar patterns with the legalization of cannabis: the burden of compliance not only favors larger producers over smaller ones but also shifts the profit-making opportunities from producers to non-producers . The illicit market continues in California, and the two markets, legal and illicit, likely influence one another. Disincentives for small growers to participate in legal markets can also be attributed to, along with the factors already discussed, the demand for cannabis in the illicit market channels, both in and out of state . As of June 2019, 39 states had yet to legalize cannabis for recreational sales . In California, state and county taxes increase the legal cannabis price, and that higher price may also contribute to in-state illicit market demand. To meet industry analysts’ estimates of $1 billion in tax revenue , at least $7 billion of cannabis needs to be sold through legal markets . In 2018, $2.5 billion was sold, and the state received $345 million in cannabis tax revenues .Accounts from non-compliant growers of the effects of legalization indicate a need to explore strategies that will incentivize growers’ participation in legal markets. Their accounts also raise questions for more research on the socioeconomic and environmental effects of the state’s licensing system. California’s new cannabis regulations put limits on transportation and distribution ,vertical farming racks and consolidate supply chains through a limited number of registered distributors . Further analysis on the effects of supply chain consolidation on compliance rates is needed to understand how non+environmental aspects of the licensing system influence cultivation practices. Further research is also warranted on small-producer cooperatives, which in other agricultural sectors have improved the collective access of growers to information, credit and markets, while also enhancing regulatory compliance, community development and innovation . Grower organizations in the cannabis industry include county and statewide policy and lobbying groups, as well as private marketing and environmental advocacy initiatives . Yet, given the historically clandestine nature of production, industry led cooperatives in the cannabis sector likely do not exhibit the political and economic influence at the state level that is exhibited by cooperatives in other sectors . At this point, producer organizing can receive only limited support from UC Cooperative Extension personnel because of the restrictions on use of federal funds for cannabis research or development. Little is known about the ways in which non-compliant growers presently organize to access illicit markets. It is possible that a reliance on clandestine markets creates disincentives to collective production and market access strategies. Illicit growers may be more likely to organize their resources to avoid detection, and, without access to crop insurance or crime reporting, to protect their operations.

Understanding forms of cooperation in clandestine markets may help identify social as well as economic factors most likely to facilitate compliance . State legalization of cannabis production presents an opportunity for growers to better manage risks and enhance returns. To this end, there is a need for further research and policy exploration of potential participation incentive mechanisms, such as tax credits, crop insurance, small business development grants, extension and training. These mechanisms could promote environmental objectives, community development goals and regulatory compliance. More understanding of what incentivizes growers would help UCCE identify extension efforts most likely to enhance growers’ control over the distribution of economic benefits from legal cannabis cultivation. Analyses of relationships between land use zoning, farm licensing requirements and compliance costs would help inform outreach with state, county and municipal policymakers to promote regulations most likely to elicit compliance and reduce enforcement costs. The high rates of non-licensed production coupled with growers’ accounts of the effects of legalization on communities indicate a need for more systematic research on the socioeconomic contributions that non-licensed growers are making. Because cannabis has historically operated as a cash economy, it is likely that the majority of income from cultivation has been spent locally; cash from cannabis is difficult to transport and invest elsewhere . These contributions to local communities were largely unaccounted for in the state’s economic analysis of the medical cannabis cultivation regulations, on which the recreational cultivation licensing program was based . The analysis identified “significant costs” of regulation for growers, including costs related to local and state licensing, cultivation plan preparation, water and pesticide use approval, farm record maintenance, business license applications, track and trace system operation, processing, legal labor, consultants and farm inputs . The analysis did not address regional effects — for example, the possibility for decreased spending in places with histories of cannabis cultivation as cultivation expands elsewhere and intensifies market competition. Interviews with leaders of cannabis organizations and distributors, growers, and representatives from county employment and benefits departments, among others, to document the socioeconomic changes they experience and witness in this transition to a regulated cannabis market will help build this knowledge base. The state’s economic analysis suggested that labor compliance costs would be the most significant direct regulatory cost for growers . In-depth analyses with growers and workers are needed to illuminate the characteristics of the cannabis labor force and its trajectory since legalization . To mitigate the negative consequences of legalization for growers and rural communities, the exclusionary and racialized effects of regulation also need to be better understood.Legalization of cannabis production in 2017 has generated demands for state regulatory, research and extension agencies, including UC, to address the ecological, social and agricultural aspects of this crop, which has an estimated retail value of over $10 billion . Despite its enormous value and importance to California’s agricultural economy, remarkably little is known about how the crop is cultivated. While general information exists on cannabis cultivation, such as plant density, growing conditions, and nutrient, pest and disease management , only a few studies have attempted to measure or characterize some more specific aspects of cannabis production, such as yield per plant and regional changes in total production area . These data represent only a very small fraction of domestic or global activity and are likely skewed since they were largely derived not from field studies but indirectly from police seizure data or aerial imagery . In California, where approximately 66% of U.S. marijuana is grown , knowledge of the specific practices across the wide range of conditions under which it is produced is almost nonexistent. Currently, 30 U.S. states have legalized cannabis production, sales and/or use, but strict regulations remain in place at the federal level, where it is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance.

Not surprisingly, these are the same industries who historically have high rates of sexual harassment . Between 2000 and 2015, the combination of these industries made up 28% all sexual harassment charges filed to the EEOC . Such industries put employees at greater risk to experience sexual harassment, especially by customers and clients who sexualize workers and feel entitled to their services. Particularly in service sector industries, there is a prevailing belief in the mantra “the customer is always right” that both allows customers to becoming sexually forward without fear of consequences and employees to respond informally to such behavior as to not upset the customer . A study by the Restaurant Opportunities Center found that women employed in restaurants who earn a sub-minimum wage of $2.13 per hour as tipped workers were twice as likely to experience harassment from supervisors, co-workers and customers, compared to women employed in restaurants who received a sub-minimum wages greater than $2.13 per hour . The large reliance on tips creates an environment where workers, particularly women, are undervalued and forced to endure injustices for the sake of their income. Additional risk factors for sexual harassment can be identified at the interpersonal and individual level. At the interpersonal level, working in isolation is also associated with reports of harassment and general workplace violence. Environments in which workers are forced to become isolated from peers gives harassers easy access to targets and leaves workers with fewer chances to interact with others in their environment and signal to others if they are in need of assistance .

Additional interpersonal risk factors in the workplace include power differentials and the abuse of power,bud drying rack discussed in more detail below. Individual risk factors associated with a worker’s vulnerability include gender, sexual orientation and age. As previously mentioned, although anyone can experience sexual harassment, women are most often victimized and thus at greater of risk of experiencing harassment than men . Likewise, studies repeatedly indicate perpetuators are most likely to men. Aside from women, individuals who identify as queer, either in their sexual orientation or gender expression, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks also face great risks of experiencing general discrimination and sexual harassment. A meta-analysis of 386 studies on the victimization of LGBT individuals found that approximately of 50% of individuals in all samples experience sexual harassment . Although comparative studies examining rates of sexual harassment between heterosexual and LGBT samples have mixed findings determining effect sizes, they lean towards sexual minorities experiencing greater victimization than heterosexual identifying individuals . In addition to the risks posed by one’s gender and sexual orientation, young and unmarried female workers are most often targeted as victims of sexual harassment . Most service sector employees are relatively young adults between the ages of 15-25 years who face greater risks of harm in the workplace . Because of their age, workers are often unaware of their rights which include a safe work environment that is free of harassment as well as entitlement to fair pay . Consequently, they may not be equipped with the information or tools to formally handle an experience of sexual harassment . Responses and coping mechanisms to sexual harassment are just as critical to understanding the context of harassment in the workplace as are the individual and organizational risk factors that predict harassment among vulnerable workers.

However, while the majority of studies focus on investigating the frequency and prevalence of harassing behaviors, many do not address how workers react to such behavior. According to the USMSP , individual based responses to behaviors can be categorized as active responses , avoidance and toleration . Among the three categories, the top three behaviors employed by federal workers in response to harassment were asking the harasser to stop, avoiding the harasser, and ignoring the behavior or simply doing nothing . The action, or lack there-of, that an employee takes to address sexual harassment is related to multiple levels of influence: the severity of the incident, the power they as an employee hold in their place of work, the social support provided by their workplace and their own cultural profile . Studies investigating coping mechanisms have found strong connections between both the severity and frequency of the harassment to response patterns . For example, engaging in detached behaviors was associated with significantly lower frequency of unwanted sexual attention than engagement in simultaneous avoidance of the behavior and negotiation with the perpetrator , however the direction of this relationship is ambiguous. Studies have also found non-assertive actions to address sexual harassment to be more common if the sexually harassing behavior was not considered to be severe . Workers also opt for non-assertive responses when the source was someone other than a supervisor . This is consistent with previous studies which have found workers do not take action against customers to avoid crossing an ambiguous boundary between providing “good customer service” and protecting themselves . Studies have found that workplaces with few policies in place regarding sexual harassment are associated with passive responses to sexual harassment . This is not surprising given a lack of formal venues for filing complaints. Women whose workplace only employed informal policies for addressing harassment, were also less likely to engage in any form of direct response for similar reasons . Finally, cultural and social factors can influence a worker’s reaction and coping to harassment. The study by Cortina and Wasti found that White women more likely to practice detached behaviors compared to Latina women who practiced avoidant-negotiating behaviors and whose culture is historically more patriarchal and communal.

Despite cultural differences, both styles of coping are ultimately non-confrontational. This general lack of combative action can also be explained by the shame women are socially taught to feel in response to harassment , as well as the responsibility they feel towards protecting the perpetrator .Understanding that sexual harassment is common in the service sector, the current study seeks to shed light on sexual harassment in the context of cannabis dispensaries, a recently legalized industry, within the context of Los Angeles County. With the passage of Proposition 64 during November 2016, the possession, use and retail of recreational marijuana was decriminalized in California through the Medicinal and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act . Beginning in January 2018, California began to issue licenses for the legal operation of medical and adult use cannabis shops, and by the end of year, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration reported cannabis shops produced $345 million in tax revenue for the state with the highest concentration of shops located in Los Angeles . While there are many studies that focus on cannabis consumers – health outcomes and public safety issues related to the legalization and use of cannabis – little attention has been paid to workers in the industry. The small amount of occupational safety and health literature that does exist regarding the cannabis industry focuses on the biological, chemical, and physical hazards associated with cannabis flower and its production into various cannabis derived products . However, the hazards that affect the safety of cannabis workers extends beyond the flower and stems from the industry’s long and complicated history with sexual abuse. In a 2016 article by Reveal News,vertical grow rack system female trimmers from the Emerald Triangle of Northern California shared stories of sexual abuse including being asked to trim topless and forced to perform sexual acts in order to receive payment . Similarly, in 2019, Vice also published an article documenting unfair work practices within the industry including 10 to 15 hour shifts, and sexual harassment of female bud tenders from shop owners . Until recently, cannabis flourished in the black market where it was produced, cultivated and distributed with little to no formal monitoring or regulation. Given the risks associated with being involved in the cannabis industry prior to legalization, it was a very secretive industry to navigate. The secrecy associated with the industry helped to establish a “culture of silence” against reporting abuses in the workplace, particularly regarding sexual harassment and exploitation . Because of the industry’s history, there is a need to assure that workers entering the business are protected and treated with respect, as with any other workforce. Institutionalized sexism permeates several aspects of the industry and cannabis companies are not exempt for marketing strategies that use sex appeal to sell products. For example, the brand Ignite pairs images of half-naked women with animals, and poorly formed cannabis puns , showcasing the misogyny and harassment that exists within the industry . The sexism which breeds harassment is not only evident through advertising, it is also apparent in hiring practices as women have historically been hired to not only sell product but to simultaneously serve as attractive promotional models for a brand .

Although this is more common in illegal retail fronts known as “trap shops,” it is a distinguishing characteristic of the industry. This in turn has led to accounts from workers describing instances of overtly touchy customers and co-workers as well as instances of their product knowledge being undermined because of their appearance and gender .Although there does exist a report documenting the prevalence of sexual abuse in the cannabis industry published by New Frontier Data, a company whose primary mission is to collect and analyze data relevant to cannabis to better inform businesses and investors, the report is not publicly available to better examine its methodology, study sample, or results . Despite challenges with accessibility, the major findings of the report have been published through cannabis related news outlets and suggest that, of the 1,741 workers in the cannabis industry who participated, there are high levels of workplace violence relative to other industries . Sexual harassment is also a widespread issue in the industry, with nearly 27% of participants reporting they have either witnessed it and 18% reporting they have experienced it themselves . An additional one-third of participants reported that they knew someone who had been sexually harassed in the industry . When filtered to only include responses from female employees working in non-ownership or management positions , the percent of workers who have experienced sexual harassment decreased slightly to 14% . Concurrently, the percentage of those who know of someone who has experienced harassment increase to 49% , indicating the effect of power structures in the likelihood to experience harassment.As the cannabis industry continues to expand within California and across the United States, it is becoming closely intertwined with the labor movement through its growing union representation. Among the many groups that have fought to legalize cannabis, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union was the first union heavily involved in the 2010 campaign for Proposition 19, a previous attempt to legalize the recreational use of cannabis in California. Although the campaign failed, UFCW continued to support the market for cannabis in California and especially in Los Angeles. In 2012, the city of Los Angeles attempted to ban all sales on cannabis. UFCW Local 770 fought the ban in order to protect the jobs of dispensary workers in the city and their efforts resulted in Proposition D, passed in 2013, that protected 135 medical marijuana dispensaries that had earned their licenses before 2007. UFCW continued their efforts to protect jobs in cannabis with their support of the 2016 campaign for MAUCRSA. As part of MAUCRSA, UFCW negotiated labor peace agreements in medical and recreational use laws. The provision deems that any cannabis shop in California with 20 or more workers is allowed the opportunity to join a union . However, despite the labor movement’s progressive ideology that serves to protect workers’ rights, it is important to address the complicated history that labor unions also face with sexual harassment as protecting women’s rights and workers’ rights have not always been advocated for concurrently. For example, during the Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. class-action lawsuit against workplace sexual harassment, the United Steelworkers Local 6860, responsible for representing the female workers and plaintiffs in the case, was found to be an inadequate source of protection for their female members reporting incessant harassment and abuse from co workers .