George Soros is a standing Director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)
and is Chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros was among the highest
paid hedge fund managers in 2009, taking home about $3.3 billion. At the
end of 2009, he owned about $6.95 billion distributed among 697 stocks.
Soros’ top 5 investment shareholdings are in gold, Petrobras
petroleum company, Hess Corp petroleum company, Monsanto corporation,
Citigroup Inc., and Suncor Energy Inc.(petroleum company).
That’s right, George Soros, who is famous for being one of the most
powerful and influential persons in world economics and whose
speculations alone are said to have ‘broke the Bank of England‘, is one
of the key directors for the organization that is leading the charge to
regulate, control and tax Cannabis in California. All the while George
Soros is one of the major shareholders in the worlds largest GM Seed
bio-technology corporation known as Monsanto.
The Monsanto corporation brought you things like Agent Orange,
Terminator Seeds, Monsantos Round-up ready Herbicide, and Genetically
Modified and Patented Organisms made from Soybean, Corn, and Cotton to
name a few. Genetically engineered crops entered the market in 1996 and
to this day around 90% of all Soy, Corn, and Cotton grown in the U.S.
have been Genetically Engineered and patented by a handful of
bio-chemical corporations, with Monsanto owning 90% of all GMO patents.
The value of the Cannabis plant as an industry, without factoring in
the value of Cannabis as a food or medicine, was estimated to be in the
billions in 1938 by an article published by Popular Mechanics Magazine
at that time, so its no wonder why one of Monsanto’s major shareholders
would have in interest in advocating for one of the main tenants of prop
19, which is to “Make cannabis available for scientific, medical,
industrial, and research purposes” and to “adopt a statewide regulatory
system for a commercial cannabis industry”. Prop 19 is doing nothing
less then opening the floodgates for Monsanto and other petro-chemical,
GMO seed and pharmaceutical corporations to commercialize, regulate,
control and tax Cannabis through genetic engineering, patenting and
licensing.
Monsanto and the Drug Policy Alliance are not the only entities
leading the charge to regulate Cannabis through genetic engineering. As
published in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of Experimental
Botany, Researchers from the College of Biological Science of the
University of Minnesota have identified the genes in the Cannabis plant
that produce tetra-hydro-cannabinol (THC), claiming in a press release
that it is “a first step toward engineering a drug-free Cannabis plant”.
George Weiblen, an associate professor of plant biology and a co-author
of the study, said “Cannabis genetics can contribute to better
agriculture, medicine, and drug enforcement”.
George Weiblen conducts his research under a permit granted by the
DEA to import Cannabis from outside of the U.S. The two sources from
which these imports come from are the Kenex corporation based in Ontario
Canada and the HortaPharm corporation based in Amsterdam. These two
corporations are two of the very few entities which have acquired a DEA
permit to import Cannabis into the United States. The history and role
of these corporations illustrate the potential of Genetic Engineering in
the global Cannabis market.
