Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has wrecked havoc among a wide range of industries globally, it appears that cannabis is excluded from the casualties. An industry white paper last week informed that the growth of cannabis’s 2020 industry is currently over-taking that of 2019. Recruitment for cannabis companies as well are experiencing some rebound, and retailers are actually buying more products from companies than they had been before the pandemic.
The white paper, The State of the Cannabis Industry:2020 is available as a free download now. It was launched as a common collaboration between LeafLink, Vangst, and FlowHub. If none of the companies are familiar to you, LeafLink is a marketplace for wholesale of cannabis and supplied insights from transactions between retailers and brands.
Flowhub specializes in cannabis retail management for modern dispensaries and extended a dispensary sales perspective for the paper, and Vangst is a human capital resource platform for the legal cannabis industry, and offered guidance from a hiring outlook. The white paper displays that in march, there was a two-week spike in cannabis sales, sometime when the United States began to react to COVID-19 and home-quarantine orders kicked into place. A sufficient amount of that spike in sales is likely as a result of customers panicking, uncertain when next they would be able to access the dispensary.
A slight decline followed that two-week spike, possibly caused by the sale customers who eventually realized that dispensaries would be considered vital (and the requirement to use up the already acquired product).
Later, there was a period of recovery including a couple more spikes which led up to 4/20, when sales gained stability, however they stabilized at a volume notably higher than they were in 2019, to the tune of a 40% increase on average. That’s a large leap. The entire white paper is a worthy read, but gestures to a stronger cannabis industry as a whole as the economy begins movement once more and states start opening up.
Other than its current use, researches are also regarding cannabis as a possible way to cure and probably prevent COVID-19. The researchers, Olga and Igor Kovalchuck have apparently been cultivating and examining a novel cannabis strain for years, except the goal was to create a strain that assists in the battle against cancer and inflammation.
When the pandemic struck, the duo shifted their focus and set efforts on how the strain could be implemented to help fight COVID-19. That study was published in April, and states that cannabis, particularly a particular
strain of cannabis, could likely prevent COVID-19 from being able to infiltrate the body of a person at all.
Of course, it is still a mere theory, but if proven could likely put cannabis at the center of the search for a COVID-19 treatment and cure. Regardless of if it ends up being an escape route from the COVID-19 pandemic or not, it appears that cannabis has become a coping mechanism for man.
