2019 Gumbo final - Book - Page 46
Greaux Tigers
New Endeavors
he LSU AgCenter expects to have the first legal
crop of medical marijuana grown in Louisiana
by November.In 2015, the Louisiana Legislature
had authorized the AgCenter to start growing
marijuana, but because of the many budget problems the
state has faced since then, the AgCenter struggled for years
to get funding for the project. “Because the AgCenter has
been cut so drastically in the last 10 years, we felt like we
couldn’t spend state tax dollars and money coming in on a
marijuana project when we were cutting other programs,” said
Ashley Mullens, the AgCenter’s coordinator for the medical
marijuana initiative.
The AgCenter finally got private funding in 2017
from its partner GB Sciences, a national corporation that
specializes in medical cannabis.
“[GB Sciences] made it very clear to us that they
knew what they were doing, they had experience, and that
research was just as important to them as it was to us,”
Mullens said.
GB Sciences is paying for all costs associated with
the program, including renovating the 5,000-square-foot
warehouse in Baton Rouge into a “state-of-the-art” facility for
medical marijuana research.
The products sold will not be smokable, but in the
form of droplets called tinctures. The AgCenter has also been
discussing other delivery methods like patches or lotions.
The Louisiana Legislature added intractable pain
disease and post-traumatic stress disorder —which account
for a large number of eligible patients in other states—, to the
list of conditions that qualify a patient for medical marijuana.
The state also lifted a regulation that restricted the number of
patients a doctor can prescribe medical marijuana to.
Dr. Victor Chou, a Baton Rouge doctor licensed to prescribe
medical marijuana, said he has a waiting list of 300 patients.
Since the University is one of the only two places allowed to
grow medical marijuana in the state, it is trying to meet the
rising demand as quickly as possible.
“It’s really important to us that we meet the demand because
that’s going to grow our program exponentially,” Mullens said.
Because further testing is needed, the amount of cannabis the
AgCenter is growing now is minimal. The bulk of the crop will
be grown starting in January. From planning to packaging, it
will take an estimated 16 weeks before medical marijuana is
ready to be sold in a pharmacy.
Only nine pharmacies have been approved to sell medical
marijuana in the state with the closest being Capitol Wellness
Solutions in Baton Rouge.
The University will receive only 10 percent of sales revenue
because GB Sciences is paying for most of the project’s
expenses.
The main reason the AgCenter decided to pursue medical
marijuana was not for the potential profit, but for the research
opportunities.
“Although people may see the benefit economically right now
with just getting the product to patients, we don’t,” Mullens
said. “We see the long term benefit in creating intellectual
property with research.”
The AgCenter has a long history of discovering new plant
varieties and finding the best growing practices, and they
hope to bring that to cannabis.
More research still needs to be done concerning cannabis,
like how to extract as much effective compounds like THC out
of the plant as possible, and how the plant grows in various
conditions.
The AgCenter also looks to use breeding and genetics to
create varieties and strains that may have higher THC content
or grow better in Louisiana.
“We hope to create a genetic library for cannabis where
people can come to us and say they are looking for plants
high in THC or any of those attributes, and we will be able to
provide that to them,” Mullens said.
The AgCenter hopes to make LSU “the go-to land grant
university” for cannabis.
Story // Benjamin Holden
Photo // Reveille Photographer
Design // Briley Slaton
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