Is India losing out on a ready-to-boom cannabis market by not legalising its use?
Looks like it’s not just the beverage companies that have an interest in cannabis. The trend now extends to the beauty industry
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Just about everybody smokes cannabis in India. Hush, not a word to anybody. We will all be arrested. It’s a democratic, egalitarian weed loved by copywriters, doctors, designers, salesmen, delivery boys, auto-rickshaw drivers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, politicians and, of course, musicians. It’s illegal and yet its use is widespread. In Odisha, it is relatively more acceptable and easier to procure. In Varanasi, at a fancy lit fest that I was invited to, bhang balls were served to delegates on a silver platter. It was part of tradition and local hospitality, the law be damned. While the world, from Coca-Cola to Corona, appropriates our tropical plant and basically reinvents bhang, making billions in the process, we have no political, moral and judicial stand on it. We have given up all claims on what was our own for millennia.
