Background: Cannabis and data gone wrong
Written by Beth Schechter, former executive director of the Open Cannabis Project
In 2014, a cannabis genetics company was formed in Oregon. The idea was to map the genome of cannabis so that they could figure out the true makeup of every plant out there – a big deal given the decades of grey market hybridization. They obtained samples from all over the world. Rather than keep the data for themselves, they decided to put it out into the open, making it possible for anyone to use it for research.
In theory, and in light of the history of wealth and agriculture, it was a powerful and democratizing move. But there were two major problems. First, the data they shared was hard to read — you had to be a scientist or at least have access to the proper equipment to decode the data, much less make any sense of it. Second, the company needed to make money, ultimately putting them in a position where they needed to sell the company. This put them on a path to agriculture business as usual — breeding plants to be used for mass production, which was at odds with their initial approach, or at least the approach they were perceived to have. The farmers who had offered their plants for research did not like that suddenly this company was their competition. The company tried to hand the data over to a nonprofit, the Open Cannabis Project, but it wasn’t enough, plus some communication missteps didn’t help. The result: cannabis farmers and breeders felt taken advantage of. It all went up in flames when a video surfaced of the CEO pitching to sell to a large corporation. The fallout led to the dissolution of the nonprofit, many broken hearts, and a general sense of distrust around science and data from the community.
Hope is not lost, though, for independent, community-driven research
In the year or so since the fallout, a small group of people have been digging through the rubble, looking for lessons, thinking about what it would take to, actually, put research and development into the hands of small farmers. Would it be possible to create a distributed data collection network about plants, letting people learn and understand their work as a collective?
The truth is…this is so much bigger than just Cannabis.
Plant medicine has experienced a similar conundrum, where the commercial value of the plant and its extract is not shared with the indigenous people who have tended to them — and potentially shared knowledge of the medicinal plant with Western scientists. This phenomenon is known as biopiracy. In both biopiracy and the data conundrum, information is extracted, creates wealth for the people who extracted it, and leaves the people who created the information out of the profits.
Outside of the United States, biopiracy is addressed through adherence to the Nagoya Protocol, or the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization (ABS) to the Convention on Biological Diversity. This supplemental agreement to the Convention on Biological Diversity “provides a transparent legal framework for the effective implementation of one of the three objectives of the CBD: the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.”
***
From this place we formed a coalition and developed shared ethics to guide us. The Ethical Data Alliance was the result of these open and ongoing collaborations. Join us!
