This week, two of the world’s top beer companies announced that they were stepping into the cannabis industry in big ways.
First Heineken announced that their California-based subsidiary Lagunitas is producing a THC infused beer that contains no alcohol. The new drink is called Hi-Fi Hops and is sold for roughly $8 at select cannabis dispensaries.
The drink only contains 10mg of THC per can, which is about the same as a cannabis-infused gummy bear. However, if someone is looking to get a value, they would have much better luck with the 100mg Dixie Elixirs, which come in a variety of flavors that go for roughly $30 per can.
Hi-Fi Hops is also available in a non-psychoactive CBD version. Not long after Heineken’s announcement, Corona parent company Constellation Brands went public with their decision to invest $4 billion into Canada’s top cannabis producer Canopy Growth.
As a result of the investment, Constellation now owns 38% of Canopy Growth, positioning themselves to be a big player in the cannabis market, as the alcohol industry risks losing market share.
“This could potentially be one of the most significant global growth opportunities for the next decade,” Constellation CEO Rob Sands said.
A 2015 study, published in the journal, ‘Scientific Reports,’ suggests that smoking cannabis is roughly 114 times safer than drinking alcohol. Ironically, out of all the drugs that were researched in the study, alcohol was actually the most dangerous, and it was the only legal drug on the list.
Just behind alcohol, heroin and cocaine were listed as the next most dangerous, followed by tobacco, ecstasy, and meth. The criteria that these drugs were arranged by, was according to the likelihood of a person dying from consuming a lethal dose.
“The results confirm that the risk of cannabis may have been overestimated in the past. At least for the endpoint of mortality, the [margin of exposure] for THC/cannabis in both individual and population-based assessments would be above safety thresholds (e.g. 100 for data based on animal experiments). In contrast, the risk of alcohol may have been commonly underestimated,” the report states. “Currently, the MOE results point to risk management prioritization towards alcohol and tobacco rather than illicit drugs. The high MOE values of cannabis, which are in a low-risk range, suggest a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach,” the report continues.
While this is not the first study to rank marijuana very low in terms of danger, it comes at a time when the debate surrounding marijuana legalization is more heated than ever before, with more and more people agreeing that it is time to end prohibition.