Politics
Marijuana Activists At Odds Over Accusations That Regulators Group Wrongly Hosted Big Tobacco-Backed Organization At Meeting
Tempers are flaring in the cannabis advocacy world after an academic journal published a critical letter by a public health analyst accusing a state marijuana regulators’ group of breaking its own rules by allowing a representative of a tobacco- and alcohol-backed organization to attend an event it hosted.
Jane Allen, a researcher at RTI International, wrote the letter that was published last week by the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. In it, she accuses the Cannabis Regulators Association (CANNRA) of breaking its own guidelines by allowing someone Allen claims was a representative of the tobacco and alcohol industries to attend a stakeholder meeting in Minneapolis last month.
“This year, for the first time, CANNRA specified that ‘individuals may not attend representing an entity manufacturing or distributing tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceutical products,'” Allen wrote, citing a CANNRA post about the event. “Nevertheless, when CANNRA circulated a list of registered attendees, that list included the Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education, and Regulation (CPEAR)—although CPEAR members include Altria and Reynolds American, two huge global tobacco corporations, and Molson Coors, a multinational alcohol company.”
“When the discrepancy between the eligibility criteria and CPEAR’s attendance was brought to CANNRA’s attention,” Allen continued, “CANNRA declined to ask CPEAR not to attend.”
The letter has stirred up leaders at CANNRA, which in a statement to Marijuana Moment said the organization “takes issue with the unfounded accusations in the recent letter to the editor.”
CANNRA and CPEAR both argue that the attendee at the Minneapolis event appeared on behalf of a sub-group within CPEAR that doesn’t represent tobacco or alcohol interests.
“CANNRA does not take funding from the tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, or cannabis industries, nor do those industries advise CANNRA in any way,” said the statement from the group’s executive director, Gillian Schauer. “Our members are all government agencies and we do not accept memberships or sponsorships from any industry or non-governmental groups. Ms. Allen’s accusations about CANNRA giving CPEAR, or any other industry group, undue influence on cannabis policy are demonstrably false.”
“Any suggestion that one attendee in an annual meeting of nearly 200 external stakeholders amounts to undue influence is absurd,” the statement said.
To be clear, Allen’s letter—titled “The Cannabis Regulators Association Is Moving in the Right Direction, but Still Permitting Too Much Tobacco Industry Influence”—does not claim that CANNRA allowed CPEAR representatives to influence cannabis policy. Rather, it asserts that CANNRA broke its own rules regarding who could attend its conferences.
“I have spoken directly with CANNRA leadership about this issue multiple times,” Allen told Marijuana Moment in an email.
She and others have been critical of CANNRA’s past involvement with CPEAR, a group that identifies tobacco giants, alcohol conglomerates, convenience stores and peripheral businesses like major beverage distributors among its members. In her letter, Allen pointed in to a 2022 CANNRA conference at which CPEAR members served as panelists.
Those optics were likely a factor in CANNRA’s new stance that it would not welcome attendees who represent alcohol, tobacco or pharmaceutical industries at its event.
But the organization is insistent that Allen’s charge is unfounded. “Any accusation that we set criteria for attendance at our meeting and then violated those criteria is false,” the statement said. “We did not disregard our attendance criteria; they were not perfunctory. We took them seriously and reached out to confirm self-certification by a number of attendees.”
The stakeholder meeting “had 100 regulators from more than 30 jurisdictions, as well as nearly 200 external stakeholders who registered from more than 100 different organizations,” CANNRA explained. “As part of the registration, attendees self-certified that they were not attending as a representative of the tobacco, alcohol, or pharmaceutical industry. To our knowledge, we are the only non-partisan organization to require a self-certification process like this.”
The attendee at the heart of the controversy is Shanita Penny, who was recently named a co-executive director of CPEAR, although she did not hold that position at the time of the CANNRA conference. Penny is also the head of the CPEAR’s Center of Excellence (COE), a group of experts that the organization says is separate from its general members.
Penny claimed to be attending the CANNRA event as a representative of the CPEAR Center of Excellence—not as a CPEAR official.
As CANNRA explained to Marijuana Moment: “One attendee registered from the CPEAR Center of Excellence and we reached out to verify that the attendee stood by their self-certification as meeting the attendance criteria. The attendee stood by that self-certification, noting distinctions between CPEAR’s role and membership and that of the Center [of] Excellence, which they noted was walled off from CPEAR.”
Penny herself, in a statement to Marijuana Moment, also emphasized those distinctions.
“CPEAR’s Center of Excellence is purposefully siloed from the coalition’s general corporate membership,” the now-CPEAR co-executive director said.
In response, Marijuana Moment asked CPEAR to explain what “purposefully siloed” means and how that’s accomplished.
Chanse Jones, who serves as communications director for both CPEAR itself and its Center of Excellence, replied that CPEAR neither charges membership dues to COE members nor does it “editorialize the views of our members of the COE.”
He did not answer repeated questions from Marijuana Moment, however, about how COE members are recruited or selected.
“The COE comprises experts in relevant and related fields that are critical to developing a federal regulatory framework for cannabis that protects public health and safety,” said Jones, who works at the public affairs firm Forbes Tate Partners, which also counts the trade group Pharma among its clients. “It aims to provide a neutral space for experts to have in-depth discussions, tackle various issues, and offer evidence-based reasoning for public policy decisions on cannabis regulation.”
He clarified that Penny “will continue to lead COE in her new role as co-executive director,” noting that another CPEAR leader, Andrew Freedman, also served both roles when CPEAR was initially launched.
It is not clear how that arrangement is considered “siloed,” as CPEAR phrases it, or “walled off,” as CANNRA described the relationship.
“CPEAR’s Center of Excellence is sandwiched between leadership and members on the ‘Who we are’ page of their website,” Allen, who wrote the critical letter, said in her email to Marijuana Moment. “I have no reason to think that CPEAR’s Center of Excellence is not an integral part of CPEAR.”
The issue of CPEAR’s relationship with its Center of Excellence also came up in relation to a December 2022 House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, when Freedman, then the group’s executive director, was asked in a written follow-up question by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) about the apparent distinction between the groups.
“Which of CPEAR’s policy recommendations are not supported by which Center for Excellence organizations?” the congresswoman asked.
Freedman replied at the time: “The Center of Excellence has final approval of all policy papers. If there is disagreement or consensus cannot be reached, we will note the disagreement. To date, we have reached consensus on all policy papers.”
Penny, in her statement to Marijuana Moment, further seemed to take issue with the idea that organizations like CANNRA should shut out representatives from the tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceutical industries.
“Consider the consequences,” she said: “Nationwide cannabis regulation devoid of input from highly regulated industries will undoubtedly mirror the failures we’ve witnessed in several states across the country.”
Arguments to the contrary “might gain traction in the echo chambers” of social media, Penny added, “but in the halls of Congress, we know the real discussions are grounded in practicality and responsibility.”
“Broadly speaking,” she went on, “it is not unusual for stakeholders to attend conferences hosted by regulators.”
Penny and CPEAR also said other advocacy groups, including Parabola Center, a policy organization headed by former Massachusetts Cannabis Commissioner Shaleen Title, has “also called upon experts from CPEAR’s Center of Excellence to inform their policymaking.”
Title previously wrote an opinion piece in Marijuana Moment last year arguing that CPEAR should not be welcome at CANNRA’s closed-door policy meetings, which was cited in Allen’s recently published letter. She was also one of the people who reached out to CANNRA ahead of the meeting in Minneapolis to express concerns about Penny’s attendance.
Title has repeatedly argued that the tobacco and alcohol industries ought not be given a seat at the table to craft cannabis policy.
In response to CPEAR’s claim that Parabola also worked with a COE member, Title told Marijuana Moment that the person being referenced—Staci Gruber, a professor at Harvard Medical School—was attending a Parabola event this month not as a CPEAR COE member but instead as a health and policy expert. Unlike Penny, Title noted, Gruber does not play a larger role at CPEAR itself.
“I’m not going to get sucked into a back and forth, because that’s a distraction tactic,” Title said in a statement. “The facts here speak for themselves.”
“What I hope people take from this is a real-life example of how tobacco and alcohol companies use front groups like CPEAR and associations like CANNRA to force their way into private policy discussions and develop relationships with policymakers,” she added of the CANNRA conference controversy. “If people can recognize these deceptive practices, they can choose to reject them.”
As for the publication of the critical letter in an academic journal, CANNRA said it was blindsided.
“After seeing the published letter to the editor, CANNRA reached out to Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research to express that had they taken reasonable steps to vet the submitted letter or at a minimum, provided CANNRA an opportunity to respond, they would have identified a number of inaccuracies that should have informed their decision to publish,” the group’s statement said.
“It is disappointing,” it continued, “that Ms. Allen’s letter comments on and makes assumptions about outcomes from a meeting that she did not attend (she registered and then withdrew her registration), particularly when her letter to the editor advises readers that ‘withdrawing from discussions that shape national policies will result in outcomes you like even less.'”
Reached about the letter, Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research Editor-in-Chief Daniele Piomelli said in an email that it’s the journal’s policy “to publish unsolicited letters without peer review,” adding: “This is, to the best of my knowledge, the policy of all academic journals.”
“We do verify that the content is of potential interest, the form is civil, and that author works in an academic or otherwise credible institution but do not go farther than that. As you know, Dr. Allen works at RTI, which is certainly credible,” Piomelli continued. “It is also our policy not to solicit comments on a letter prior to publication because we maintain that letters express the opinion of the authors and the authors only. The only exception to this rule is when the letter questions the results or the interpretation of a study previously published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research.”
Piomelli said the journal was “happy to publish counterpoints and give them the same visibility as the original letter.”
Over the weekend, CANNRA submitted its own letter to the editor. The organization said it couldn’t share the letter per journal rules but that the substance was similar to the statement it sent to Marijuana Moment for this story.
One additional point raised in the letter, said Schauer, the group’s executive director, is that she herself spent more than a decade working in tobacco control and smoking prevention:
“As a researcher, I spent 15 years of my career focused on tobacco prevention and control and served as a Senior Editor on the 2020 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking Cessation. I would not work for an organization that accepted funding from or sought to give undue influence to the tobacco industry. As the Executive Director of CANNRA, I – along with our board members who are all current cannabis and cannabinoid regulators – have set out strict ethical parameters for our work. It is extremely disappointing that the journal of Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research allowed false information to be spread about who CANNRA is and what we do.”
CPEAR’s involvement in the cannabis space has been welcomed by some advocates and policymakers, while others have been deeply skeptical of tobacco and alcohol giants’ interest in the marijuana industry.
In September of last year, the group rankled some advocates by publishing a paper that called for a centralized, nationwide track-and-trace system as well as marijuana tax stamps to help “distinguish regulated cannabis products from illicit products.”
This March, CPEAR commissioned a poll focused on Missouri, Ohio and Wyoming, finding that a majority of voters—including more than 60 percent of Republicans—support congressional legislation to protect states’ rights to set their own marijuana laws.
As for CANNRA, last year the organization asked Congress to change laws around hemp and cannabinoids through the federal Farm Bill, seeking to adjust the federal definition of the crop and modify rules around hemp-derived cannabinoids.
The changes are needed, CANNRA said at the time, because the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp nationwide, “inadvertently resulted in a thriving market for intoxicating cannabinoid products that are included (or claim to be included) within the definition of ‘hemp.’”
The association also expanded its membership last year and welcomed new board members as additional jurisdictions moved to legalize marijuana.
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
