Cedric Stephens | Insurance industry silent on ganja

 

ADVISORY COLUMN: INSURANCE HELPLINE

Ganja, according to the website weedmap.com, is a term derived from Sanskrit. It refers to Cannabis sativa, otherwise called marijuana.

Ganja is said to have entered the local vocabulary via Indian labourers in the late 19th Century. Despite ganja’s long association with Jamaican culture, Rastafarian religious practices and the local varieties’ highly-regarded reputation for quality, according to some aficionados, the spin-off word ‘ganjapreneur’ is not in common usage on our streets. A ganjapreneur is a person “engaged in the business of selling ganja and ganja products".

Jamaica’s first legal ganja retailer opened for business on the north coast last year. An investor in this venture has called Jamaica “one of the meccas for ganja”.

Do local health insurers recognise the medical benefits of marijuana? Are ganja drugs included under the prescription benefit of local health insurance plans?

Is the industry, including the regulator, aware of the growth opportunities in the emerging ganja industry? Or, are the risk-takers concentrating only on the negative impacts of liberalization like, for example, the links between ganja smoking, driving and motor accidents?

Is the social stigma that was associated with the use of ‘the herb’, as it was called when I was in my teens, still being reflected in the policies of insurers?

I am not sure where to obtain local answers to these questions.

Meanwhile, I am getting information about cannabis industry developments and what insurers are doing from the United States and Canada. There is absolutely no information about the slowly-blossoming local industry posted on the Financial Services Commission’s website. Same thing for the insurance carriers.

Perhaps the scores of persons who attended the FSC’s recent town hall meeting in Port Maria would have been even bigger had the planners offered to provide information about what they were doing to lessen the many risks that local ganjapreneurs face.

The California Department of Insurance is my favourite insurance regulator. It devotes one part of its website to ganja and insurance-related issues. The section reads: “our mission is Insurance Protection for All Californians − that includes cannabis businesses. Our goal is to make sure that insurance products are available, especially to businesses that will need insurance to secure a license from the California cannabis licensing agencies. We want to learn more from you about what CDI can do to be helpful to both the insurance industry and the cannabis industry to provide insurance-related guidance or resources ...”.

The FSC’s failure to follow this model is puzzling given Jamaica’s long and colourful history with ganja and reggae icon Bob Marley.

Canada, a country that some persons describe as traditional, became the world’s second state to legalise the recreational use of cannabis in October last year. The use of medical ganja there was legalised in 2001.

An insurance company there specializes in the development of the ganja industries in the United States. It is called, fittingly, Cannabis Insurance Company. The company’s mission is to provide security and protection for qualified marijuana businesses. It has been legally authorized to conduct business by Canada’s insurance regulator.

Former Harvard and Princeton academic and a leading international advocate on ganja reform, Dr Ethan Nadelmann, urged the Jamaican government nearly two years ago to speed up the pace of reforms in the local ganja industry before Jamaica “misses out on significant economic activities”.

Government has apparently taken that advice. A top official in the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture & Fisheries mentioned ganja to me in the same breath when he was speaking about traditional crops like sugar, coffee and cocoa.

In the meantime, according to the website www.ganjapreneur.com – a domain name that should have been owned by Jamaican and not American interests – I learned that in the US, the “movement towards federal legislation for the legalisation (of cannabis) is slowly gaining more Congressional support — slowly, but surely”.

It would be very interesting to hear from local industry officials and the regulator about their respective ganja policies.

 

Cedric E. Stephens provides independent information and advice about the management of risks and insurance. For free information or counsel, write to: aegis@flowja.com