The LSU AgCenter expects to have the first legal crop of medical marijuana grown in Louisiana by November.
In 2015, the Louisiana Legislature had authorized the AgCenter to start growing marijuana, but because of the many budget problems the state has faced since then, the AgCenter struggled for years to get funding for the project.
“Because the AgCenter has been cut so drastically in the last 10 years, we felt like we couldn’t spend state tax dollars and money coming in on a marijuana project when we were cutting other programs,” said Ashley Mullens, the AgCenter’s coordinator for the medical marijuana initiative.
The AgCenter finally got private funding in 2017 from its partner GB Sciences, a national corporation that specializes in medical cannabis.
“[GB Sciences] made it very clear to us that they knew what they were doing, they had experience, and that research was just as important to them as it was to us,” Mullens said.
GB Sciences is paying for all costs associated with the program, including renovating the 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Baton Rouge into a “state-of-the-art” facility for medical marijuana research.
The products sold will not be smokable, but in the form of droplets called tinctures. The AgCenter has also been discussing other delivery methods like patches or lotions.
The Louisiana Legislature added intractable pain disease and post-traumatic stress disorder —which account for a large number of eligible patients in other states—, to the list of conditions that qualify a patient for medical marijuana. The state also lifted a regulation that restricted the number of patients a doctor can prescribe medical marijuana to.
Dr. Victor Chou, a Baton Rouge doctor licensed to prescribe medical marijuana, said he has a waiting list of 300 patients.
Since the University is one of the only two places allowed to grow medical marijuana in the state, it is trying to meet the rising demand as quickly as possible.
“It’s really important to us that we meet the demand because that’s going to grow our program exponentially,” Mullens said.
Because further testing is needed, the amount of cannabis the AgCenter is growing now is minimal. The bulk of the crop will be grown starting in January. From planning to packaging, it will take an estimated 16 weeks before medical marijuana is ready to be sold in a pharmacy.
Only nine pharmacies have been approved to sell medical marijuana in the state with the closest being Capitol Wellness Solutions in Baton Rouge.
The University will receive only 10 percent of sales revenue because GB Sciences is paying for most of the project’s expenses.
The main reason the AgCenter decided to pursue medical marijuana was not for the potential profit, but for the research opportunities.
“Although people may see the benefit economically right now with just getting the product to patients, we don’t,” Mullens said. “We see the long term benefit in creating intellectual property with research.”
The AgCenter has a long history of discovering new plant varieties and finding the best growing practices, and they hope to bring that to cannabis.
More research still needs to be done concerning cannabis, like how to extract as much effective compounds like THC out of the plant as possible, and how the plant grows in various conditions.
The AgCenter also looks to use breeding and genetics to create varieties and strains that may have higher THC content or grow better in Louisiana.
“We hope to create a genetic library for cannabis where people can come to us and say they are looking for plants high in THC or any of those attributes, and we will be able to provide that to them,” Mullens said.
The AgCenter hopes to make LSU “the go-to land grant university” for cannabis.
