The Leaf THE LEAF May-June 2019 | Page 17

Bayer has a business partnership with GW Pharmaceuticals, a UK-based company that grows marijuana, extracts compounds from it, and then turns the compounds into pharmaceutical medicines. Bayer is the licensed distributor for GW’s Sativex®, an expensive medical cannabis extract spray that patients say is less effective than growing and using their own buds. Like Monsanto and Scotts Miracle-Gro, Bayer is a pathologically harmful corporation. In 1898, Bayer trademarked the opiate diacetylmorphine, giving it the name heroin. The company falsely claimed that heroin was great for children as a harmless curative for coughs and digestive disorders. When Monsanto is called out for creating harm to humans and the environment, the corporation responds with denials and propagandistic public relations campaigns, and attempts to intimidate its critics. Michael Straumietis, founder and owner of hydroponics nutrients company Advanced Nutrients, has constantly warned the marijuana community about Monsanto, Scotts Miracle-Gro, GMO marijuana, and corporate takeover of the marijuana industry. “Monsanto and Bayer have an agreement to share information about genetically modifying crops including cannabis,” Straumietis notes. “Bayer is partnered with GW Pharmaceuticals, which grows its own proprietary marijuana genetics. You can bet Monsanto and Bayer are interested in creating GMO marijuana.” Several years ago, Straumietis reports, billionaire investor George Soros, who owns 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock, worked behind the scenes via a “public interest” front group to legalise cannabis research in Uruguay. Straumietis says South American governmental insiders report that Monsanto is working there on genetically-modified cannabis, along with pharmaceuticalising THC, other cannabinoids, and terpenoids. The biggest problem with Monsanto, Bayer, and Scotts Miracle-Gro linking up globally is that their goals are to control the world’s seed supply, food supply, agricultural chemicals, fertilizers, and medicines. “These corporations have reduced the variety and availability of native seeds,” he says. “They genetically modify crops so farmers have to buy new seeds every year, and use corporate chemicals like RoundUp to grow them. They’d do the same thing with GMO marijuana.” The corporate interests and immense political power of Bayer, Monsanto, and Scotts Miracle-Gro, enforced by the World Trade Organization and international patent law, could result in corporate ownership of marijuana seed stock, prohibition of cannabis growers producing their own strains, GMO marijuana, and decrease in the number of cannabis strains available. “There used to be hundreds of commercial varieties of apples,” Straumietis says. “Today there are less than two dozen. The United Nations warns that the diversity of cultivated crops declined by 75% during the