Beau Whitney of Whitney and Associates (pictured here) told ICS 2026 that the cannabis market internationally is flawed by regulatory design and that the United Nations should step in and hit the reset button on the whole approach to plant medicine.
Speaking remotely on the Cape Town panel discussion on cannabis equity and trade on 27 June 2026, Whitney said international cannabis regulations favoured the First World and there would be growing conflict between pharmaceutical interests in advanced countries and traditional medicine practitioners in developing countries unless plant medicine was recognized as a category of its own, operating within a complementary framework as pharmaceutical medicine.
This he said would best be taken up at the UN level in order to harmonize international regulations.
Whitney was also critical of social equity models set up in the US cannabis industry. “In fact I haven’t seen one that works” he said. Such schemes were meant to address historical injustices, but because measurement had not been built into diversity schemes as a compliance measure, it was difficult to determine whether any project had actually reached its goals.
He said social equity schemes could also turn into traps to keep marginalized stakeholders from benefiting from the full value chain of the cannabis economy. He said micro-licensing of businesses to ease market access may sound attractive, but in many ways this was a limiting factor for businesses to scale up.
Whitney said the current market compression – economist-speak for falling prices – was a result of flawed regulatory systems design which focused on the taxing the demand side of the equation without adopting balanced policies on the supply side of the industry.
“There is way too much supply capacity allowed by regulators and that is driving prices down” said Whitney. He said big operators could weather price falls better than smaller businesses could, and that unless regulatory frameworks were fundamentally rejigged, the game would continue to be a race to the bottom.
In the meantime, he suggested that developing countries band together to increase scale. In South Africa he said there were proven community and co-operative models that could enable small scale farmers to meaningfully enter the cannabis economy.
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