'Flying Leaves'

[Randy W]

in the SCMP - the cannabis industry in China

 

WORLD CANNABIS DAY: ‘FLYING LEAVES’ DEFY STIGMA TO SOAR TO NEW HEIGHTS

Cannabis gains acceptance globally and evolves into a billion-dollar industry

 

http://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/2000x792/public/images/methode/2017/04/21/e8d413a8-24ec-11e7-a553-18fc4dcb5811_4000x1584_092411.jpg?itok=jSVr2bwi

 

The few foreign visitors who came to my ancestral home Dali in Yunnan in the 1980s broadly fell into two types. The first ones were people who dressed in formal suits and stayed at the most luxurious hotels – always accompanied by an English-speaking guide and driven around in chauffeured cars. The second type, however, was more interesting: carefree, young hippies clad in colourful clothes with unkempt long hair. They holed up in cheap guest houses, mingling with locals and venturing into the hills and woodlands, seemingly looking for something.

With my curiosity piqued, one day I summoned enough courage to ask one of them what they were doing. A man, said to be from California, gave me a mysterious grin and said: “We are looking for the magic plant ‘faiyezi’ (flying leaves).” I asked my botanist uncle what ‘faiyezi’ was. He laughed hard but never gave me a straight answer.

. . .

Exacting pure cannabidiol from cannabis is extremely difficult, as it is often mixed with THC. In 2014, Chinese researchers in Yunnan successfully achieved high-purity cannabidiol exaction (95 per cent) from sativa seeds. It has built the world’s first and only industrial centre to produce cannabidiol in large quantities. In 2015, China began to export cannabidiol to Europe.

Even the military began to take interests in cannabis. There are reports of military-related pharmaceuticals experimenting with cannabis extracts to produce drugs that could help soldiers “to overcome battlefield anxiety and depression”. Industrial insiders estimated that the cannabis industry would grow into a trillion-dollar business in the next decade.