The country’s health minister says that the Sri Lankan government will grow 25 tons of pot a year.
The island nation of Sri Lanka is looking to put itself on the most cutting edge of Asia’s cannabis industry with an eventual goal of U.S. exports.
As U.S. cannabis entrepreneurs continue to deal with the struggle of not being able to ship their products across state lines, Sri Lanka’s Minister of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine is looking to ship cannabis over the international date line on its way to the United States. But Rajitha Senaratne told the New Dehli Times the first and primary goal was to provide cannabis to the local Sri Lankan market.
“The traditional herbal medicine market currently depends on the hand-outs from the court which generally seize the illegally grown and smuggled drugs. By the time our doctors get the cannabis, it is already four to five years old and lost its effectiveness,” Senaratne told the Times.
A country in Asia setting up a federal marijuana cultivation program would be big news any day, but the next part of Senaratne’s reasoning really spiced the news up. He noted that there is “a high demand in the U.S. for the quality weed which is used to manufacture tranquilizers and painkillers” and went on to say that Sri Lankan cannabis would surpass anything that is being “prepared in the U.S.” Bless his heart.
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