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News on cannabis stocks and on developments in the industry haven’t let up in today’s volatile markets. Here are this week’s stories that we believe will mean the most to you as a Canadian investor.

1. Health Canada has cited CannTrust Holdings for a second breach of the country’s cannabis production regulations.

The apparent breach was discovered last Friday, according to the company, and involved its manufacturing facility in Vaughan, Ont. The production site now faces questions about its security controls and elements of the facility constructed without regulatory approval.

CannTrust is still grappling with fallout from a July discovery by Health Canada inspectors of unlicenced grow rooms at one of its facilities. In the weeks following, the company’s stock price dropped 48% and its CEO was let go. The company also halted all sales and shipments of its products, and the federal government may suspend or even cancel its license in response.

Some in the industry also fear that investors may lose confidence in the ability of growers to meet demand while remaining within the law.

2. A Canadian lender to Indigenous communities and professionals is planning to fund cannabis stores on First Nations lands where it says communities have yet to reap the economic benefit of legalization.

Bridging Finance Inc. is starting with a store on the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, according to chief executive officer David Sharpe. His firm is working with Popcann, which repurposes old shipping containers to make pot stores, to replicate that model for Indigenous communities in North America.

“For me it’s a fairness issue,” said Sharpe, a member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. “We’re lobbying the Ontario government to come up with more licenses.”

As the second country to legalize recreational marijuana, Canada saw a rush of prospective retailers apply to individual provinces for licences. In Ontario, says Sharpe, some indigenous people have expressed frustration at the provincial government’s plan to issue a maximum of eight licenses for cannabis stores on reserves on a first-come, first-serve basis. There are over 200 reserves in the province.

3. Some American farmers suffering under U.S.-China tariffs are now turning to hemp production in an attempt to lessen any losses.

John Boyd Jr., a soybean grower in Virginia, is among them. He has now planted about 100 acres (40 hectares) of hemp this year to deal with the fallout of the trade dispute that saw China cut its buying of American agriculture imports by more than half in 2018. Purchases have continued to drop in 2019.

“We’re trying our hand at hemp for the first time,” Boyd said in an interview on Bloomberg Television with Alix Steel. “I’m taking a big risk there, and I know some other farmers are doing that as well.”

Hemp, like cannabis, is rich in cannabidiol, or CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabis ingredient being credited with medicinal properties. Congress legalized CBD in the U.S. last year, prompting investors to pour money into the industry and catching the attention of farmers.

4. A new study suggests that private cannabis stores are closer to no-go zones like primary schools than their government-run competitors.

Those licensee-run bricks-and-mortar outlets are also closer to secondary schools, a demographic more likely to experiment with pot, according to the research, which compared legally operating recreational cannabis locations across Canada.

A less surprising finding of the study is the growing concentration of both private and government cannabis stores in lower-income neighborhoods. Those businesses are, in fact, twice as likely to be in those areas than in high-income neighborhoods, say researchers at the Ottawa Hospital, the University of Ottawa and the Bruyère Research Institute. –

They used government and private websites to collect listings on retail cannabis stores that opened across Canada in the first six months after the drug was legalized in October 2018.

In total, the study found that 260 cannabis stores opened during that time.

5. The growing number of outdoor cannabis farmers in California are coming into conflict with neighbouring grape and vegetable growers given state prohibitions on fungicide spraying near those marijuana crops.

While grape farmers are allowed to use stronger fungicides for decades, they’re now effectively blocked from doing so if that pesticide creeps onto neighbouring cannabis crops.

The prohibition is meant to avoid contamination of a plant that is directly ingested and with more-immediate impact on the bloodstream and human tissue.

Still, Santa Barbara County grape and vegetable farmers worry that local legislators have gone too far in protecting cannabis crops.

“I have nothing against cannabis,” vineyard owner Kathy Joseph told NPR. “It existed whether it was legal or not legal, and this just allows it to be controlled a little bit more responsibly. But that isn’t what happened.”

Research on the economic impact of California farming values cannabis now takes up a fraction of the arable land in the state, that crop is worth $180 million. By comparision, its famed wine is worth an estimated $120 million.