Can Morocco’s famous hash industry survive pharmaceutical regulation? In Part 2 of Episode 166, Trevor and Kirk continue their conversation with Jan van Weenen, a European cannabis veteran helping transform Morocco’s ancient hash market into a GMP-compliant pharmaceutical industry. From heavy metals in Rif Mountain soil to pricing battles between farmers, co-ops, and manufacturers, this episode reveals the real-world challenges of global cannabis regulation. Jan shares his strategy to build a pharmaceutical cannabis brand now — and pivot into recreational markets later — while navigating European standards, extract distribution, and international licensing. Listen now to explore the birth of Morocco’s legal cannabis industry and what it means for Europe and beyond.

Why doesn’t Morocco’s historic cannabis dominance automatically translate into global pharmaceutical success? Jan van Weenen's decade and a half in cannabis starts in the Netherlands, tours through Switzerland and lands in Morocco’s legal cannabis experiment. He has spent four years working with farmers, government, and doctors attempting to move the ancient Moroccan cannabis industry toward pharmaceutical grade production. Jan explains the challenges, particularly with naturally occurring heavy metals in the soil accumulating in Moroccan cannabis. Jan describes the complex supply chain in Morocco including the challenges of aligning farmers, cooperatives, processors, and regulators. The lack of coordination in the supply chain leads to quality control issues and other frictions which shave cash off the bottom line of companies trying to enter the legal market. In this episode Kirk and Trevor continue the discussion of the growing pains for the Moroccan cannabis industry, the gap between government ambition and on-the-ground reality, and the joy of learning the rules of a world’s regulated cannabis market on the fly.  Listen now to this first of three stories from Morocco to understand how science, regulation, and culture collide in global cannabis markets.