Police officials in New Orleans this week told a city council committee that rats have taken over the department’s downtown headquarters, saying that the rodents have been eating marijuana stored in an evidence room. Anne Kirkpatrick, the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, told the city leaders at a meeting on Monday that the rats are apparently enjoying the food source sitting in an evidence room at police headquarters.

“The rats are eating our marijuana,” Kirkpatrick said, according to a report from online news source NOLA.com. “They’re all high.”

The superintendent was reporting to the council committee on the condition of aging police facilities around New Orleans. In addition to eating drugs in the evidence room, rats are reportedly found throughout the building, spreading feces across the desks of police officers and other department workers. The building is also infested with cockroaches, Kirkpatrick reported.

The department’s problems at police headquarters are not limited to pests. The building also has mold and elevators, HVAC equipment and plumbing that are old and deteriorating. 

An NOPD veteran speaking to a reporter anonymously said that the downtown police headquarters has been infested with rats throughout his almost two decades with the department. He also noted that some officers report coughing or sneezing after visiting the moldy building, which has served the police department since 1968.

“It’s horrible. I don’t think it ever recovered from Katrina, to be honest,” the officer said, referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans. “The basement was full (of flood water). You get a lot of rodents that climb through the walls. Some things you just can’t get to, so there has always been some type of rodent, bugs, rats, mice, whatever.”

New Orleans Police Department’s Five-Year Quest For New Digs

The police department has been asking for a new headquarters since before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, the department asked for $39 million to build a new base of operations, but the project was not funded by the city council. 

Kirkpatrick, who took over as superintendent in October after moving to New Orleans from the West Coast, renewed the push for a new department headquarters, a source told NOLA.com. Kirkpatrick was “adamant” about a new facility for the department’s officers and staff of 400 who work at the aging building. 

At Monday’s meeting, Kirkpatrick described the building as a “turn-off” to prospective employee transfers from other areas as well as the personnel that already work there.

“It’s not OK, and it’s not OK for people to be treated that way and be called valued,” she said.

The superintendent also noted that the poor condition of police facilities goes beyond the department’s downtown home.

“It is not just at police headquarters. It is all the districts. The uncleanliness is off the charts,” Kirkpatrick told the council members on the committee. “The janitorial cleaning [team] deserves an award, trying to clean what is uncleanable.”

Kirkpatrick was at the meeting to ask for the committee’s approval of a proposal to house the department on two floors of a new high-rise in downtown New Orleans for 10 years while a plan for a permanent facility is developed. The committee approved a motion to authorize the move, sending the plan to the full council for a vote.

Gilbert Montaño, the city’s chief administrative officer, described the headquarters move as a “Herculean lift.” Once the headquarters has been temporarily relocated, additional buildings in the downtown justice complex will also be vacated.

“I foresee most of the criminal justice agencies will have to be temporarily housed as we address these old decrepit buildings,” said Montaño, according to a report from The Guardian.

“Right now, we are addressing police headquarters because it is in dire straits.”

Not The First Time

The problem with rodents eating weed being stored as police evidence is not new. In addition to the report from New Orleans, police departments in South America and Asia have reported similar stories of hungry rodents fiending on pot, The Guardian noted.

In 2018, the outlet reported that eight police officers in Argentina were fired after they reported that mice had eaten nearly 1,000 pounds of pot that had disappeared from a police warehouse about 35 miles away from Buenos Aires. 

“Buenos Aires University experts have explained that mice wouldn’t mistake the drug for food, and that if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse,” a spokesperson for a judge who was reviewing the case said at the time.

Four years later, CNN reported a story from northern India, where rats had allegedly eaten more than 1,100 pounds of weed that had been seized from pot dealers and stored in a police warehouse.

“Rats are small animals, and they aren’t scared of the police,” an official told a court in Uttar Pradesh.

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The first mushroom festival in India took place September 15-18 in the verdant and fungally diverse tropical forests of Wayanad in the southern state of Kerala.

The inaugural Shroom Sabha attracted mycophiles from all corners of the subcontinent, and struck an acute balance between professionalism and playfulness that brought out the best of each quality. 

While the “Shroom Boom” happening in the West has garnered headlines and primetime coverage for the last several years, the mushroom revolution in India has somehow managed to evolve in relative isolation from the rest of the world. 

The laws and social mores around psilocybin mushrooms, and mushrooms in general, still skew heavily conservative in the country of 1.5 billion people. But the legacy and lore of mushrooms in India extends back to ancient times, and what’s happening now is in some ways a reclamation effort more so than a cutting edge development. The renowned ‘Soma’ ritual drink mentioned in millenia old Vedic texts has been conjectured to be an entheogenic fungi by a number of notable researchers and historians, and indigenous tribes throughout the subcontinent have long used numerous different species of fungi for food, medicine, materials, and a variety of other purposes. 

In addition to dozens of types of fungi with documented indigenous use cases as food and medicine, India is home to myriad different strains of psilocybin mushrooms. Animals such as cattle, elephants and rhinoceroses provide a turnkey substrate with their manure, and the humid tropical environments found across large swathes of the country provide for the natural incubation and fruiting of psychoactive fungi. Some of these, such as the Orissa strain, have already likely found their way into your local supply. Other species such as the elusive Psilocybe wayanadensis from the Wayanad area where Shroom Sabha took place are harder to pin down and present an exciting opportunity for spore collectors and mycophiles to research. 

Additional psychoactive fungi species from India include Copelandia cyanescens, Paneaoleus tropicalis, Psilocybe cubensis, and Psilocybe semilanceata among a number of others. 

A constellation of Indian mycopreneurs congregated in person for the first time at Shroom Sabha to share research and best practices from their respective fields within the rapidly developing and globalizing field of mycology. Prithvi Kini of Indian mushroom startup Nuvedo presented a rigorously documented and cited study of entheomycology (the study of cultural use of psychoactive fungi) across the world as found in the traditions of the Mazatec and Siberian cultures among others. The presentation closed with a call to action that was also recently issued in the peer-reviewed Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge: 

Does India Have Entheomycology Traditions?

The oral nature of ancient tribal fungi knowledge in India has made it difficult to trace the legacy of psychoactive fungi knowledge across the distributed indigenous cultures here, but the ubiquity of psychoactive fungi species and the intimate relationship that these tribes have with their environments and other types of fungi suggest that there is a strong likelihood of an entheogenic fungi use legacy among them. 

Beyond the subject of entheogenic fungi, a wealth of fungal knowledge with immediate practical applications and commercial potential was shared by conference participants.

Indian mycopreneurs such as “M” of Terra Myco and Harikrishnan MT (@Indiantoadstool on Instagram) led wild mushroom identification forays into the dense tropical forests surrounding the reserve, while a ‘mushroom chef masterclass’ by Goa-based OG Mushroom incorporated some of the wild fungi found by the group – including the massive Pleurotus giganteous specimen. Nuvedo Co-Founder Jashid Hameed shared his aspiration for the startup he founded last year to be the #1 supplier of mushroom supplements in India by 2025, a goal which they are making considerable progress towards. 

From cooking with mushrooms, to biofabrication of mushroom leather and materials, to cutting edge research into the medical potential of psilocybin mushrooms, to fungal diversity reports mapping out the Funga of India and forays into the extraordinarily biodiverse Periya Forest reserve in search of rare and potentially undocumented fungi, Shroom Sabha showcased an impressive wealth of Indian mushroom research and practical applications that so far have been happening in a silo largely disconnected from the rest of the world. 

Each evening of the four day festival featured a musical performance and dance party, as well as a mesmerizing 90-minute drum circle on one of the nights and a closing Mardi Gras party. Highlights included Bonny Abraham giving an astounding performance on the oud, a traditional stringed instrument from Syria, multiple appearances from rare instrument collector and performer Xen Kat, and mycophile turned electronic music composer Siddharth. We were even treated to a properly mind blowing magic show that was as hilariously interactive as it was baffling. Sanjay (@illusionistsanjay on IG) showed us that magic and mushrooms are compatible in more ways than one might think. 

As the United States grapples with the legacy burden of bad policymaking and cultural baggage attached to psychedelics from the burst bubble of scientific research and cultural adoption in the 1960’s, modern India has a ‘tabula rasa’ from which to approach any potential benefits that may be offered by psilocybin and the inherent potential of mushrooms as tools to catalyze regenerative industry across multiple sectors. 

For example, a number of young mushroom entrepreneurs showcased their mycomaterial prototypes such as Reishi leather, mycelium bowls, and a rather impressive pure oyster-mushroom mycelium disc with the consistency of wood. The potential for sustainable biomaterials as such to scale is currently being demonstrated by the American company MycoWorks, which recently closed a $125 million Series C round and has just opened a full-scale mycelium leather production plant in South Carolina.

Dr. Gokul Raj presented an in-depth analysis of medical research into the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, lending an academically and professionally credible lens to the potential for the adoption of psychedelic science as a legitimate area of focus for the scientific community at some point in India’s future. Dr. Raj also spoke about the intersection of psychedelic medicine with traditional Indian yogic and Ayurvedic principles, which prioritize the wellness of mind and body through plant medicine and a healthy diet conducive to mental and physical health. This perspective also empowers a uniquely Indian framework for the potential integration of psychedelics into the broader culture, rather than relying on an explicitly western framework. 

The stigma around fungi is slowly beginning to shift in India thanks to the research and contributions of the Shroom Sabha community and a rapidly growing class of mushroom enthusiasts across the country. As globalization accelerates and development in remote corners of the country continues to encroach upon tribal cultures, the largely undocumented and predominantly oral corpus of indigenous fungi knowledge here is up against potential extinction. Shroom Sabha partner organization and global NGO Fungi Foundation is mounting a heroic effort to document and archive this priceless ethnomycological legacy spread across our planet while the window of opportunity is still open, as are a rising number of other activists and conservationists around the world. 

The inaugural Shroom Sabha demonstrates that the mushroom revolution in India is officially underway, and the future for the 1.5 billion citizens of India may indeed be designed and built with a little help from our fungi friends.

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Dear reader, we regret to inform you that the war on drugs has needlessly claimed another life, this time in southwest India where a man was arrested for MDMA possession shortly before dying in police custody.

Several different Indian news outlets have reported that Thamir Jiffri, age 30, was arrested in the early morning hours of August 1 in Tanur, a town of about 50,000 people in Kerala, India. He was arrested with four others for drug possession charges and died around 4:30 in the morning from what police said was a drug overdose.

The problem is police testimony directly conflicts with both accusations from the victim’s family as well as the post mortem examination. Jiffri’s family has publicly alleged that Thamir was not in fact arrested in Tanur on August 1 as police have attested. The family has accused the police of coming into their home in nearby Chelari, about a 20 minute drive to the northeast, the previous evening, beating Thamir in front of them and arresting him. 

A public outcry followed Jiffri’s death. The following is a statement made by Indian Union Muslim League leader N. Samsudheen, a member of 15th Kerala Legislative Assembly:

“Jiffri was taken to the police quarters and subjected to third-degree torture. The postmortem report revealed that 21 wounds were inflicted on his body. This in itself is a proof of the kind of torture he was subjected to. Although Jiffri was taken into custody from his place at Chelari, the police claimed that he was arrested from under the railway bridge at Tanur. It has now also been revealed that he was sodomized in police custody.” 

Eight police officers were suspended following Jiffri’s death. Samsudheen has publicly demanded the Malappuram Superintendent of Police be suspended as well. 

“We raised the issue in the assembly. Regrettably, the government is yet to take appropriate action against the SP. We suspect the possibility of the SP’s involvement or knowledge in the custodial torture. To facilitate an unhindered investigation by the CBI, we firmly demand the removal of Malappuram SP,” Samsudheen said.

The postmortem examination referenced above also showed that two packets of a crystalline substance were found in Jiffri’s abdomen, though tracking down much more detail than that has proven difficult from my desk in California. 

All of this information has been put together from about 10 different articles in Indian/East Asian news outlets, almost none of which fully agree with each other on every detail surrounding this case. To that end, about half of them spell Thamir’s name “Tamir Jiffri” or “Tamir/Thamir Geoffrey.” I don’t know if this is because accurate information is hard to come by in certain parts of the world or because online translators take certain auto-programmed liberties which can often lead to errors. It could be any number of things.

What I DO know is a young man appears to have been arrested either at his home or in a nearby town with some MDMA on him, a drug very near and dear to my own heart. That young man was dead hours later and a postmortem examination showed he took one hell of a beating before he died. All the police involved have been suspended and Jiffri’s family and local representatives have been demanding action be taken ever since.

It is also worth mentioning here that India has some extremely stringent laws regarding drug possession and use. Possession of small quantities of drugs in India is punishable by six months imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Large amounts get you 10-20 years and habitual offenders are eligible for the death penalty. This is small beer compared to a country like Singapore where 15 people have been executed in the last year for drug use, but still a terrifying reality for anyone who wants to eat or sell a bit of Molly in India.

Thamir Jiffri’s family, Kerala Police, Malappuram Police and any of the journalists who wrote the articles I referenced did not return my attempts to contact them. Nonetheless, limited details of this terribly tragic situation have made their way all the way from Kerala, India to the West Coast of America, where pretty soon we’ll be paying exorbitant prices for some guy named Indica to doll us out two points of MDMA from his silly little doctor’s office in Palo Alto. At the risk of editorializing a bit, we mustn’t let stories like Thamir’s go untold as we fight to end the drug war in America because overseas they get executed, put into work camps, or allegedly beaten to death in police stations. 

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We have all heard of the dog who ate the homework, but rats who ate the weed? That’s a new one, but it is apparently the account that has been offered up by law enforcement officials in India, who are blaming the pesky rodents for getting their fangs on some seized marijuana. 

CNN has the weird (and disgusting) details, reporting on court documents that spell out the damage that rats have imposed on confiscated contraband in northern India.

The network quotes a court in the city of Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, which noted that “local police were unable to furnish almost 200 kilograms of confiscated cannabis that was supposed to be used as evidence in a recent case.”

“Rats are small animals, and they aren’t scared of the police,” the court said, as quoted by CNN.

“Court documents said the police had been asked to provide 386 kilograms of cannabis, but the prosecution flagged to the court that more than 700 kilograms of marijuana stored in various stations across Mathura could be impacted by the rat infestation,” CNN reported. “And this was – allegedly – not the first time the rats had struck. The judge hearing the case cited Mathura police as blaming the rodents for destroying a total of more than 500 kilograms [a little more than 1,100 pounds] of cannabis that had been seized in various cases and stored at the city’s Shergarh and Highway Police Station.”

It should be noted that not everyone accepts that version of events. Mathura City Police Superintendent Martand Prakash Singh told CNN that the weed had in fact been “destroyed by rains and flooding,” not rats.

“There was no reference to rats in the (report submitted to the court) … the police only mentioned that the seized cannabis was destroyed in the rains and flooding,” Singh said.

India’s laws on cannabis use and cultivation are spelled out in the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act of 1985. According to the website The Print, the law “prohibits the sale and use of cannabis resin and flowers, [but] it permits the use of its seeds, stems, and leaves.”

In 2019, with concerns surrounding vaping mounting around the world, India issued a ban on all electronic cigarettes. 

“Unfortunately, e-cigarettes got promoted initially as a way in which people can get out of the habit of smoking cigarettes. It was to be a weaning process from using cigarettes,” Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said at the time, as quoted by CNN. “The Cabinet rightly thought it is time and we immediately took a decision so that the health of our citizens, of our young, is not thrown to a risk.”

According to CNN, “Sitharaman added that the ban would cover e-cigarette production, manufacturing, import, export, transport, sale, distribution, storage and advertisement,” and that it included “all forms of ENDS, heat-not-burn products and e-hookah devices.”

“People who violate the ban once could face up to one year in prison or a fine of 100,000 rupees ($1,400) or both. For subsequent offenses, the penalty would be five years imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 rupees ($7,000). Storing e-cigarettes would also be punishable with up to six months in prison and a 50,000-rupee ($700) fine,” CNN reported at the time.

The Indian government said at the time that those “novel products come with attractive appearances and multiple flavors and their use has increased exponentially and has acquired epidemic proportions in developed countries, especially among youth and children.” 

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Nowadays people tend to associate the cannabis plant with Mexico, and for good reason. For decades, narcos smuggled their harvests into the United States and Europe. Along with California, Mexico is known to produce some of the finest cannabis in the world. The states of Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Durango—where the largest farms are located—all have climates that are perfect for cultivating cannabis: year-round temperature ranging between 70 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, with cool, long nights and low humidity.

But long before cannabis was introduced to—and became synonymous with—the New World, it was being cultivated in the lands of Central Asia. Initially, though, the cannabis or hemp plant was grown not for its leaves but for its stems, which could be processed into a strong and durable rope.

Excavations reveal that humans have been using hemp rope since the Neolithic age. The earliest evidence for burning cannabis, meanwhile, dates back to 3,500 BC, and is attributed to the Kurgans of modern-day Romania. This Proto-Indo-European tribe probably burned the plant as part of their rituals and ceremonies, a practice that spread eastward as its practitioners migrated. Why the Kurgans burned cannabis is difficult to say. They may well have discovered the plant’s psychoactive properties by accident, only to find that the smoke heightened their connection with all things spiritual.

The earliest evidence for smoking cannabis comes from the Pamir Mountains in western China. There, in 2500-year-old tombs, researchers discovered THC residue inside the burners of charred pipes that were probably used for funerary rites. (Similar pipes, dated to the 12th century BC, were later found in Ethiopia, left there by a separate culture). These devices, compared to pyres, would have yielded a much stronger high. Given their placement inside a crypt, however, it’s safe to say they were used only ceremonially, not recreationally. 

Some scholars have argued that cannabis was an important ingredient of soma, a ritual drink concocted by the Vedic Indo-Aryans of northern India. Described in the Rigveda, a collection of ancient Sanskrit hymns, soma was made by extracting juice from an unknown plant. When taken in small doses, soma was reported to induce a feeling of euphoria. In higher doses, it caused people to see hallucinations and lose their sense of time. All three of these effects have been ascribed to cannabis, but even if cannabis was not the main ingredient of soma, it may have been combined with psychedelics such as psilocybin, a.k.a. magic mushrooms.

Aside from rope, cannabis was most often processed into medicine. When the Hindus of India came down with a case of “hot breath of the gods,” healers treated the illness with cannabis smoke. The logic behind this treatment was not exactly scientific; cannabis was thought to possess healing powers because it was the favorite food of the supreme godhead Shiva, also called “Lord of Bhang.” In reality, cannabis would have been able to reduce fevers because its active ingredient, THC, works on the hypothalamus to lower body temperature.

The Assyrians used cannabis not in a medical but religious context, burning it in their temples to release an aroma that supposedly appeased their gods. Sources from the region refer to cannabis as qunubu, providing a possible origin for the word we use today. The Assyrian Empire was conceived in the 21st century BC and lasted until the 7th. During this time it engulfed much of modern-day Iraq as well as parts of Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey. Through trade and conquest, Assyrian traditions spread to neighboring societies, including the Dacians, Thracians and Scythians, the latter of which were among the first to consume cannabis in a distinctly recreational manner.

The Scythians were part of a Central Asian nomadic culture that flourished from 900 to around 200 BC. Originating in northern Siberia, Scythian tribes settled as far as the shores of the Black Sea, where they came into contact with the ancient Greeks. When Scythians died, their friends and family burned hemp inside tents to commemorate their passing. While the Kurgans and Assyrians burned their cannabis out in the open or in large indoor spaces, the Scythians were essentially hotboxing themselves at every funeral. At least, that’s the image we receive from the historian Herodotus, who wrote that “the Scythians enjoy [the hemp smoke] so much that they would howl with pleasure.” And so, the primary purpose of this ritual was to send off the dead, it clearly also served to entertain the living.

Herodotus did not live among the Scythians, but his observations seem to have been confirmed by excavations. Archeologists discovered fossilized hemp seeds at a Scythian camp in western Mongolia that were left there between the 5th and 2nd century BC.

Romans, too, consumed cannabis for their own pleasure, but not in the way you might expect. Like many societies of classical antiquity, they harvested the plant for its seeds rather than its leaves, which were discarded as a waste product. When grounded, the seeds were used in medicine. When fried, they were served up as delicacies during lavish dinner parties. Roman chefs mentioned cannabis seeds in the same breath as caviar and cakes. Galen, the famous Roman physician, wrote that they were consumed “to stimulate an appetite for drinking.” Nowadays, it’s the seeds—not the leaves—that are considered useless. However, the Romans believed they, too, had some intoxicating properties; Galen adds that, when consumed in large amounts, the seeds would send people into a “warm and toxic vapor.”

Cannabis was so widely consumed in classical antiquity that people raised the same questions and concerns we are debating today. The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, for instance, wrote that the plant’s spherical seeds, “when eaten in excess, diminish sexual potency.” Modern-day cannabis users are all too aware of the connection, even if they don’t eat seeds. As stated by Healthline, cannabis is “often associated with side effects that may affect sexual health, including erectile dysfunction.” Similar to some psychedelics, the general sense of euphoria generated by cannabis may counteract or override the reception of sexual stimuli.

Let’s skip forward a bit. Recreational smoking became especially popular after the 9th century AD. In the Middle East and Western Asia, the followers of Islam took up the habit for the simple but somewhat amusing reason that their holy scripture, the Quran, forbade the consumption of alcohol and various other intoxicating substances. Fortunately for Muslim stoners, the Quran did not say anything about weed. Of course, they smoked not just any weed, but hashish.

Skipping forward again, this time to the 16th century—the century that cannabis arrived in the New World, and for the sole purpose of making rope no less. Actually, Americans did not start smoking weed until about one-hundred years ago, when Mexican immigrants entered the country to seek refuge from the Mexican Revolution. For decades the U.S. government turned a blind eye on this harmless, multicultural and age-old practice. However, this changed during the Great Depression, when Washington redirected the anger of unemployed workers to their Mexican brethren. After millennia of peaceful consumption, cannabis was suddenly decried as an “evil weed” and, in 1937, the U.S. became the first country in the world to criminalize cannabis on a national level.

The rest, at this point in time, has now become history as well.

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India is moving into the hemp space—as a new eatery serving infused food in Pune demonstrates. The establishment serves sandwiches, coffee, and other foods infused with hemp. The 30 year owner of the Hemp Cafe, Amruta Shitole, is actually a serial cannabis entrepreneur, having opened the Ganja Cafe previous to this, and has been successfully selling cannabis infused food products for the last four years.

She is not the only ganjapreneur in the country of course. There have been numerous projects—and products—launched recently. One that caught the recent eye of the foreign and travel press? A new gin produced in Goa called Satiwa which calls itself a “happy high gin” because it is also infused with hemp.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

What Is the State of Cannabis Reform in India?

Cannabis has been used in India for thousands of years. It has also traditionally been utilized in many different forms—from resin (called charas) to ganja (flower) and bhang (the seeds and leaves). The use of cannabis is mentioned in texts which date back to 1000 CE.

In 2019, a study conducted by the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences—an autonomous group of government public medical universities under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare—reported that about 7.2% of Indians used cannabis in the last year. In a country of 1.38 billion people this is not incredibly significant when it comes to the percentage of the population who are cannabis users. In real terms, however, this represents as many as 99 million people—or about one third of the total population of the United States.

According to the UNODC, the retail price of cannabis was lower than anywhere else in the world—about $0.10 per gram. New Delhi and Mumbai clocked in as the third and sixth highest cannabis consuming cities in the world in 2018. As of 2022, heroin and high THC cannabis are the two most used “illicit” drugs in the country. Both illegal cultivation networks and seizures are up too, which is why authorities are turning to drones for interdiction, particularly in parts of the country that are remote and hard to access by other means.

The Sleeping Cannabis Giant

While the trade and consumption of all high THC cannabis is still illegal here per the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985, there have been increasing calls for its legalization. In the meantime, intriguing projects are afoot across the country. Much like the U.S., individual Indian states have wide leeway to formulate their own laws about the cultivation, warehousing, processing, and interstate transport of the drug.

It is clear that there is huge interest in cannabis—both as a domestic product and as an export. Indian pharmaceutical firm Dr. Reddy’s actually bought a German narcotics distributor in Frankfurt in February of this year.

On the recreational side of the discussion, Mallana Cream, cultivated in a small Himalayan village to which the strain owes its name, is one of the most expensive cannabis strains in the world. Connoisseurs trek here to sample it from around the world.

As legalization comes, expect India’s most famous strain to become a highly sought, legally exported product.

In the meantime, the industry is growing here, particularly on the hemp side of the discussion. The Indian Hemp Expo, the first B2B exhibition of its kind in the country, kicked off in mid-May this year in Delhi. It was heavily attended by a wide range of firms and individuals across the burgeoning industry domestically and internationally.

India Vs. China—The New Hemp Capitals of The World?

How the industry develops here, particularly in relation to its Asian neighbor China, will be interesting to watch. At present, two Chinese provinces account for over two thirds of global hemp fiber production—and cultivation has dramatically increased year over year for the past 7 years.

However, it appears, at least so far, that China will focus more on textiles and biocomposites than edibles. For that reason, India is certainly strategically well-positioned to enter the global hemp industry across a range of products.

Of course, it won’t just end there. It never has.

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Amrapali “Ami” Gan, 36, will serve as Chief Executive Officer of OnlyFans, effective December 21, 2021, according to an announcement. Bloomberg first reported the change in leadership, and a representative from OnlyFans—the leading subscription-based adult content creation platform—told High Times “we can confirm the appointment of Amrapali Gan as CEO.”

Gan arrives with first-hand knowledge working in challenging industries, including the first-of-its-kind restaurant serving cannabis-infused food. Her appointment as OnlyFans CEO is causing a significant buzz in East Asian media cycles. Why? OnlyFans is home to 180 million registered users as of the time of writing—and the company says it pays out more than $5 billion to its two million content creators annually.

Before OnlyFans, Gan worked as a marketer by profession in Mumbai, India, where she was born. She started in 2007 with PepsiCo under its Marketing Leadership Program, and worked with Quest Nutrition as the Head of Brand Communications, and for Red Bull Media House focusing on Activation & Communications. 

Most recently though, Gan worked as VP of Marketing and Communications with Andrea Drummer and others to unveil the historic, first-of-its-kind restaurant, The Original Cannabis Cafe in West Hollywood, California—which was formerly known as Lowell Cafe. The cafe featured CBD, THC or both in every dish, with an emphasis on highlighting cannabis’ benefits for personal wellness. It was the first brick-and-mortar cannabis-infused restaurant, mirroring other cafe projects that claim similar “first” titles. 

OnlyFans Founder Tim Stokely will hand over the reins to Gan, as Stokely prepares “to pursue new endeavors.” He’s ready to shift gears as he steps down from his role.

“Ami has a deep passion for OnlyFans’ business and I’m passing the baton to a friend and colleague who has the vision and drive to help the organisation reach its tremendous potential,” said Stokely. “OnlyFans is still a new company and Ami brings a fresh energy and reflects who we are as a business.”

Gan served as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of OnlyFans, after joining the team in 2020, working closely with Stokely. Ami is taking over this role from Stokely, who has been at the helm since founding the company in London in 2016. He will continue with OnlyFans as an advisor guiding this leadership transition.

“I am proud to assume this role. I look forward to continuing to work closely with our creator community to help them maximize control over, and monetise, their content,” said Gan. “I will be leading an exceptionally talented team at OnlyFans that is delivering a unique experience for our creators and fans. By blending state of the art technology with creative capital, we are committed to being the safest social media platform in the world.”

OnlyFans is a subscription-based social platform focusing on typically adult material. The site is inclusive of artists and content creators, giving creators the opportunity to monetise the content that they share. 

The rapidly evolving nature of social media platforms means adaptability. Citing pressure from the banks that process payments on the site, OnlyFans announced it would ban all sexually explicit content from the platform in August but quickly reversed the decision not long after. After all, many people turned to OnlyFans into a means of income during the pandemic, including single mothers.

Gan’s new job will be to ensure to promote the company’s growth and drive its vision and commitment specifically to empowering content creators. As a woman of color, she also brings a spark of diversity to OnlyFans’ leadership team.

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Deepak Chaudhary and the Indian Landrace Exchange connect indigenous farmers with modern growers in an equitable exchange.

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