Community Based Participatory Research

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a model of research in which community members, organizational representatives, and academics work in an equitable partnership in all aspects of the research process. Thus, contrary to typical academic research where community members are just the “subjects” of a study, this CBPR project brings the cannabis community into the research team as partners and advisors. Moreover, community members will have various opportunities to have their voices heard through webinars and regional workshops, as well as online nomination forms for both the project’s Community Advisor Board and research participants.

The project’s CBPR model will be co-developed by Genine Coleman and Dr. Todd Holmes, with the assistance of Marj Plumb and Khalil Ferguson. Evaluations of the CBPR model will be performed throughout the study with both community participants and research personnel. This evaluation data will inform the ongoing research, as well as lead to a final report on developing a CBPR model for future research with cannabis communities. Analysis of the model’s development will also be discussed in two academic publications.

Herbarium Science & Plant Genetics

The scientific research for this project includes herbarium and genetic sequencing. The herbaria component is a foundational method to define genetic resources. An herbarium (plural: herbaria) is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study. Working with the communities, the project will voucher 100 plant specimens in each of the six rural study areas and up to 100 total plant specimens in the urban regions. The vouchers act as immutable references of the plants and will be linked to descriptive data of the cultivars, growing environments, cultivation techniques and methods. Vouchers will be held as a community resource as a special collection with Canndor Herbarium. In each of the six rural regions, researchers will support community members in selecting two cultivars of significant importance for Cultivar Registration with LeafWorks. A Cultivar Registration is a document linking herbarium vouchers with formal botanical descriptions and genetic sequence data (see genetic sequencing component below) that can then be used to verify a given plant material as that specifically defined cultivar, thereby supporting commercial licensing and IP protections.

In addition to the Canndor Herbarium, the project’s Community Advisory Board will offer input on the selection of a local community-based organization within one of the research regions to mentor in establishing a local herbarium of their regional voucher specimens. This will serve as a demonstration project for developing and stewarding a local herbarium, and it will guide the process of establishing the specific terms for access to the collection, including access for community members, researchers, and the public. The herbaria research will also result in the documentation of a community language of cannabis genetics (i.e., the naming conventions that make sense to the communities), with which scientists will need to coordinate to interpret the plants’ breeding histories.

The genetics sequencing component of the research builds upon the herbaria work, pursuing a comparative analysis of the genetic diversity between a legacy farming region with a significant number of licensed farms, and a legacy farming region that has to date not yet had a path to licensure. This study will provide a better understanding of the effects of California legalization and regulation on legacy plant diversity and persistence, and how access to licensure and market dynamics affects this diversity. To do this, a minimum of 100 cannabis plants that have been submitted to the herbarium will be deep-sequenced, including (a) sampling 40 plants from a licensed community (i.e., Humboldt County), with 20 submissions from licensed legacy operators and 20 submissions from unlicensed personal/medical legacy cultivators, and (b) sampling 30 plants from an unlicensed personal/medical legacy farming community (i.e., Big Sur community in the Central Coast).

Additionally, approximately six “collectors” (individuals with diverse and/or historic collections of seeds or plants), who are representative of both rural and urban communities, will donate a minimum of 10 plant lineages each to the sequencing component. Oral histories and other interview data, along with input from the project’s Community Advisory Board, will be used to determine the plants chosen for genomic sequencing.

This area of the research will led by Dr. Eleanor Kuntz, co-founder and CEO of LeafWorks and co-founder of Canndor Herbarium. Her team of scientists will work with the community in the vouchering and herbarium process and maintain the special collection at the Canndor Herbarium. They will also conduct all genetic sequencing and analysis of plant genetic and chemical diversity. With community and individual permission, select qualitative and quantitative data from this analysis will be made available via a genomic database.

Oral Histories

Oral History is the collection of memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. It is a practice used by historians to document the experience of individuals and communities that have been left out of the archives, and therefore overlooked or misunderstood in the historical record. The legalization of cannabis in California affords the unprecedented opportunity to finally document the history of the state’s legacy communities—a history told by the community members themselves. Moreover, placing these communities in the historical record will also allow us to establish the connection between the social and genetic history of cannabis in California.

This area of the research project will be conducted by Dr. Todd Holmes, Historian with the U.C. Berkeley Oral History Center. Dr. Holmes will conduct nearly 100 hours of oral history interviews with both rural and urban cultivators. Those interviews will be transcribed, printed, and archived at U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, and made available to researchers and the public via the library’s online archive. Interviewees will be selected through a community-led process, which includes online nominations by community members and review by the project’s Community Advisory Board and research team.

When complete, these interviews will create the California Cannabis Oral History Collection at U.C. Berkeley, which will prove a valuable resource for academics and community members alike. The collection will provide the first, detailed foundation from which scholars, journalists, policymakers, and the public can begin to understand the full history of California cannabis. The collection, moreover, will also allow communities to link the social and genetic histories of their cultivars, and thus document the legacy and heritage of their respective regions.

Ethnography and Political Geography

Ethnographic interviews are semi-structured interviews about experiences, places, and events in which the interviewees typically remain anonymous. Unlike oral history, these types of interviews are not transcribed and release to the public. Instead, they are compiled, analyzed, and used in a written summary. In this project, ethnographic interviews will be used to compliment the other research areas and help trace the broader history of California cannabis and the movement of genetics. More specifically, this research area will explore: when and where in California did communities form around the stewardship of cannabis genetics; when and where did these plant stewards connect with other places in the world in terms of genetics; and how did law enforcement and other social conditions shape such movements and choices.

The area of the research will be conducted by Dr. Dominic Corva, Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, and head of the Cannabis Studies Program. Interviewees will be selected through a snowball method, which will be supplemented by those identified in ongoing research and recommendations from the project’s Community Advisory Board. The analysis and summary of these interviews will result in two academic publications.

Intellectual Property and Public Policy Tools

The IP and policy component of the research examines existing and future IP and public policy instruments that support cultivators and breeders in stewarding genetic diversity, protecting novel genetics, and commercially leveraging collective and individual genetic resources. The research will inform the content of a public educational webinar and report about IP protections and commercialization of genetic resources, such as licensing agreements and appellations development. The research team will analyze the impacts of existing and potential policy frameworks on genetic diversity and market opportunities for commercial cannabis cultivation and breeding. This research and analysis will inform a suite of public policy recommendations.