Cannabis legalisation and the North America patent landscape
The legalisation of cannabis products in North America has taken two different routes: medicinal use and recreational use, both of which have had a profound effect on the patent landscape.
The use of cannabis was first legalised for medicinal use in the US state of Virginia in 1979, when legislation was passed to allow doctors to recommend cannabis for glaucoma or for the side-effects of chemotherapy. It wasn’t until the end of the 1990s that a handful of other states and Canada would follow suit.
The acceleration of medical cannabis legalisation slowed between the years 2006 and 2011, but it underwent a resurgence from 2012 onwards, with all but three US states now having made the medical use of cannabis legal in some form.
The legalisation of the recreational use of cannabis, however, has been a more recent event with the first US states passing legislation in 2012; since then, eight more US states and Canada have also legalised the drug for recreational use. With this recent surge in legalisation, the shape of the cannabis patent landscape is sure to be affected even further.
Patent filing analysis
Figure 1 shows two large peaks of activity for patent filings relating to cannabis products: one beginning in 2000–2001 and the other in 2013. These peaks could be explained by legalisation events that occurred within these years in the US and Canada, as discussed previously. Many US states legalised the use of cannabis products for medicinal purposes during 2014, which may also help explain the surge in patent applications over the last five years.
