No Trademarks for Cannabis Entrepreneurs For Now

Wall Street Journal

On April 1, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created a new trademark category: "Processed plant matter for medicinal purposes, namely medical marijuana." The patent office, part of the Department of Commerce, posted the new category on its website.

The patent-office change set off a land rush by pot dealers in the 14 states where laws permit medical-marijuana sales. Some staked claims on rights to long-used names like Maui Wowie and Chronic. Others applied to trademark business names such as Budtrader and Pot-N. Two companies applied to trademark psychoactive sodas named Keef Cola and Canna Cola.

"It looked like a positive step to me. We don't have many steps by the federal government legitimizing medical cannabis," said Steve DeAngelo, executive director of the Harborside Health Center medical marijuana dispensary in Oakland, Calif., who hired an intellectual-property lawyer to trademark his company name before the patent office created the new trademark category.

But last week the patent office snuffed out the promise of federal recognition. On Tuesday, after questions about the new pot-trademark category from a Wall Street Journal reporter, a patent-office spokesman said the office planned to remove the new pot classification by week's end, and the category is now off the website.

The issue is trademark, not patent - attempts to lay claim to certain strains as a trademark of your business product versus someone else's. The business side of the legalization issue brings to the fore a little truth-in-advertising about American society. Laws exist not merely to protect, but also to exclude others when no protection is necessary. This is how prohibition laws work, as well.

The coming cannabis industry needs regulations to provide useful information to patients and connoisseurs. Trademarks don't provide information. They provide protection from competitors by perhaps, in this case, manipulating the use of well-known strains and terms. That's not what people need. We need information about the chemical composition of specific strains, with percentages of THC and other cannabinoids, with standards for how all strains are grown for legal sale and consumption so that people can make informed choices.

While I appreciate the value of legitimizing the legalization push if the Patent and Trademark office had chosen to acknowledge the existing industry, the cannabis industry needs to set terms, like wine growers, for the use of words like "kush," in the same way that a wine is a "pinot noir" because of the grape. Let the cannabis capitalists fight out the trade wars on those terms first, please.