Medical Marijuana

The IEEE FWCS PACE group held a meeting on Wednesday evening, May 17th, to discuss the impact of the passing of Florida’s Amendment 2 that legalizes medical marijuana in the state. Medical marijuana will soon become available via dispensaries to residents with medical needs.

The estimated size of the legal U.S. marijuana industry (both medical and recreational) in 2016 was $7.1B– a boost of more than 25% over the year 2015. The market is forecasted to grow by 700% from 2016. This is going to be huge! The impact of planting, growing, harvesting, processing, distributing, and selling medical marijuana is going to be a very large brand new business. This new market is going to require a great deal of engineering talent.

Catherine M. Zito, the CEO of American Wellness, Inc. and Doug Fyvolent, Hydroponics Cultivator and owner of Solaridy CropTowers presented. Catherine discussed the current state of both the medical and the recreational marijuana markets in the United States. She discussed the different types of products that are currently available and covered the medical benefits that marijuana has been identified as providing.

Doug discussed his firm’s CropTower vertical growing system. Doug’s CropTower system provides a vertical aeroponics environment to grow medical and recreational marijuana without the use of soil or fertilizer allowing plants to thrive in a natural, pesticide and disease free environment. Doug covered the differences between growing marijuana outside, inside in pots, and growing them in a vertical aeroponics environment.

The real value of this meeting came at the end when both Catherine and Doug made themselves available to answer questions from the audience. There were a number of questions and they ranged from what is currently legal in this country to the costs associated with growing plants vertically.

A video of the presentation has been created (sorry, you don’t get to ask questions!). To view it, view it on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/02cxGqyZTRA