Musk, Bezos and Branson — We’ve got your weed: SA aims to add cannabis to space race

The Gauteng premier and the country’s biggest marijuana company are challenging Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to rocket purpose-grown South African cannabis strains to Mars for space cultivation.

Premier David Makhura will initiate the Cannabis Out of This World Challenge to the three billionaires at noon on Wednesday at the CBD Full Spectrum facility in Vanderbijlpark, Gauteng.

CBD Full Spectrum CEO Prof Benny De Beer and his team have cultivated three unique strains, each generically unique and named after the trio for cosmos cultivation and Mars colonisation.

The strains are: EMAH (Elon Musk and Humanity), RIBAH (Richard Branson and Humanity) and JEBAH (Jeff Bezos and Humanity).

The three moguls are locked into what is being called the “billionaire space race”, a rivalry between the trio to create low-cost intercontinental suborbital transit.

In February, during his state of the province address, Makhura said Gauteng would bolster its economy by becoming the industrial hub of cannabis. 

“We already have the industrial infrastructure,” he said.

CBD Full Spectrum has taken him up on that challenge.

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