Snoop – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Recording artist Snoop Dogg speaks on stage on day one of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 at Pier 70 on September 21, 2015 in San Francisco, California.

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LONDON – Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies, happily endorsed by rapper Snoop Dogg and tobacco giant Imperial Brands, launched on the London Stock Exchange on Friday.

The British company, which specializes in developing pain relieving cannabinoid drugs, grossed £ 16.5 million ($ 23.4 million) in gross proceeds on its IPO with a starting market value of just over £ 48 million ($ 69 million) .1 million USD).

The share price hovered around 5p on Friday lunchtime after opening near 8p.

Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Broadus Jr., has invested in several cannabis startups, including OCT, through his venture capital firm Casa Verde. His firm has also supported plant-based food companies like Outstanding Foods and tech names like Klarna, Robinhood, and Reddit.

Cannabinoids are naturally occurring compound chemicals found in the cannabis sativa plant and are commonly used for medicinal purposes to treat symptoms such as chronic pain.

OCT’s strategy is to develop cannabinoid drugs for the non-addictive treatment of painful conditions. CEO John Lucas told CNBC on Friday the company plans to use the proceeds of its IPO to develop four new drugs.

“The key here is getting cannabinoids into the hands of patients and the way you do that happens through the drug development process,” Lucas told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe.

“With medical cannabis, the problem is that doctors can’t prescribe it, so we want a drug that we can get into the hands of doctors, into the hands of patients.”

In its listing announcement, OCT said its “primary market focus is on the total addressable pain market, valued at at least £ 42.5 billion through the commercialization of the first drug manufactured by OCT, currently expected in 2027.”

When fears for their industry turned to a baffled optimism last year, publishers began rethinking almost everything they had once taken for granted, from nurturing new literary talent to the way they market books and to sell. Live literary events like signatures and author appearances have been replaced with Zoom, as with so many things. BookExpo, the largest gathering of publishing professionals in the United States, which usually took place in May and attracted thousands of booksellers, publishers, editors, agents, authors and librarians to the Javits Center in New York, has been canceled. The convention center is now used as a mass vaccination center.

“One of the most important things that will change is the reassessment of everything we do and how we do it,” said Don Weisberg, Macmillan’s general manager.

The loss of live authoring events has all but wiped out a significant source of income for bookstores. Virtual events can attract a larger and more geographically diverse crowd and are cheaper for publishers, but online audiences often do not buy the book from the store where it is hosted.

Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona, said the store only sold half a dozen books at virtual book events. At a really good virtual event, they could sell 150 copies – but the same author could personally sell 1,000. Some publishers have started paying their businesses to host virtual events, usually between $ 200 and $ 500, which is roughly what they would make if they sold 20 to 50 books, she said.

Like the big retailers, independent bookstores were flooded with online orders, a welcome spike in business when their doors closed, but one they were poorly set up to manage – some stores were dropping maybe a dozen orders a day last spring to hundreds over. For many of them, online sales growth was still insufficient.