What? No, it has had an effect on the research. UC Berkley is a state college, using public funds, but in a state with legal pot. That makes it possible (not always, depending on the state, the university system, and the funding sources) to do scientific work like that which would have been completely illegal ten years ago.
As for whether El Chapo could have been funding this research ten years ago, no, it’s almost certainly cheaper to farm fields of pot using cheap labor than to develop a world-class research lab staffed by experts. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, this may change.
