So the regulators are eager to flood the market with GMO THC, so they can stop people from growing their own organic THC? Sounds like they just want to commercialize & control it.
If they really wanted to commercialize and control the sale of marijuana, they would legalize it.
This has several advantages: It makes dosing possible, as natural products can have vastly varying amounts of the active agent. You don't have to consider the effects of other active ingredients which might also come in varying amounts (this is especially true for cannabis, which contains several different active cannabinoids).
This is exactly what you want to do when you really want to use cannabis as a medicine instead of using the medical system as a trojan horse for full legalisation. It's similar to how you get pills with caffeine at the pharmacy and coffee at other places.
If you let cannabis plants or genetically modified yeasts generate the THC before you extract it doesn't matter. It's only a question of cost. You will get exactly the same extract that is in no way distinguishable. Most arguments against GMO don't apply for modified bacteria and yeasts in biotech - they're not viable to live outside of the lab.
Also it's pretty funny that you speak about organic and not commercial. Most cannabis is grown in hydroculture with chemical fertilizer and produced for a financial gain (other word for this is commercially).
Well that's a new one, because THC isn't an "organism", nor is it "genetically modified".
GMO as an adjective is prone to RAS syndrome - e.g. GMO corn is "genetically modified organism corn".
Yeast is a great vehicle for organic molecule production.
"It is the ambition and intention of authors that tactical usage of this broad-sweeping technique may rapidly and at low cost satisfy a global demand in what may be termed a “grass-roots” bio-engineering project worthy of the 3rd Millennium; bringing to fruition micro-mass-productivity. "
And he still makes the news: http://www.c-ville.com/ansons-crawl-city-council-candidate-d...
Moreover, using USPTO Pair[0], you can check the status of such patents, and it turns out that this one has been abandoned since 2011 for failure to respond to the Patent Examiner. So no, there is no patent on this (at least, not the one you pointed to).
[0] Publicly available database by USPTO: http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair