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Cannabis CEOs highlight Griner’s plight

The cannabis industry went to Washington last week with the argument that Russia’s detention of American professional basketball player Brittney Griner is yet another reason to reform federal cannabis law.

Griner has been kept in Russia since Feb. 17, when a drug-sniffing dog at a Moscow airport helped detect hashish oil in her luggage. She was subsequently arrested on charges of drug smuggling. As her detention wears on, some compare her to a hostage taken in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Her situation was one of many things that cannabis executives discussed with senators and members of congress last week.

Nick Kovacevich, chief executive officer of Greenlane Holdings Inc., a Boca Raton, Florida-based maker of custom vaporizers, packaging and cannabis accessories, said the current U.S. situation makes it hard for the country to press for her release.

 “At the same time, we have 2,700 nonviolent cannabis prisoners here in the U.S.,” he said.

“How can we do get the right thing to get her released in Russia when we’re not following through on campaign promises to get people released stateside?”

67% of Texans support the sale and use of recreational cannabis, but possession of any amount of up to 2 ounces is a Class B misdemeanor.

When it comes to cannabis, texas is divided. A recent survey from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found that 67% of Texans support the sale and use of recreational cannabis. Yet possession here of any amount of cannabis of up to 2 ounces is a Class B misdemeanor and can land people in jail for up to 180 days. 

The medical use of cannabis has been legalized in Texas since Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas Compassionate Use Act into law in 2015. But it doesn’t serve all who need the help. Texans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and cancer of all stages couldn’t be prescribed medical marijuana until 2021. For years, many Texans who preferred to deal with debilitating ailments with cannabis couldn’t do so in the state they call home.

“I know a lot of people who struggle with that in the military, and cannabis  is something that they lean on to help them, whether it’s with their anxiety or physical pains or whatever they got going on,” says Houston hip-hop legend Paul Wall.

State lawmakers find themselves on the verge of legalizing marijuana for medical use, but with stricter rules than the way cannabis has been cleared for use in other states.

The Kansas House passed a legalization bill last year. The Senate stood poised to start work on it in the opening weeks of the current session, but Republican Senate President Ty Masterson abruptly pulled the bill from the calendar.

Now the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee has begun three days of hearings on the measure, a signal that the conservative Republicans controlling the Legislature have blessed tightly regulated legalization.

Masterson said he wasn’t opposed to legalization. Rather, he said, he wanted to make sure that bill was written tightly enough to guard against doctor-shopping and other tactics that allow people to get the drug on flimsy claims of medical need.

“There is some legitimate medical benefit to the derivatives of the cannabis plant,” Masterson said in a pre-session interview with the Kansas News Service.

A violent trend of imposter law enforcement agents hit at least three medical cannabis businesses in various counties throughout Oklahoma.

On March 13, a group of six individuals—donned in believable law enforcement gear—furnished a fake search warrant and attempted to raid a Hughes County, Oklahoma medical cannabis grow operation in a brazen attack. The next day, other locations were hit including a medical cannabis business in Seminole County. Over 100 pounds of cannabis, machines, cash and cell phones were stolen. Law enforcement agents believe the rash of incidents are connected.

The names of the cannabis businesses weren’t released. Cannabis farms are already a target given cannabis’ value, but being forced to deal in cash due to the federal status of cannabis makes the industry a bit more dangerous.

Mark Woodward, spokesman of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control (OBN) agrees.

“I think that’s what makes them a target,” Woodward told High Times.

“There are people who see an easy opportunity to get both cannabis, money and cellphones very quickly—especially from a vulnerable population.”

Colorado has launched a pilot grant program to help social equity cannabis applicants develop and grow their businesses.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis last week announced the launch of a state grant program for cannabis social equity companies, offering licensed operators a new source of capital for their businesses. The governor’s office said in a statement that the new grant program is “a bold, forward-thinking initiative to save small businesses money, foster a more equitable cannabis industry, and make it easier for Coloradans to thrive in one of the state’s fastest growing industries.”

The new grants are an initiative of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) and its Cannabis Business Office. The program is designed to provide financial support to licensed cannabis social equity companies to accelerate the growth of their enterprises.

“Colorado’s nation-leading innovations in the cannabis industry are strengthening our economy, advancing diversity, and inclusion, and saving small business owners money,” Polis said last week in a statement from the governor’s office.

Catching Up on Social Equity in Colorado

When Colorado legalized recreational pot in 2012, the state’s groundbreaking cannabis reform legislation failed to adequately address decades of racial disparities in the enforcement of cannabis prohibition. Since then, social equity has become a key issue as other states draft plans to remove criminal penalties for cannabis use and legalize a regulated cannabis economy.

Colorado is now taking measures to institute social equity provisions into the state’s cannabis regulations. In 2020, the state passed legislation to pardon those with past cannabis convictions. And last March, Polis signed a bill creating the Cannabis Business Office to provide financial and technical support to businesses owned by individuals disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs. The agency opened and began providing services to social equity applicants in July.

Federal marijuana taxes could hit 25% under Senator Chuck Schumer’s legalization plan.

The vast majority of Americans want to have legal cannabis on a federal level, there are numerous polls that support this notion. The problem, however, comes down to “how” it is supposed to be done.

For the past few years, Senator Chuck Schumer has been the most vocal about legalizing cannabis on a federal level and has been attempting to push his cannabis legalization bill which aims to remove cannabis from the controlled substance act, while also creating provisions for minority business owners to gain easier access to cannabis licensing.

One would think that this would not have too much opposition, however, as of now, the bill has not gained too much traction. One of the main reasons comes down to taxes. While the senator might be well intentioned in his approach, his proposal of high taxation got a lot of flak from cannabis reformists.

According to an article on Roll Call:

It (federal legalization) would land at 25 percent of a federal prevailing price, charged per ounce of product sold in flower form, or per milligram of THC — a psychoactive compound known to give marijuana users a high — for edibles, vapes and other alternatives.

Tax credits would slash rates in half for the first $20 million in annual sales, creating an effective rate as low as 12.5 percent for small businesses.  

Curt Varone warns departments that they face a new landscape when it comes to members who partake in grass.

The legalization of marijuana created a number of problems for the fire service and contributed greatly to an uptick in marijuana-related lawsuits that were filed by firefighters and applicants. It’s a multifaceted challenge that stands in stark contrast to the simple, straightforward approach to marijuana that existed for decades.

Times have changed

Until recently, cannabis, including its primary intoxicating ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), was illegal under state and federal law. As a result, any positive test that indicated the presence of THC was grounds for discipline. Thus, when a member tested positive for THC, whether on a random, post-accident or reasonable-suspicion test, there was no need to worry about the level of impairment that the test showed. The fact that THC was present was enough to suspend or terminate a member.

That straightforward approach did not change when states began to legalize medical marijuana or decriminalize marijuana possession. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) expressly excludes the use of illegal drugs from protection. Similarly, lifestyle discrimination laws that prohibit an employer from discriminating against an employee for legal activities while off duty were of no avail, because marijuana remained illegal under federal law.

The leading case in this area, Coats v. Dish Network, LLC, 350 P.3d 849 (CO, 2015), concluded that, because marijuana is illegal under federal law, it remains beyond the protection of the ADA or lifestyle discrimination laws. I still run into attorneys who assume that Coats v. Dish Network is good law.

Today, Coats v. Dish Network has become irrelevant in an increasing number of jurisdictions. In those states, the legislatures amended their discrimination laws to protect those who have a prescription to use medical marijuana as having a per se disability under state law. Those who lawfully used medical marijuana, thusly, are protected from any adverse employment action, including discipline or termination for a positive THC test.

“Our saying here is we grow weed at a prison to help people get out of prison for growing weed,” said Dan Dalton, a co-founder of the California cannabis company Evidence.

Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, baking in the 100-degree heat of the Central Valley, a former prison is in the midst of an unlikely second act.

Inside its cinderblock walls, a company is growing the very product that led some prisoners to be locked up there. 

Longtime music manager Dan Dalton and Casey Dalton, his sister, bought the 20-acre site in 2016 for $4.1 million, choosing the location because its dry and sterile environment would provide a secure place to store marijuana.  

The purchase also allowed their cannabis company, Evidence, and others that have bought shuttered prisons to come face to face with the lasting effects of the war on drugs, particularly on people of color, as they try to shape the role the industry will play in confronting that legacy.

“We’re moving thousands of pounds of flower now, and I’m going to go home to my family tonight,” Dan Dalton said. “You know … there are people sitting in jail cells right now for personal possession of flower. And the hypocrisy makes no sense to me.” 

Nearly two thirds of Marylanders, 62%, support legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, according to the latest Goucher College poll.

Support for the legalization of cannabis reached its highest point since Goucher College starting polling around marijuana in 2013 in the March 2021 results, in which two thirds of Marylanders approved. That support has since waned slightly.

Although a majority of those polled supported legalization, there was some clear division in support along party lines.

Among Democrats, 65% support while 32% percent oppose it.

More Republicans are supporting legalizing marijuana use than ever before, with 54% of those polled supporting the move and 44% opposing it.

It’s been well over a month since the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act was signed into law.

However, potential cannabis growers in Mississippi are hesitant on how to proceed in growing their product.

Ambiguity in the signed legislation doesn’t specify if greenhouses are considered indoor or outdoor grow.

The difference is outdoor grow is strictly prohibited under the law.

“We fought so hard for these last two years, over two years, to get something passed,” said Zack Wilson with We are the 74.

A criminal record doesn't always hurt

New York state’s plan to let people with past convictions for marijuana crimes become the first to sell it legally is admirable, but faces some major challenges.

The dynamic pits what’s now referred to as the “legacy market” of once-illegal sellers against the publicly traded multi-state companies, some of whom already sell medical marijuana in the state. It’s a group that includes big players such as Curaleaf Holdings, Green Thumb Industries and Acreage Holdings. 

As New York becomes one of the world’s largest legal marijuana markets, the nitty gritty of its regulations will make or break the broader industry. Like California, where the industry is now asking for bailouts to beat back a still-thriving illicit market, New York has an entrenched network of marijuana dealers who don’t pay taxes or meet regulatory standards — helping them potentially undercut fledgling licensees. 

New York’s decision to set aside the first 100 to 200 licenses to sell recreational marijuana for people with past convictions may upend that dynamic. It’s one of many initiatives across the country to bring  those arrested for past marijuana crimes — disproportionately Black people — into the newly legalized industry and its profits.

“Those who have been most impacted will go first,” said Christopher Alexander, the executive director of New York State’s Office of Cannabis Management, during last week’s conference announcing the measure. Alexander clarified that New York’s rules would include good conduct standards to exclude individuals who are unfit to lead businesses. Applicants should also have experience as a business owner.

There's still a long way to go.

Americans for Safe Access (ASA), an organization working to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis for therapeutic uses and research recently unveiled its “2021 State of the States Report: An Analysis of Medical Cannabis Access in the United States.” Since its first edition in 2014, advocates and state legislators have utilized ASA’s report to pass new legislation and regulations to improve laws.

“The report evaluates the effectiveness of each state cannabis program from a patient perspective and assigns a grade using a rubric that reflects the key issues affecting patient access broken down into over 100 categories, including barriers to access, civil protections, affordability, health and social equity, and product safety as well as penalties for harmful policies," reported ASA in a press release. 

The report offers solutions for improvement to programs including legislative and regulatory language.

Americans for Safe Access hosted a press briefing on the report, which highlights the fact that states are still falling short in creating programs that fulfill the needs of all patients (the average grade among states was only 44%, with the highest score being 76%).

Drop off in legislative forward movement

“With a decline in legislative improvements in state medical cannabis programs, millions of patients are left with limited or no access,” said Debbie Churgai, ASA's executive director.

As D.C. seems unable to fully create a proper cannabis program, it is overcoming the roadblocks step by step.

The new bicameral omnibus spending bill presented on Wednesday by congressional leaders in Washington D.C. would keep a ban on allowing legal recreational cannabis sales. On the other hand, a different provision that protects state-legal medical marijuana programs from federal interference was left unchanged in the proposed measures, reported Marijuana Moment.

And so, the long-standing problem for cannabis businesses in Washington D.C. looks like it will remain, despite recent efforts to change it.

On March 4, the Drug Policy Alliance and more than 50 criminal justice reform, business, labor, and drug policy organizations, sent a letter to key House and Senate appropriators as well as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, demanding the removal of the appropriations rider that has prevented the District of Columbia from spending its own money to legalize and regulate adult-use marijuana sales.

Though adult-use cannabis was legalized in Washington D.C. in 2014, a rider that has remained valid over the course of several presidential budget proposals has prevented the District from fully exercising its legal cannabis program.

As such, adults over 21 are allowed to grow and possess cannabis yet commercial sales remain stalled under the rider, which was also included in President Biden’s last budget for 2022. Last year, the rider was purposely left out of a spending bill approved by the House and circulated in draft form in the Senate.

Virginia House Republicans squashed an effort to give people incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes an automatic resentencing hearing.

State lawmakers voted last year to allow adults to possess small amounts of marijuana. But Democrats said time restraints then kept proposals to include resentencing options for those incarcerated on marijuana convictions on the shelf.

Democratic state Sens. Scott Surovell (Fairfax) and Louise Lucas (Portsmouth) introduced a bill this legislative year that would have allowed those in state custody and on probation for marijuana-related felonies to ask a circuit court judge for a different sentence.

In February, the Virginia Senate passed the legislation on a bipartisan vote. Changes were made to the bill once it reached the House of Delegates, but it ultimately was rejected by Republicans.

On a 12-10 party-line vote Monday, the GOP-controlled Virginia House Appropriations Committee defeated the bill. The measure before the panel had been changed to eliminate the automatic hearing option and only called for a state study on resentencing for marijuana-related offenses.

“The underlying problem is that we decriminalized the possession of marijuana by adults of small amounts in most circumstances last year,” Sen. Surovell told the committee.

Well-intentioned government programs were supposed to lift barriers for Black entrepreneurs. But access to capital is still a big problem.

As cannabis legalization has swept through the U.S., nearly a dozen states have adopted programs intended to help marginalized groups enter the industry. But the so-called “social equity” initiatives have fallen far short of their goals, according to entrepreneurs they were designed to help.

Four Black founders of legalized weed businesses talked to The Business of Business to share their thoughts about why it’s been so hard for them to succeed in the industry, and why the popular programs do little to address the problems they face. Legalized cannabis for medical and recreational use is a swiftly growing business in the U.S. It hit $17.5 billion in 2020 and was projected to more than double to $43 billion by 2025, according to Forbes.

Still only a tiny morsel of that business belongs to Black Americans — a group that has long been deemed to have been unfairly targeted by the War on Drugs. According to data gathered by our parent company, Thinknum, of dispensaries listed on Leafly, only 26 of 9,487 locations across the U.S. are Black-owned. That’s fewer than 1%. Meanwhile Black people are more than four times as likely as white people in the U.S. to be arrested for pot violations, even through rates of pot use are about the same in both groups, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

So why are social equity programs not helping? These Black weed business founders offered their thoughts.

Norbert Pickett
Cannabliss DC

Pickett is the sole owner of Cannabliss DC in Washington D.C.’s Deanwood neighborhood. The district’s social equity program for legalized weed has done little for Pickett and other entrepreneurs because the model “is broken and needs to be fixed,” he told us.

It has been a rough week in international affairs. Even the cannabis sector, which has unique political problems of its own, felt the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Pot investors can’t tune out Kremlin’s aggression

Two political imbroglios for the cannabis industry have added to its usual legislative woes.

Sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and a White House memo about marijuana stocks upended the industry last week, sending the AdvisorShares Pure U.S. Cannabis exchange-traded fund down 9.6% over five days.

Canadian shares of Curaleaf Holdings Inc., the dominant U.S. cannabis company by market share, lost 17% last week after a flurry of posts on Twitter that raised concerns about the company’s ties to Russia. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Boris Jordan, is also a founder and chairman of two large Russian companies: Renaissance Insurance Group and investment firm Sputnik Group. Another large shareholder, Andrey Blokh, holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Russia.

“The speculation on social media that the company and its major shareholders and executives will somehow be subject to any U.S. government economic sanctions now or in the future is incorrect,” Curaleaf said in a statement on Feb. 25, noting that Jordan is also a U.S. citizen.

Blokh and Jordan’s history with Russia is old news, well understood by Curaleaf investors for years. A Curaleaf spokeswoman said the company can’t speak to Jordan’s other investments, and that he won’t be discussing concerns about Russia sanctions.

The U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to address whether the federal drug law that criminalizes possession of marijuana invalidates state orders requiring employers and their workers’ compensation insurers to pay for medical marijuana prescriptions for employees injured on the job.

However, before it fully takes on the question, the high court has asked the Solicitor General, who represents the federal government before the high court, for guidance in light of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution that gives federal statutes primacy over state laws.

Five state supreme courts have addressed whether the reimbursement of medical marijuana costs is permissible, with two ruling yes and three ruling no. The Supreme Court is being asked to resolve this split in authority.

Under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the manufacture, distribution or possession of marijuana is a criminal offense, with the exception of when the drug is part of a Food and Drug Administration research study.

The Supreme Court’s involvement is related to two cases from Minnesota — Bierbach v. Diggers Polaris and State Auto/United Fire & Casualty, and Musta v. Mendota Heights Dental Center — in which injured employees challenged their employers and their insurers for refusing to reimburse them for their medical marijuana prescriptions. Musta suffered a neck injury in her work at a medical facility; Bierbach was injured in an accident while working for an all-terrain vehicle dealer.

Mount Shasta is a beacon on the horizon in Siskiyou County with clear skies and beautiful open land.

However, as you drive through the rural communities, greenhouses and trash-filled illegal grows dotting the hillsides create another perception entirely.

“There’s a correct way to grow cannabis and this is not it,” Siskiyou County Sheriff Jerimiah LaRue said.

The Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department received a search warrant to eradicate an illegal marijuana grow just south of Yreka. The parcel had 107 greenhouses, and each greenhouse had an estimated 1,000 individual plants.

“We’re dealing with a city of cannabis,” LaRue said.

But Stiffer Odor-Control Regulations Are Coming in North County, Supervisors Say

The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors this week expanded the burgeoning cannabis industry in the North County and Carpinteria Valley, removing processing buildings from the acreage caps on cultivation there — a change that some residents viewed as a broken promise.

The new rule was part of a final 4-1 vote on Tuesday, with Chair Joan Hartmann opposed, on several amendments to the county’s cannabis business license.

Also on Tuesday, the board unanimously approved a 25,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art processing building at Glass House Farms, where eight acres of cannabis are under cultivation at 3561 Foothill Road in the Carpinteria Valley.

Processing is the smelliest stage of cannabis operations, but the building proposed by Graham Farrar, the Glass House president, is designed to be airtight and equipped with 19 carbon filters to “scrub” out the “skunky” smell of cannabis. The building will maintain negative pressure; that is, whenever a door is opened, the air will flow in so that odors can’t flow out.

“This is a historic day,” said Supervisor Gregg Hart, who represents the Goleta Valley. He praised Farrar’s plan as “a significant achievement, something to celebrate.”