On January 3rd, according to the owner of a smoke shop in Yuma, Arizona, officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seized a variety of CBD products from the store’s shelves. The officials took fewer than fifty items and told the owner to anticipate follow-up paperwork within seven to ten business days. According to
We are heading into the first decade of scaled commercial hemp production in the United States since the 1920s. As a law firm that has been helping cannabis businesses succeed since 2010, we couldn’t be more excited. And for good reason: the recreational market is expanding. Hemp is legal. CBD and other cannabinoids are fast becoming (if not already) household names. The international market is
Once again, Oregon is working on becoming a marijuana maverick. The Beaver State is on the verge of introducing a bill that would allow marijuana exports to other states by 2021. In an attempt to tackle the oversupply crisis that has plagued Oregon the last few years, the Craft Cannabis Alliance, an Oregon-based membership association
Our California cannabis lawyers are seeing a major spike in mergers and acquisitions (M & A), and it’s time to discuss what’s on the horizon for changes of ownership for some California cannabis businesses. In every cannabis state, M & A is no breeze because the regulators almost always require pre-approval of the transaction or
We’ve previously written about some of the pitfalls for landlords to avoid when leasing to commercial cannabis tenants in California. We’ve also recently discussed some relevant issues for landlords created by the state’s near-final regulations. And we’ve also looked at some of the biggest uncertainties remaining after the state issued those regulations. Now that we
It’s 2019 and Oregon employees can still be terminated for off-work marijuana use. That includes not just recreational use, but off-work medical use by registered cardholders in the Oregon Health Authority system– even patients with debilitating medical conditions like cancer or epilepsy. This means that Oregon, which has been on the forefront of decriminalization and
There is no doubt that the enactment of the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized industrial hemp by removing the crop from the Controlled Substance Act’s definition of “marijuana,” will lead to increased sales and growing opportunities for hemp-derived cannabidiol (“Hemp-CBD”) companies in the new year. In fact, we have already seen an uptick in new and
We handle a lot of cannabis M & A in our Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland offices. Over the years, it’s become pretty clear that in robustly regulated cannabis states, the secondary market for buying and selling businesses really peaks (after initial legalization) as local and state governments finally begin to settle their
We had a blast celebrating all of the big wins for cannabis on this blog this past year. Looking back, it was a monumental year for cannabis reform, both in the United States but also internationally. At this point, it feels like there is no realistic scenario in which prohibition carries the day: Federal legalization
On December 20th, U.S. Tax Court issued its opinion in Alternative Health Care Advocates et al. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The long opinion details various issues related to the specific case, but we will concentrate on one relatively small piece of it. How would the Tax Court treat income paid from a marijuana retailer
