This summer, I wrote about a Title III lawsuit that was filed against cannabis company NC3 Systems dba Caliva. As a quick refresher, Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) requires all businesses to remove any obstacle that interferes with a disabled person’s ability to access their products or services online. The plaintiff
In a step towards achieving the goals of the SAFE Banking Act, California Governor Gavin Newsom approved Assembly Bill 1525, which importantly provides that banks, credit unions, and other financial servicers to cannabis businesses do not violate California law “solely by virtue of the fact that the person receiving the benefit of any of those
On September 24, 2020, the Bureau of Cannabis Control (“BCC”) issued a press release announcing its filing of a complaint seeking civil penalties from Vertical Bliss, Inc., also known as Kushy Punch (“Vertical Bliss”), as well as other related individuals for unlicensed commercial cannabis activity. For a bit of background, in November of last year,
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect at the beginning of the year. CCPA is a massive privacy law similar in scope to the European Union’s infamous General Data Protection Regulation, and applies to many businesses (not just cannabis businesses) that are based in or even “do business” in California. I wrote about the
Yesterday, my Harris Sliwoski colleague Vince Sliwoski wrote a post entitled, “The Oregon Fires and Cannabis“. Given how fires have been ravaging California for the past few weeks, I thought I’d write on how California’s fires are affected the cannabis industry. For the past few weeks, our California cannabis attorneys have been told by a
Due to the federal illegality of cannabis, cannabis businesses don’t receive normal treatment from the federal government (with maybe one or two exceptions, like the NLRB and the 2014 FinCEN guidance for access to financial institutions). This obviously mucks up the ability of a cannabis business to operate in a consistent and reliable way, and
In an inevitable conclusion, the Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) and Department of Justice (“DOJ”) won their federal court case against the California Bureau of Cannabis Control (“BCC”) pursuant to which the BCC must now comply with a recent DEA subpoena regarding alleged criminal activity by certain state-licensed distributors hailing out of (what’s probably) San Diego
California’s three cannabis agencies–the Bureau of Cannabis Control (BCC), California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), and California Department of Public Health (CDPH)–aggressively regulate every aspect of the state’s licensed cannabis industry. Most of the agencies’ rules make sense or have some justifiable purpose. Today, I want to talk about some of the rules that
The California legislature is considering a new law (AB-1639) that, if passed, would restrict how cannabis vape products are made and sold. AB-1639 would change California law for tobacco and cannabis businesses (for the purposes of this post, we’ll just focus on the cannabis side of the law), and would effectively prohibit almost any kind
In the most basic terms, offering fraud occurs when a person (or entity) makes material misrepresentations or omissions to potential investors in a new company (most commonly, promising those investors large “guaranteed” returns on their investments). Offering fraud cases have become more prominent in recent years, and it looks like the U.S. Securities and Exchange
