Since California passed the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, there have always been folks who insist that federal legalization is right around that corner. As more and more states decriminalized and then regulated cannabis, the ranks of people who believe federal legalization is imminent has grown exponentially. Recently, when Joe Biden won the presidency, it
I often write about various discrete aspects of cannabis M&A transactions. A full list of my posts, along with other Canna Law Blog contributors’ posts, is linked at the bottom of this post. Today, rather than looking at individual elements of a cannabis M&A transaction, I want to walk through what a transaction looks like
Some readers may be surprised to realize that a lot of cannabis stakeholders actually don’t want broadsweeping federal legalization. Why? Because they know it means that they’ll instantly be competing with well-established companies that are already masters of economies of scale, branding, marketing, and consumer sales, and their market share will shrink or be eliminated
Back in 2015, we wrote about the U.S. Postal Service (“USPS”) taking issue with companies placing cannabis ads in the mail. In a written notice dated November 27, 2015, issued by the Portland, Oregon, District Mailing Requirements Office, the USPS explained: [i]f a mailpiece contains an advertisement for marijuana, that mailpiece is nonmailable” where the
If you’re still at the point where you are playing lawyer sometimes or all of the time with your cannabis business contracts, then this post is for you. I grew up in rural Wisconsin with two parents who were raised in the wake of the Great Depression. My parents had a bunch of kids, and
Cannabis licensing has a pretty standard trajectory by this point in time. States tend to start out with medical programs and later adopt recreational programs. What usually happens is that the recreational cannabis market swallows up the medical market. The majority of medical operators will seek out and get authorization to sell recreational cannabis, and
Seen as a protectionist, cottage measure to some stakeholders, residency requirements for cannabis licensure have been a staple in the industry since Washington and Colorado legalized cannabis statewide back in 2012. When I lived in Seattle, the local industry was mostly stoked then that “big money” and out-of-state interests couldn’t easily crash the party that
My last post in this series, which ran a few weeks ago, went over some of the more common representations and warranties you’d see in the average cannabis M&A transaction. In that post, I briefly mentioned disclosure schedules, which are an integral part of a purchase agreement and its reps and warranties. Today, I’ll get
There are a lot of bad ways to set up a cannabis business, and we like to think that we’ve seen them all. But there’s probably no worse category than 50/50 ownership of a business – a recipe for all sorts of disasters. Let’s look and why that is, and some ways to avoid it.
We wrote a couple of times about the Department of Cannabis Control’s (DCC) proposed emergency regulations. See here and here. Under those regulations, some interesting changes were proposed around the definitions of owners and financial interest holders, alongside restrictions on license stacking on “contiguous” premises (among other things). On September 15, 2021, the DCC submitted
