An Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission (OLCC) licensee must comply with all rules stemming from ORS 475B. There are a lot of them. These rules have been in a constant state of flux since 2015, and they are buttressed by other sets of permanent rules, temporary rules, proposed rules, bulletins and guidance. In my experience,
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
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
Last Friday and Saturday, members of the Oregon Bar gathered (online) for the third annual Cannabis Law Institute (CLI) put on by the Cannabis and Psychedelics Law Section of the Oregon State Bar. Topics included agricultural liens and receiverships, securities in the cannabis industry, federal and state hemp updates, Oregon’s Psilocybin Act, and the failures
I’ve preached before on the blog about how often our firm gets pulled into M&A deals where the parties have screwed up reporting the transaction to cannabis regulators on both the state and local levels. In California, in particular, changes of ownership have been a painful affair where the Bureau of Cannabis Control (“BCC”) routinely
Every state has some form of open records laws. Most of us have probably heard of the Freedom of Information Action (“FOIA”) which is the federal open records law. The purpose of the FOIA according to the U.S. Supreme Court is “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed
The City of L.A. has had no shortage of tweaks and changes to its cannabis laws and regulations over the past four years. Admirably, as industry issues have arisen, the City and its Department of Cannabis Regulation (“DCR“) have tried to keep pace. At times though, that pace has been glacial much to the chagrin
People familiar with the Oregon cannabis industry know of its strange and lucrative secondary market for cannabis producer licenses. For the past few years, but especially the past year, we’ve helped many farmers buy and sell these licenses (or, more accurately, “interests in successor licenses”). To be clear, most of these sales involve no equipment,
In the continuing trend of normalizing the cannabis industry for practical reasons (a topic I will be discussing with New York City Council Member Keith Powers on August 17 at a free webinar), the New York State Bar Association’s (NYSBA) Committee on Professional Ethics issued Opinion 1225 (the Opinion). In short, the NYSBA now expressly
