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
One interesting thing about cannabis law is how so much of it ties into “first principles”, or bedrock tenets of the U.S. Constitution. We lawyers spend our days papering deals and suing folks (always with good cause) and defending clients from lawsuits (which are always BS), so we seldom revisit first principles. But these principles
So you’re interested in applying for an adult-use cannabis license once the Cannabis Control Board (CCB) issues the license application. One of the first decisions an applicant needs to make is where they intend to operate. As we referenced in our earlier posts on the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) and Part 1 of
Over the last few weeks we have seen a number of articles about New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) written by attorneys based outside of New York or (worse yet) attorneys who are not licensed to practice law in New York. We have been pretty “vocal” about the importance of selecting the right
The Arizona Department of Health Services (the “Department”), which is the cannabis regulatory authority in Arizona, released the draft regulations for the Social Equity Opportunity Program (“SEOP”). Click here to view the draft regulations. Under the SEOP, Arizona will issue another 26 licenses. As set forth in the Arizona Revised Statutes (“A.R.S.”), the SEOP regulations
Arizonans knew zoning issues could cause headaches for dispensary owners. However, what was unanticipated are the new bans by some of the Arizona cities for recreational marijuana establishments. Shortly after the passage of Proposition 207, otherwise known as the Smart and Safe Arizona Act (the “Act”), several Arizona cities moved to ban recreational marijuana sales,
