Here is a scare article published last week in Portland’s Willamette Week. I like that publication pretty well, but the article makes a trio of tax-related assertions which strike me as wrong. In the author’s defense, suspect cannabis tax reportage is an industry pastime and the narrative of fiscally oppressed cannabis stores is attractive. Consider
We regularly represent Oregon marijuana licensees in administrative proceedings commenced by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC). As anyone with a license knows, the OLCC regulates medical and recreational cannabis in Oregon. This includes enforcing the administrative rules against licensees when the OLCC believes a licensee has violated the administrative rules found in Chapter 845,
Last month, I spent a Saturday scraping together a syllabus for the Cannabis Law and Policy class I teach at Lewis & Clark Law School here in Portland, Oregon. In one unit, we go through the regulatory history of Oregon cannabis. From an academic perspective, it’s amazing to look at all the things that have
The Oregon legislative session kicked off in earnest last week (online) with 28 proposed cannabis bills crowding the docket. We’ll probably see another dozen or so between now and June. In this post, I will run down the list and offer brief comments on each offering. Before diving in, though, some context will be useful.
A couple of months ago, my colleague Vince Sliwoski wrote Oregon Cannabis Dispensary Sales: What We Are Seeing on Valuation, which focused on the secondary market for cannabis licenses and businesses. Vince explained that the retail market, i.e. the purchase and sale of dispensaries, is still mostly done on multiples of revenue. But what is
Here we are at the end of 2020 (thank goodness!), which means it’s time for the fifth annual “State of the State” post on Oregon cannabis. The year 2020 was remarkable for the Oregon cannabis industry, mostly due to COVID and its effects, including record sales on the THC side. But there were also key
The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (2018 Farm Bill) removed hemp and its derivatives from the definition of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and provided a detailed framework for the cultivation of hemp. The 2018 Farm Bill also gave the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulatory authority over hemp cultivation at the federal
We love our clients. From mom-and-pop shops to multinational corporations, most of them run solid operations and behave themselves pretty well. But when you have hundreds of clients and thousands of transactions over many years in the cannabis industry, you see some crazy things. This list covers crazy things have happened in Oregon. This is
Last month, along with streamlined licensing, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) announced a significant (and welcome) change to its compliance function by instituting a new Verification of Compliance program (VOC) that will focus on education rather than penalties for certain types of marijuana rule violations. The VOC launched in early October and arose from
The Oregon secondary market for cannabis licenses and businesses remains lively. We have been helping industry buy and sell these businesses since 2016. This post is mostly about pricing for retail plays, which is still an evolving standard, but a standard nonetheless. First, some context. Over the past few years, there have been two significant
