On July 31, 2015, the New York State Department of Health awarded five licenses for medical marijuana cultivation, processing, and distribution authorized by the state’s Compassionate Care Act that went into effect on July 5, 2014. These five license recipients now have a deadline of January 5, 2016, or eighteen months from the date the law
The best cannabis contracts are those that never need to be enforced. The most important goal in contract negotiation is for the parties to determine their obligations and when those obligations are due to each other. Everything else is secondary. That said, things can and do go wrong in business transactions. Maybe a party tries to
This week we could not resist pulling quotes from two people who we the taxpayers pay to serve us. And serve us they have. The first is from Chuck Rosenberg, the acting head of the DEA. At a news conference, Rosenberg revealed that he didn’t know whether marijuana was as dangerous as heroin because he’s no
So where exactly are people now allowed to smoke marijuana in Oregon? I get this question often from business clients, who understand that smoking marijuana in public is generally verboten. In the business context, the real question is whether the subject business constitutes a “public place” in the eyes of the state. If the answer
History matters. And why Nixon initiated the war on drugs matters. It matters because all history matters and it matters because many who oppose cannabis legalization today do so for strictly political reasons that hardly differ from Nixon’s day. This week’s quote is much longer than usual, so please bear with us here. Back when
The marijuana industry is finally beginning to experience meaningful movement on the national level, slowly chipping away at federal prohibition. With the most recent Cole Memo, FinCEN guidelines, legalization in two additional states and D.C., improving Veteran access to cannabis for medical use, and a tiny take-down of at least one significant federal barrier to marijuana
We’ve blogged before about products liability and the cannabis industry and we all know it’s just a matter of time before a plaintiff successfully sues a marijuana company for injuries caused by a defective marijuana product. When most businesses hear the term “products liability,” they start to sweat and then to pray that their insurance carrier will
Products liability and its application to marijuana businesses is a topic we’ve discussed at great length. In California, however, marijuana business owners have additional cause for concern: Proposition 65. California’s Proposition 65, or the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, requires the State to publish a list of chemicals known to cause
Our cannabis business lawyers are always interested in what is being said to support the “War on Drugs.” It is important to know what our opponents are thinking, how they strategize, and what they are trying to push for how to handle cannabis at the federal and state levels. Looking at the evolution of the rhetoric
We regularly get calls from clients in Oregon who are trying to figure out whether the property they’ve selected for their recreational marijuana business complies with applicable zoning regulations. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear what zoning regulations pertaining to recreational marijuana businesses will look like, because much of this regulation is left to individual cities
