On August 17, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the the holding of the US District Court for the District of Maine that the residency requirements of Maine’s Medical Use Marijuana Act violate the Dormant Commerce Clause (“DCC”). The First Circuit has added itself to the list of jurisdictions that have invalidated similar state
I like being a cannabis business lawyer. It took a while for me to get there. I certainly didn’t think I would be doing this while I was in law school, or at the start of my career. Like a lot of things in life, it just sort of… happened. And I’ve learned a lot
On August 4, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden published a formal statement concerning the sentencing of U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner. Griner was just sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony and fined one million rubles. We’ve written about Griner’s case before (here and here), but to summarize, she could be spending the
Last week, we discovered that U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker cited our own Vince Sliwoski in a letter to Merrick Garland, the U.S. Attorney General, pressing for the end of cannabis prohibition. The Warren-Booker letter, dated October 6, 2021, advocates for DEA to remove cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act— which would
Most cannabis businesses have to amend written cannabis contracts on a regular basis. And many of them do it all wrong. Today, I’ll look at some of the key issues cannabis businesses must consider in amending cannabis agreements. First off, any halfway decent cannabis contract will have an amendments provision. These clauses only permit amendment
Things are happening in New York as we get closer to the Cannabis Control Board (CCB) and the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) issuing adult-use licenses: today (July 14, 2022), the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) issued a memo to its branches stating that the FDNY stops cannabis testing for firefighters and applicants to
Marijuana is illegal in most countries in the world, is federally illegal in the United States, and is highly regulated even in the U.S. states that allow it. Hemp laws are all over the place in the U.S. and are often just as bad as marijuana laws internationally. It goes without saying that it’s a
In this post, we will answer the cannabis patent questions that were submitted to us. Please visit our Cannabis Intellectual Property page for more information about protecting your brand. What do you think about using the Plant Variety Protection Act to protect strains? The Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) can provide protection for both asexually
The Texas Supreme Court recently upheld the state’s smokable hemp ban. This is bad news for the smokable hemp industry inside and outside of Texas. Today, we’ll look at what happened. As our readers know, the federal 2018 Farm Bill classified “hemp” as an agricultural product and removed hemp from schedule I of the federal
On January 1, 2023, California’s Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) will begin accepting applications for large cultivation licenses for the first time ever. California law authorized large cultivation licenses years ago. But, the law caveat was that applicants could not apply for large cultivation licenses until 2023. And on June 17, the DCC announced it
