Jesse Mondry Partner

Many of the states that were in the first wave of recreational marijuana legalization such as Oregon and Washington have their own state worker safety programs and published guidance for the industry, said attorney Jesse Mondry, whose practice at Harris Sliwoski Sliwoski LLP in Portland, Ore., focuses on cannabis issues.

Also, each state’s cannabis industry is already heavily regulated and licensed with worker conditions often part of the requirements, he said.

“The USDA has incorrectly, in my view, sought to impose this DEA certification program on hemp testing labs,” Mondry said “I think ending that requirement would help end the bottleneck at this testing level and allow the hemp CBD industry to scale up. That’s just one way to do that.”

Arguably, the FDA has no jurisdiction over smokable hemp at all, says Harris Sliwoski Attorney Jesse Mondry in Hemp Grower’s January issue.

“I think it also shows [that federal agencies] are working in good faith and want to make rules that work for the industry,” he said. “They actually want it to grow, and taking feedback from folks in the industry is a good way to help understand what needs to be done.”

In a Thursday post at law firm Harris Sliwoski’s Canna Law Blog, attorney Jesse Mondry outlines problems Curaleaf and Cura have faced.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration warning letter against a CBD company for making an unfounded health claim, for example, “is almost an invitation to a plaintiff’s lawyer to file a class action suit,” said Oregon cannabis attorney Jesse Mondry, co-chair of Harris Sliwoski’s dispute resolution/litigation practice group.

A U.S. Federal Food and Drug Administration warning letter against a CBD company for making an unfounded health claim, for example, “is almost an invitation to a plaintiff lawyer,” Mondry said.

“The last year has seen a significant uptick in hemp-related litigation in nearly all phases of the industry,” from contract disputes to federal action against cannabidiol (CBD) health claims, Jesse Mondry, an attorney with international law firm Harris Sliwoski, tells Hemp Grower. Lawsuits involving hemp businesses have surfaced throughout the U.S. with hundreds of thousands to an excess of $1 billion at stake.

“The farmers for this growing season are going to have to abide by that 0.3 percent THC threshold and it is going to be very difficult for them to do so,” said Jesse Mondry, an attorney based in the Portland, Oregon offices of Harris Sliwoski who regularly does litigation work involving hemp and CBD.

As disagreements and malfeasance related to CBD and seed spill over to court rooms, the timing is in sync with hemp’s rollicking rise, describes Jesse Mondry, an attorney with Harris Sliwoski, and head of the firm’s Portland litigation team. “Hemp litigation has increased for the past couple of months and it will continue to rise, at least for a few more months, because this is the first crop under the 2018 farm bill,” Mondry explains.

At least two previous racketeering lawsuits filed in Oregon over the smell from marijuana farms have been dismissed, making this ruling notable, said Jesse Mondry, an attorney at the law firm Harris Sliwoski, which specializes in cannabis-related legal matters. Mondry is not involved in the case.

“It changes the playing field in that the court has shown a pathway to bring racketeering claims against marijuana farms,” he said. “I don’t know that this is going to open the floodgates. At least they know now what they need to do so survive a motion to dismiss.”

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to resolve a key issue in international arbitration agreements: whether the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards permits a non-signatory to an arbitration agreement to compel arbitration against a signatory to arbitration based on the doctrine of equitable estoppel.

A post on the Harris Sliwoski China Law Blog points out that the question has split the circuit courts, meaning that now the answer to the question depends on where in the United States the dispute is being litigated.