The Suquamish Tribe and the State of Washington recently signed and entered into the first ever marijuana compact to allow a Native American Tribe to cultivate, process, and sell marijuana within a state’s highly regulated marijuana system. The Tribe’s own marijuana regulations have not been disclosed to the public. We previously blogged about how Washington was the first state to adopt
We write frequently about the importance of contracts to the state-legal cannabis industry. (For a crash course, check out Doing Business with Pot Businesses #2: Cannabis Business Contracts; Marijuana Contracts: Get them in Writing; and How to Draft an Effective Marijuana Contract.) We preach about the need to have solid contracts in place before you need them, covering
When it comes to marijuana licenses, some states are completely indifferent to residency, others give a slight competitive advantage to in-state license applicants, while others adopt a bright-line requirement that residents hold a controlling interest in the licensed entity. Are these restrictions on out-of-staters constitutional? State governments can require licensees to be a certain age,
Thinking about flying with cannabis on your next vacation? In most cases, you better find an alternative because you may face serious criminal penalties for boarding an airplane with cannabis. However, at a few airports, law enforcement allows passengers to fly with cannabis when certain very limited conditions have been met. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the federal
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
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
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
