Search Results for "massachusetts"

Connecticut Cannabis Regulator Predicts Adult-Use Delays

9/10/2021

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The Connecticut Commissioner for the Department of Consumer Protection said that the state’s timeline for adult-use cannabis sales may take longer than legislators first thought, according to The Connecticut Examiner. Commissioner Michelle Seagull made the comments to an audience at a breakfast hosted by the CT Chamber of Commerce. She told the Examiner at the event the anticipated timeline may be delayed.

“We’ve been suggesting that there will likely be sales by the end of 2022, and we’re still aspiring for that. Obviously, we have to see how things play out in the next few months.” — Michelle Seagull, via the CT Examiner

Seagull said unknowns like who will qualify for a social equity license could contribute to the hold-up—these decisions are yet to be made by the Social Equity Council, a 15-member group recently appointed by Gov. Ned Lamont (D) and state legislators tasked with developing a social equity application criteria.

In response to an audience question about how the state will weed out “large corporations trying to circumvent rules,” Seagull told the group the Council needs to “take a look at ownership and corporate documents to understand who truly controls the business.”

Attendee Kurt Smith, who owns a Massachusetts cannabis producer and works for Fuss and Neil, a grow-site designing firm, said the “capital-intensive nature of this business makes it difficult for these companies to start up.” Consequently, “the ancillary business market is going to see … a lot of opportunity here,”

Smith, a Connecticut medical cannabis patient himself, backed up Seagull’s predictions, telling the gathering, “It’s going to take longer than everybody thinks.”

“It’s not going to happen on that timetable,” he said, “because it always takes extra time to get these things right.”

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NECANN: Northeast B2B Cannabis Conventions

8/24/2021

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In 2015, medical cannabis was legal in Massachusetts but dispensaries had yet to open. Simultaneously, the push for adult-use legalization was losing its momentum. The regulatory standstill frustrated the founders of NECANN, who were long-time believers in the power of cannabis medicine. Their first event in 2015 was Founder and President Marc Shepard’s response to these unfavorable conditions. Many attendees had their first cannabis business experience at those early conventions. Shepard believes that in helping lead the event space, NECANN has helped increase the pace of the cannabis industry’s development.

“We thought that having an event that educated people on the medicinal potential of cannabis and the fact that recreational cannabis was a serious, lucrative, professional industry would help regain momentum,” Shepard said.

NECANN has expanded throughout the Northeast since its inaugural event in Massachusetts. Each event draws regionally relevant presenters and exhibitors, and both the speakers and advertorial efforts focus on stimulating growth in the local cannabis community. Speaker tracks represent the multi-faceted industry, covering cultivation, extraction, ancillary businesses, and more. Rather than stacking the speaker tracks with exhibitors, speakers bring unique niche expertise.

NECANN actively works to recruit relevant, knowledgeable speakers, which creates a dynamic roster of lectures and conversations that differ from the sometimes canned cannabis convention speaking circuit. The first keynote was an impromptu speech from legendary sportscaster Bob Lobel, who walked in as an attendee. Shepard approached Lobel to see if he would be interested in speaking, and he delivered a keynote to hundreds of attendees. More recently, in 2019, Niambe McIntosh delivered the keynote on how social justice must be a guiding principle in the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry.

The insightful programming draws attendees who are equally interested in the exhibition floor. In addition, NECANN has built advertising opportunities that help exhibitors convert booth visits to sales. There are presenting and programming sponsorship opportunities that can be tailored to individual advertisers. The team, who understands that legalization efforts are often community-led, also donates 10% of the exhibit floor’s booth space to local activists and community leaders. Businesses who showcase on a NECANN floor will have the chance to meet local industry leaders, learn about the regional market and make lasting business connections.

For attendees, the draw is the proximity to education, career opportunities, and entrepreneurial ventures. NECANN ticket prices remain two to 10x lower than their competitors despite robust attendance. The affordability allows small businesses to gain a foothold through networking and education, creating a more diverse local industry.

“Cannabis is going to be a billion-dollar industry in this state — more than enough to go around. Our goal is to help make sure a fair share of it stays with local businesses & communities,” said Shepard. “Advocacy for access to affordable medicine and education for patients remain standard fixtures in the programming for all of our events, and medical-focused non-profits make up the majority of our donated booths.”

Lastly, while most states that legalize cannabis begin to prioritize the adult-use shops and producers, NECANN knows that this regulatory swing left many patients behind without their trusted products, support, and familiar dispensaries. Therefore, both the speaker and advertising content are structured around keeping the patients in mind, which will hopefully carry over into the legalized state economies. The NECANN team will focus on this positive impact as they continue expanding into newly legalized medical and adult-use states.

Since its founding, NECANN has grown alongside many U.S. cannabis businesses while maintaining its foundations of building local businesses and preserving medical cannabis. To learn more about exhibiting or attending the upcoming NECANN events in the Northeast, visit NECANN.com.

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Sebastien Centner: Luxury Cannabis Edibles

8/19/2021

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Luxury cannabis products constitute a peculiar segment for the cannabis industry: where many consumers might scoff at what they consider an overpriced product, there are many others for whom the added charm (and promise of excellence) is worth the extra cost. To learn more about the growing market for luxury cannabis products, we turned to Sebastien Centner, co-founder of Hervé—a Toronto-based, French cuisine-inspired cannabis brand that currently sells its infused edibles in the Nevada cannabis marketplace.

In this podcast interview, Sebastien joins our host TG Branfalt to discuss his jump from the hospitality industry to cannabis, what inspired the Hervé brand, launching the company’s first product line of handcrafted THC-infused macarons, what attracted Hervé to the Nevada marketplace, the maturation of the edibles market, and more!

You can listen to this interview through the media player below or on your favorite podcast listening platform, or scroll further down to read a full transcript of the interview.

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Commercial: At Ganjapreneur, we have heard from dozens of cannabis business owners who have encountered the issue of cannibis, which is when a mainstream business, whether a landlord, bank or some other provider of vital business services, refuses to do business with them simply because of their association with cannabis. We have even heard stories of businesses being unable to provide health and life insurance for their employees because the insurance providers were too afraid to work with them. We believe that this fear is totally unreasonable and that cannabis business owners deserve access to the same services and resources that other businesses are afforded, that they should be able to hire consultation to help them follow the letter of the law in their business endeavors, and that they should be able to provide employee benefits without needing to compromise on the quality of coverage they can offer.

This is why we created the Ganjapreneur.com Business Service Directory, a resource for cannabis professionals to find and connect with service providers who are cannabis friendly and who are actively seeking cannabis industry clients. If you are considering hiring a business consultant, lawyer, accountant, web designer, or any other ancillary service for your business, go to ganjapreneur.com/businesses to browse hundreds of agencies, firms, and organizations who support cannabis legalization and who want to help you grow your business.

With so many options to choose from in each service category, you will be able to browse company profiles and do research on multiple companies in advance, so you can find the provider who is the best fit for your particular need. Our business service directory is intended to be a useful and well-maintained resource, which is why we individually vet each listing that is submitted. If you are a business service provider who wants to work with cannabis clients, you may be a good fit for our service directory. Go to ganjapreneur.com/businesses to create your profile and start connecting with cannabis entrepreneurs today.

TG Branfalt: Hey, there. I’m your host, TG Branfalt, and thank you for listening to the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast where we try to bring you actionable information and normalize cannabis through the stories of Ganjapreneur’s activists and industry stakeholders. Today, I’m joined by Sebastian Centner. He’s the co-founder of Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based Hervé, which sells its luxury cannabis edibles in Nevada. Last month, the company launched Le Mirage, a sublingual hard candy line with a USDA patented refillable storage and dispensing system. How are you doing this morning, Sebastian?

Sebastien Centner: I’m doing great. And boy, that was a mouthful. Congratulations. You got that, you nailed that.

TG Branfalt: Thanks. I’ve done this for a couple of years now, it doesn’t ever get really easier. So I want to know about you, man. What’s your background and how did you end up in the cannabis space?

Sebastien Centner: My background is food and beverage. I grew up in the food and beverage space. I grew up in the restaurant business with my parents. My mother was French from the North of France. So I have got French background, and I always grew up around food. In terms of cannabis, it’s kind of funny. I have a bit of a weird relationship with cannabis because I had not really gone anywhere near cannabis since high school. I had a 20 or 25 year kind of departure from cannabis and it came back into my life really in two ways, one with legalization in Canada, which really sort of brought it to the forefront in terms of it was becoming something that people were talking about. Consumers that we never expected were gravitating towards cannabis were asking about it in our other businesses and our hospitality businesses, but also my father, who recently passed away, he suffered through cancer.

One of the things I learned when I was going through this was that when we were doing a lot of testing in Canada for our products, I started to learn a lot about obviously the benefits of plant medicine and specifically cannabis. So I actually started to get him a gray market CBD from cannabis, a high, high dosed CBD to try and get him to reduce his reliance on opioids and other medicines and morphine, things of that sort. And it actually really was interesting because I thought, here’s something that recreationaly everyone’s really interested in, but then I saw firsthand what the benefits of it were. And those two things combined really, really sort of just sparked something inside of me that got me really excited.

TG Branfalt: I’m sorry to hear about your father. When you introduced him to the CBD, did he have any sort of background in cannabis use or was it really, did you have to sort of force him?

Sebastien Centner: No, no. Well, I mean, he was a little bit reluctant just because he was on so many different things and his doctors could not endorse. They were like, “Listen, if you want to try, absolutely.” They warned us about a couple of things that for any of his surgeries, that it can affect some of the other things that are going on at the same time. So they just said let’s be aware of that. They weren’t negative to it. But funny enough, my parents grew up as like hippies basically. They were hippie entrepreneurs we’ll call them. They met in Paris in the ’60s during the student riots.

They came back to Canada. I even remember my dad used to grow weed in the backyard and he loves to tell us a story about how he had these beautiful, big plants of weed. And then he went to smoking and it was garbage, like it was terrible. It was just shit. Excuse my language, sorry. It was garbage. So they were very liberal. They were very open. They were great about it, but he hadn’t used cannabis in probably 40 years or 30 years or whatever it had been. But he was very open to it. And when we started to see the effects of it, he was even more open to it.

TG Branfalt: Thank you for sharing with me that story. I know that some people it’s very tough to sort of go back to that sort of traumatic time. What was the learning curve for you for migrating from the culinary to the cannabis space? It’s not something that we sort of hear every day. We hear a lot of people going from real estate to cannabis or other sort of tech industry-type things. So how do you move from one to the other?

Sebastien Centner: Well, I mean, all of our businesses, whether they’re cannabis based or not, they start with a passion for food and a passion for hospitality. So that’s where this came from. It was really I met a guy who became my business partner who was probably the foremost dessert guy in Canada. He had a French background as well. We had our factories right next door to each other. I was a big fan of his products and I asked him, I said, “Hey, do you ever put cannabis? Have you ever thought about putting cannabis in your products?” And he kind of looked at me like, “Okay, no.” But he was intrigued and we started chatting and it turned out to be, I’m not going to say it was easy because we’ve spent a long, long time working on how to sort of bring the two things together.

But we kind of bounced on the fact that one of the things we noticed about the cannabis space and we noticed it when I did about a year’s worth of research before getting into this business is that nobody was really coming from it from a food standpoint. Everybody was coming in it from a business standpoint. Hey, we got to make this product because people don’t want to consume by smoking, by inhalables. So how do you come up with something different? And where I epitomized it as is to me it was a little bit like edible cannabis was a delivery mechanism. It was, how do you get high? How do you get cannabis into your system if you don’t want to smoke? And to me, that’s a really low bar, and still the case in Canada, frankly, for most products. They taste terrible. There’s lots of sugar in them. They’re not products that you would buy on a regular basis if you weren’t looking to get that cannabis product into your system.

So we changed that. We wanted to change that. We’ve sort of said, look, if these people, if consumers are out there caring so much about the products that they put in their body, willing to pay a premium for premium quality products in other industries, whether it’s food or beverage or wine, alcohol, fashion, whatever, well, they’re going to start to do that for cannabis as well and the bar is going to get raised and we want to be the ones to do it.

So we started from that and we went back to all of our recipes. We looked at the different products we do, which ones would fit well. Also the fact is that we were very, very… We felt that we never want to mask anything. We don’t want to use or put anything artificial, but we do want to try and have products that really don’t have the flavor, the plant flavors in it. Now, that being said, we know some people like those flavors. So with our newest product, we do have a few products that actually do have a bit of plant flavor in them, but generally speaking, we wanted to achieve something really special.

TG Branfalt: So when you talk about adding that little bit of plant flavor, is there a sort of, what was the learning curve there? Because at first you’re trying to sort of mask it and then you are trying to make it. What goes into that?

Sebastien Centner: Okay. So it’s not so much masking it or adding it back in. And actually, frankly, the last little bit we’ve gotten but we’re becoming much more familiar with, terpenes and a lot of the other cannabinoids and things of that sort. So we’re getting much more sophisticated. But when it came out, I’ll be very honest, in the beginning, we used to take our desserts. We would put a cannabis distillate that was bound with MCT oil into the products. And then we’d give them out to our friends and family and say, “Hey guys, we’re giving you two of these. One has cannabis, one doesn’t. Can you tell which one?” Like it was really, really rudimentary. This is going back years ago before edibles were legal in Canada.

I was kind of playing with this and we decided we don’t want to mask. We don’t want to say, “Okay, let’s increase the flavoring in this,” because then you’ll get rid of that. It was more about finding the right ingredients, that is, the right distillate with terpenes removed, a high quality premium Delta-9 distillate, and then binding it with our products at the right point that you would be able to get really good homogeneity and integrations with products. Like our macarons have zero flavor of cannabis, and we’re not doing anything different. We’re not adding anything to those macarons that we don’t put in our regular macarons except the cannabis. We just put it in at the right point and bind it to the right ingredients to get it to not actually have a really poignant flavor.

TG Branfalt: Now, I’ve seen some pictures of the macarons and I mean, they jump out at you. I mean, if someone who loves dessert loves food, I wanted to just take it from the computer and put it in my mouth. I mean, they look just special. They look special. And in the US, I hear a lot of split opinion about luxury cannabis. Some say, well, it’s just overpriced and packaged in such a way that allows them to jack up the prices. What to you defines a luxury cannabis product?

Sebastien Centner: Well, first of all, people are right when they say that. I mean, just because you take a product that came in a white bottle and you put it in fancy packaging and you call it something neat and you put a bit of marketing behind it, it doesn’t make it a luxury product despite the fact there’s a lot of luxury brands out there that have been successful doing just that. But to me, we look at more of the essence of it. The fundamentals. A luxury product to me has to have a couple of things. First of all, the ingredients that go into it have to be the best in the world. They have to be the best you can find. And in our case, whether it’s the almond flour, whether it’s the cream, whether it’s the fresh pre-race we’re using, they’re always the best of the best of the best. We don’t skimp on anything.

The second thing is that our products are all handmade. Now, we are looking at some ways to automate, for example, the filling and things of that sort, but our shells, which contain no cannabis at all, so the filling is what contains the cannabis, they’re made by hand. They’re gold foiled by hand with a brush. That hand sort of touch to them, personalization, all those things I’m talking about bring the cost of production way up, which means we have to charge more. We don’t have a choice. We lose money. Our packaging as well. Our packaging, of course, cost a lot of money and it’s much more intricate than most cannabis edible packaging, but it’s that whole bringing all those things together that creates a luxury product.

And I’ve seen, unfortunately, now that I’ve been in the industry for a year and a half or so, which I know sounds like an infancy, but we’ve seen a lot. And we see products that we know this product and this product are exactly the same product. It’s coming off the same line. It’s the same recipe. This one’s being put in a really cool box and this one isn’t, and this one’s being charged a premium. We know that’s happening and we realized that unfortunately consumers are not educated enough about cannabis products, much more so in the US than Canada, but that’s going to happen. They’re slowly getting more and more educated and as they are, they’re not going to pay a premium for a product that is not premium.

Just like if you were, I don’t know, if you were a fashion consumer and you decide you’re going to buy a Louis Vuitton or a Hermes purse, like listen, if you want to spend that kind of money on it, then that’s fine, but that’s something you’re going to hand down to your grandchildren, to your daughter or to your granddaughter or whatever else. If the stitching comes out two weeks later, or a month later, if you can buy a product that looks almost the same and just as good quality by another brand, you’re going to stop buying from them. So we really have to deliver on the promise of a luxury product. And if we don’t deliver on that promise, we’re not a luxury good.

TG Branfalt: You mention that you’ve only been in the industry for about a year and a half, which you said sounds sort of infancy, but I mean, the industry itself is in its infancy. In that year and a half, what’s been sort of the most striking thing to you about the cannabis industry?

Sebastien Centner: So it’s two things. Actually no, it’s a lot of things. I’ve got to say for a guy who’s been in business for 20 years in the hospitality business, I thought I’d seen everything and done everything, boy, I was in for a bit of an awakening. I think there’s a few things. First of all, it’s exciting. That’s the first and foremost. I think the whole fact around plant medicine around cannabis becoming part of your regular lifestyle, to me what’s happening every single day and we hear about it on your podcast, we read about it in your newsletter, every day something exciting is happening to make it more mainstream. And to me, that is super exciting. This is when we’re all going to look back and be able to tell our kids, our grandkids, whatever, that we were a part of this. That’s exciting.

The second thing that is really exciting to me is that I’ve never been in an industry, ever, that is this collaborative. And by that, I mean that people are willing to make introductions. They’re willing to answer questions. They’re willing to help you out. Any other industry is so closed minded and so competitive. Not that cannabis isn’t competitive and it’s getting more competitive, but there’s that collaboration. And to me, that’s really exciting because I’ve met so many people through this business who have just been so kind to us and so open and so willing to share information that we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for them, and they don’t expect anything in return except obviously if they ever called us and asked for a question, whatever it was, we do the same for them. So that collaboration is great.

The one area where I think we really are going start to see an evolution is in terms of the level of professionalism. I think that because a lot of people are legacy cannabis entrepreneurs coming from the gray market, coming from the black market, they’re starting to learn how to work in a corporate environment. And listen, I don’t ever want it to be that the passion is lost because that’s what makes this business what it is. But we are going to have to up the level of our professionalism, whether it’s our cost controls, whether it’s our structures, whether it’s all those kinds of things, because what I think is going to happen is more and more mainstream business, more and more mainstream business people, more and more CPG people are going to start coming into this business.

And the one thing I would hate to see is to see the people that started this get eclipsed because it’s become too professional or too corporate. So I think there’s a way to do that. And some people have done that amazingly well, and I think that that’s where we have to all work together to help each other out. I help a lot of people that I work with in this business by something simple like showing them how to use a spreadsheet or how we do our scheduling or how we do our costing. That’s important to us and I think it elevates the entire industry.

TG Branfalt: I think that’s a really astute insight for being so sort of young in this business. So as a Canada-based company, why did you choose Nevada as your foray into the US market? I know that you have operations in Nevada, so it’s not like you’re transporting stuff, but why Nevada as opposed to say a more mature market like California, Colorado?

Sebastien Centner: It’s a good question. We originally wanted to launch in Canada, I’ll be very honest. We thought, let’s launch in our own backyard. There was financial reasons for doing it. It’s our own backyard. All of our other businesses are based there. When the cannabis legislation came down for Cannabis 2.0 in Canada, we realized that wouldn’t be possible in its current form. We realized there was a lot of challenges. We could get into that, but it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. So we started to look at the US and we started to look around the US and I spent a lot of time traveling around and seeing these markets like Colorado, like California.

The reason we picked Nevada was because when we first had this idea of launching as premium or luxury cannabis company, everybody said we were crazy. Everyone said there’s no way people are going pay a premium. “Oh, your macarons have to be frozen when they get to the dispensary.” There’s no way that’s going to work. There was a million reasons why it wasn’t going to work. When we looked at each market, we looked at them and we said, “Well, what are the challenges we’re going to be facing and where do we have the lowest hurdles to getting through those challenges given we’re a small company?” We like Nevada because they’ve understood regulations for so long with gaming that even though their cannabis legislation is a little bit all over the place, it’s quite frankly much more streamlined than a lot of other places, like simple thing.

In Nevada, we found that if they change the packaging rules, so when they changed it from saying marijuana to cannabis on the boxes, you had six months to get rid of your existing packaging. In California, recently with the proposition 65 95, I always mix up the two, they said almost overnight you have to list this if you have any ingredients that fall into this category. Now we don’t. So it didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to us if we’re in that market, but for everybody else, all of a sudden one week to the next, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars of packaging that go in the garbage. So one was the access to the market and the risks.

The second thing is that Nevada, especially Las Vegas, provided to us almost like a vacuum test center to do a proof of concept. We get luxury consumers from all over the US, from all over the world for that matter. It’s a great place to build a brand. People go home and they start talking about it. But it also is much more contained than somewhere like California. I would love to launch in California. We’re actually just in the midst right now of talking about our California launch. But as a first market, I heard from people it’s like the wild west and there’s big players. It’s very, very, very risky.

And we didn’t have the kind of deep pockets to say, “Hey, let’s throw millions of dollars at this and make it work.” We had to do it in a contained environment and Nevada to us in Las Vegas was just a perfect environment. We got that validity by putting it in and seeing people pay that premium and the reaction, not just like the media and other people but the budtenders who are the hardest to convince. They’re the high dose users. They don’t like premium products because they feel they’re a rip off, whatever else. We were giving these to budtenders who were eating them and saying, “Oh my God, I’ve never ever tasted anything like this.” And then not only selling it, but also using it for themselves. Maybe not as their main consumption vehicle, but as like a little splurge. And to us, that validation was really, really important and that’s why I think Nevada was a great place for us to launch.

TG Branfalt: Again, I mean, really interesting insight. I’ve spent several weeks, not consecutively, in Vegas, and one thing that I do remember very distinctly is the luxury market that exists there for a variety of products. So I think it’s a very keen sort of business move for somebody who admittedly is early in this industry. I want to talk a bit about the Le Mirage product. What sets it apart from other edible options?

Sebastien Centner: When we launched, we have a whole bunch of products that we put cannabis in. There was these beautiful moose desserts. There’s everything. The macarons, the reason we launched with macarons was because they have the ability that despite the fact that they’re frozen, to have really, really good stability, meaning that they can go from being frozen to room temperature to being left in your hotel room for four or five days, going back in the fridge. And it doesn’t affect, they’re not like other products where they don’t melt or go bad, things of that sort. So it was the right product to launch with because it was so special. We always wanted to launch a room temperature stable product, and we’d played with gummies and chocolates and mints. All things we’ve done before we do in our main businesses.

The reason we created Mirage was because we felt that in addition to doing a product that had the foundation of Hervé, which is great quality products, flavor, like no sugar or no process, no added sugar, gluten-free, vegan, all those sorts of things, as a hard candy, we felt that we also needed something else. We needed to make it special in another way. So it wasn’t just another hard candy. And we came up with Mirage because we kept being faced with the fact that despite in Canada where consumption publicly is not a problem, most of the US states, it’s a big problem. Like if you look at Nevada, which is one of the most advanced states in terms of legalization, you still can’t consume on the street. You can’t consume in a restaurant or in a club or by the pool, or you can’t take cannabis into the hotels.

So there is still this discretion that is needed when you’re consuming cannabis. So we tried to bounce between those two things, provide a stylish discreet option for people to consume cannabis edibles, but also balance that with creating a product that was different than anybody else was creating. So Le Mirage is a hard candy, which means it’s sublingual. So it means it kicks in a little bit faster because it doesn’t go through your liver, it goes through your bloodstream. It is vegan, it’s gluten-free. We use no processed sugar whatsoever, which means that every portion is less than two calories, but also it has a glycol index of less than two.

So it’s very suitable for people who have to have low sugar diets. We can’t officially say our product is right for diabetics, but there’s a lot of diabetics, a lot of people with medical conditions that require them to have low sugar that cannot find a gummy or a chocolate even or a hard candy that’s suitable for them. We wanted to offer something very special that people would really, really gravitate to putting in their bodies because the ingredients are all great, combined with how do we do it in a way that people can discreetly carry it on them and pop a piece off and enjoy it.

TG Branfalt: Yeah. And to your point, I mean, a lot of the edibles that I get from legal markets are sprinkled with sugar. And it’s just almost sort of a turnoff if you’re not in the mood for that much sugar but you still want to get that low dose. And you also created a dispensing mechanism for this product and you did show it to me before we went live. My first reaction to seeing it was that, wow, like the ease of use for this compared to some of the other childproof sort of containers that you get in legal markets. Why was it important for you to also create this dispensing mechanism? You said you went through 20-something iterations before coming up with this one.

Sebastien Centner: Yeah. I mean, it was 27 I think our last count, 27 prototypes. We also accelerated. We were supposed to launch this in December of 2021 and we actually accelerated it from an 18 months development cycle to about seven months because we wanted to get it out by Christmas time. But the reason why it was important to us is because we felt that… I believe very strongly that you have to hit a whole bunch of markets. It’s not just about putting a product out there that might have one asset or one feature. It’s about having a lot of different features. And for me, I’ll play with it while I talk about it. But the Mirage gave us the ability that I talk about your daily life. I talk about going to a restaurant, going to a club. I talk about perhaps that person that consumes cannabis because they’ve reduced their alcohol intake and they prefer cannabis.

Well, how do they at a dinner party when everybody else is drinking vodka, sodas or wine or whatever else, how do they discreetly pop a little candy? Now, with the chocolate nowadays, you’re carrying around what, a tinfoil that’s got a bunch of chocolate pieces in it, gummies. The best I’ve seen is there’s some great companies out there with tins and whatever else. But what does that look like at a concert or at a dinner party, et cetera? It’s just not conducive to your regular lifestyle. It’s not something you would ever carry around. Mirage to me is something that a woman can put in her purse, a guy can put in his pocket that really builds into your regular lifestyle.

And what I found is really interesting is that, one, we’ve had just tremendous response to it. People just absolutely love it. And of course, with COVID, especially in Nevada where the clubs are all closed and the day clubs are closed and the restaurants are limited, we’re not seeing people use it as much as they will when things come back, but we wanted to launch it early enough so that people started to get used to it. Buying a dispensing system that is a refillable dispensing system has never been done in the edible space before. It’s been done with vapes, it’s been done with razorblades. So people have to start to get used to it. You buy the dispenser once, the dispensary sell it from anywhere from $5 to $10 they sell the dispenser for, and then you buy your inserts over and over and over again. You amortize it over the life of the dispenser, which can be 40, 50, 60, 100, 200 inserts.

So that was something that was really important for us to start to get out there and get people used to because we knew it would take some getting used to. And we’re very, very proud of the fact that it’s there. Now it’s just becoming more mainstream getting people this to be their system. One of the things I’ll point out which we did not expect is we never expected our products to really cater to the heavy user, the legacy user, who’s generally using smokable products and inhalable products. What we found is that all of a sudden our products are, even though they’re in a premium price point.

If you look at Mirage, a lot of the budtenders that we speak to, they’ll say to us if I have to go to my girlfriend’s parents for dinner, I smoke before I get there, but God knows I can’t sit through four hours with her parents without smoking or whatever else. Well, they carry Mirage. What do they do? They discretely pop one in and et cetera. Maybe they pop onto their girlfriend too, and all of a sudden the future parents-in-law seem a lot more manageable. We love hearing those stories because it really gives us that validation that what our vision was is actually happening slowly but surely.

TG Branfalt: Well, and I think another thing about having the reusable one is the waste that the cannabis space has created. You go to Massachusetts and you buy four edible products, you walk away with five pounds of packaging. So I think this moving towards a reusable is really, really good for the industry’s sort of footprint, the energy footprint as a whole, which is really exciting to me. You had told me about that you chose not to launch in Canada because of the restrictions on edibles. Can you tell me a little bit about those restrictions and whether or not there’s any chatter about reforms on those rules?

Sebastien Centner: To us, it was a really disappointing time in our launch of Hervé when we saw the Cannabis 2.0 legislation come out. Listen, no offense to the government, I think they legalized very quickly. They did lots of great things, but it’s almost like they approached it from a point of view of saying, “Look, if you are a cannabis company that wants to make edibles, let’s assume you’re less responsible than a dairy company or a catering company or a any type of food service company and let’s give all these restrictions.” And I get it, slowly and surely. But to your point, the first one was the footprint, the carbon footprint of the packaging. In Canada, the maximum dosage you can provide in a single package is 10 milligrams. And generally gummies are about five milligrams each.

So you’re getting a bag or a box, generally a box of this big, that has got two gummies in it, 10 milligrams. Like it makes zero sense. The packaging alone is just probably 20 or 30 times what it should be. And even that, as you mentioned, the US isn’t great. So that really, that was one of the issues. The second issue is the room temperature stability. So in Canada, you’re required that all of your products have to be room temperature stable in the true form, which means they have to be able to sit on the shelf, which means effectively all you’re ever going to really see is gummies and chocolates. Maybe some mints eventually, hard candies, of course, but our macarons would never pass the sniff test.

Now, our macarons have a six month shelf life according to the state of Nevada. When frozen, we know that they last well over a year and at room temperature, they last probably three, four weeks. And it’s not that they go bad, they don’t go bad. They just will get crunchy. There’s not that kind of flexibility. And what I loved about the US is that when you… And not every state because Colorado, California and Nevada are great. Michigan still doesn’t have room temperature stability. It just passed it for beverages, it’s coming for other products. But in Canada, there was just so many hurdles and restrictions that to get to market would have been so challenging.

And then when you get to market, it was such a segregated market in terms of at the time we had 40 dispensaries in Ontario. Now we have 200, but I think we’re supposed to have about 600 or so just to have the per capita that California does or Michigan does or Nevada. So there’s a lot of things like that that we looked at and said we either have to completely change the ethos of what we believe in, make our products room temperature stable, which means use preservatives in them, take away some of the great ingredients we use like the fresh creams and fresh purees and use artificial, do all that. And we got to dumb down the dosing on it, and then we have to charge so much money for it that as far as I’m concerned, we are not providing a great product at a good value, be a premium or not. And that’s when we started to look at the US.

TG Branfalt: Is there anyone working on reforming those rules or do they seem to be sort of in stone for the foreseeable future in Canada?

Sebastien Centner: It’s a good question. Not that I know of. I know that there’s talk about it. There’s talk about the carry limits. Like you can go in and buy a certain amount of flour, but in terms of edibles, it’s like one 20th of the amount when you translate it. I think in Canada we’re more worried about like let’s get the country open and start getting people vaccinated, frankly, which even our government isn’t able to do. They’re incapable of doing that. So I’m thinking that cannabis reform in general is really on the back burner. We probably won’t see anything notable happen for another year or two, at least. And I think it’s unfortunate because we started out with such momentum. Maybe a little bit of arrogance we’re going to be the cannabis suppliers to the world.

But what we haven’t done well is we have not progressed as quickly as a lot of the US states, and I think that’s going to mean that we’re lagging behind and you can already see that in some of the markets. I think I just read a report that last month for the first time ever, edible production for one month in Canada exceeded the demand, which means we’re producing more products than people want. I mean, there’s problems there. It means our distribution isn’t good. It means the products, frankly, are not good enough because now people are getting used to it.

And the problem with that is that if you cannot move legalization forward, then you really can’t eliminate the gray market, the black market. People can get better products on the black market when it comes to edibles for the most part and they give them faster and better dose in Canada than they can in the legal market. So if that continues, we’re not going to see that transformation to legalization quickly enough. So I hope they make changes to it. I feel for them because I’m sure that whoever the people are behind all of this are trying their best to move things forward. But I just don’t see it moving as quickly as the US and we like the excitement of being in the US.

TG Branfalt: You mentioned the Canadian lockdowns, the pandemic-related restrictions. What was the impact on your business throughout the last year dealing with the pandemic?

Sebastien Centner: I mean, we’ve been shut down since October 15th, effectively all of our businesses. I know this is a hot button issue because you’ve got some states where they’ve really reopened completely and other states that are locked down. But if you look at something like New York, your home state, I mean, New York City indoor dining I think just recently reopened. I think there’s ways to do it safely. But I think the biggest challenge we’ve had is that our businesses, and we’re in the hospitality business, can’t really start to pick up and go back to normal until we see at least the potential end of the pandemic. And when is that going to come? It’s going to come when we have enough, whether it’s vaccination or herd immunity or all these things combined, and we have to slowly and cautiously do those things.

And in Canada, we’re not seeing that at all. Like in Canada, you just read about it. We’re implementing more and more strict measures. We have a Northern zone of Ontario I read about just the other day that had some cases in the Southern tip and they shut down the entire zone, and you’ve got mom and pop restaurants and whatever else that have been suffering through that. They can’t pay their rent with subsidies sort of coming but not really coming, but same time you can shop at Walmart. You can shop at Costco.

So I think in Canada we really need to put pressure on our politicians. Canadians in general, by the way, we’re much more complacent. What I love about Americans is they get up and they’re like, “Nope, we’re not going to stand for this. We’re not staying home. We’re not closing our businesses.” Now, maybe it goes a bit extreme sometimes, but we need to do that more as Canadians because with, excuse me, I might get a bit personal, but with the drama teacher as our prime minister, we need to make them a bit more accountable.

TG Branfalt: No. To your point, I mean, in the US, cannabis dispensaries were considered essential services. Was it the same in Canada?

Sebastien Centner: It did. It kind of flip-flopped. They didn’t. And then everyone was like, well, hold on a second, how’s the liquor store an essential service and the dispensary isn’t? So then they flipped to it. And then they said, well, no, you know what? You can do curbside pickup, and then you can do this. They kind of go back and forth, but frankly, it’s just been a complete mess.

TG Branfalt: I want to move away from the coronavirus, and thank you so much for your insight here.

Sebastien Centner: No problem.

TG Branfalt: Tell me about your partnership with Silver State Wellness and how it helped you enter the US market?

Sebastien Centner: Yeah, Silver State are awesome. We operate under a co-packing model, so we develop these amazing products. We develop this brand, but we really rely on our partners to execute them in each of the markets. So even though we have a presence in terms of marketing, in terms of support and all those sorts of things, we always have to be partnered with a licensee. And that’s what we are looking at for other markets as well, like California and Michigan and Colorado and a bunch of other places. Finding the right partners is truly key because, one, we’re not just creating a regular product, especially with our macaron. So our macarons, they need a lot of love. They’re not an easy product to produce even though we make the shells. So all they’re doing is the fillings, but they don’t prescribe to the regular standard of making edibles.

So somebody has to look at that and have the skill and the passion to want to do something different. Our Mirage is a little bit different. In our Mirage, I think Silver State was pretty happy to see that come along because unlike the macarons that everything’s done by hand, our Mirage products are made in the same format as a gummy. So any gummy line can produce our Mirage products, our inserts. That’s great because all of a sudden we can bounce between getting our partner to do something that’s not easy to do to do something that they’re used to doing, and the economics start to work out, et cetera.

Also I got to give some shadow. It’s like we’re very fortunate. There’s a great team at Silver State. They’re tremendously passionate about what they do. Their sales team is led by a woman named Casey, who is the best thing. She’s the best thing since sliced bread as far as I’m concerned. When it comes down to that, it comes down to meeting really great people who share our passion because when you run into challenges, that’s when you’re going to be able to overcome them by having great partners who are sort of like, how do we solve this problem?

How do we solve the problem that, for example, a couple of dispensaries we were working in said, “Well, your freezers are not certified with the state board.” We’re like, “Well, they don’t have to be. They’re certified with the federal board to be used for food service.” They said, “No, no, no. We want certification.” Well, silver State were the first ones to take our specific freezers, deliver them to the state with all the information to get stamps. So we’re the only people in Nevada now that has had freezers that are actually certified to be in dispensaries. Those kinds of challenges we could not have gotten through without great partners. And when we go to other markets, we’re looking for the same type of partnerships. Partnerships that are mutually beneficial, but with people that are very passionate, as passionate as us about what they’re doing.

TG Branfalt: Did you experience a lot of roadblocks when you went to somebody and said, “Hey, we want to work with you to deliver these macarons, but they’re done my hand.” Did you have a lot of pushback and trouble finding a partner because of that?

Sebastien Centner: We did. I mean, when we launched our company, everybody told us we’re crazy. You’ve got a product that has to be frozen at the dispensary Qsomebody who’s looking just for the economics of being in the cannabis business because it’s not an easy business to be in, but I think it’s going to raise the entire industry and I’m very excited for it.

TG Branfalt: As somebody with a culinary background, are you eyeing the sort of days when you’d be able to go into a restaurant that is just serving cannabis-infused dinners?

Sebastien Centner: Yeah, 100%. Well, think about it. If you’re doing a dinner party in Toronto or Nevada or whatever, why wouldn’t you have a macaron at the end of dinner instead of, I don’t know, a around of tequila shots or whatever you’re having? Why wouldn’t you have an infused olive oil on your salad to start? I mean, there’s so many things you can do with it. I understand the trepidation. I understand that all of these legislative bodies are sort of looking and saying, “Okay, let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it down.” And I agree. I think that educating people, being very, very mindful of children and cannabis and underage use of cannabis and things like that are really, really important and I understand why they’re not rushing, but I see a day very soon where we will be able to all sit around, maybe drink a great bottle of wine, have dinner, and then at the end of dinner say, “Oh, you know what, let’s have a macaron.”

Our macarons right now use distillate. So they take 45 minutes to an hour to kick in. But with emulsified product, with all the new things coming down the pipeline that we’re very much very excited for, we’re watching very closely, you’ll be able to take that macaron and you’ll see the effect within 10 or 15 minutes. That’s going to be the future of it and I think that day is going to come a lot sooner than any of us think, just from the acceleration we’ve seen in the last 18 to 24 months.

TG Branfalt: I personally can’t wait for the day where I can have cannabis-infused olive oil on a salad. With your sort of really unique background, I think, entering this space, what advice would you have for other entrepreneurs who aren’t from the cannabis industry and have already developed successful businesses outside of the space looking to enter the cannabis space?

Sebastien Centner: That’s a good question. I love to share, like in Canada in the hospitality business, I’ve always tried to sort of share whatever advice I can give and mentor younger people coming into the industry and stuff. And with cannabis, I hope to do the same one day. I would say if you’re coming from a non-cannabis background and you’re moving into this business, or even if you are a legacy user and you’ve got a business idea, be aware of a few things. First of all, it’s challenging. It’s always an uphill battle and it’s going to be way more challenging than you’d ever expect. It’s also going to cost way more money than you ever expect. I mean, that’s just the nature of a new evolving industry where things change constantly.

We’re all going to make mistakes. I’ve made more mistakes in the cannabis business in a year than I think I’ve made in every other business I’ve been in in the last 20 years. So you’re learning, you’re developing and creating a path for others that will follow. So there’s that. So be patient about that. The only real piece of advice in terms of what I personally use to get through all of that is baby steps. Take one step forward on each thing one at a time. And if that means getting your company incorporated, figuring out how you can do your banking, understanding the different options you have for packaging, understanding the different production things you can do and testing different. Take little, little, little, little steps. Every one of those thousands of steps you take is going to take you a mile closer to your goal.

And if you try and leapfrog those, which you can in other industries, cannabis you just can’t. You just can’t say, “Okay, well, tomorrow I want to launch this. So here’s what I’m going to do.” I see a lot of people, I listen to a lot of podcasts and recently on, oh, I forget the name of the new service, I’m sorry, but the new social media service everybody’s going nuts over that you can listen to different entrepreneurs and stuff like that. And I always get a little bit cringed when somebody says, “Oh, just go out there and do it.” Well, yeah, just go out there and do it, but plan. Do the little steps because what I hate to see is somebody embark on a passion project, leave maybe a stable job, do something that they’ve always loved and then fail. You don’t want that.

And so they need good advice. They almost need to be held back at the reins a bit, as people did to me, to say, “Hey, let’s just take the steps necessary. Let’s not get too excited about it. And when you make mistakes, don’t worry about it. We’re all making mistakes.” We’re the forerunners in this entire industry and the people behind this are going to make a lot less mistakes thanks to the mistakes we made.

TG Branfalt: I think the baby steps thing is really, really good advice that people get so excited that they start running instead of walking. And so I really appreciate your insight there too. Where can people find out more about you, Hervé, Le Mirage or macarons. Tell us where to find.

Sebastien Centner: Sure. Well, I mean, we’re in about half the dispensaries in Nevada. So all the big ones, Planet 13, Jardin, MedMen, LVR, there’s a whole bunch of them, Ayr, all their dispensary and mint dispensary. So go to any of those, you can check it out. Check out their websites because they have all of our products and it’s a great way to see it. Visit www.hervé.fr. So that’s our main website. It shows all of our products. It tells you a little bit about what we’re doing. Most important, follow us on Instagram, Hervedibles, only one E in the middle. That’s the only thing. So Hervedibles is our Instagram. We’re communicating with people constantly.

You have a question, if you’re an entrepreneur getting into this business, hey, send us a message on Instagram. I get all the messages through our marketing person and I respond to most of them. My Instagram is @SebCentner, even though it’s my main kind of hospitality business, everything like that. Again, I love answering questions for people and just connecting. If you have a question, if you have an idea, if you think we’re doing something right, if you think we’re doing something wrong, let us know. If you get to try our products and you love them, or if there’s something you think we should be doing different, let us know. This is all about communication and collaboration.

TG Branfalt: Once I decide to get on a plane, I very much am hoping to go to Nevada and I will be on the lookout for macarons because I get very excited about food. That’s Seb Centner, he’s the co-founder of Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based Hervé which sells its luxury cannabis edibles in Nevada. Last month the company launched Le Mirage, a sublingual hard candy line and a USDA patented refillable storage and dispensing system. Seb, this has been very informational. You’re a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on the show and I definitely hope to get a macaron in my mouth before the end of 2021.

Sebastien Centner: I certainly hope so. You’ll let me know when you’re coming to Vegas and we’ll make sure we meet up and have a macaron together, but thank you for having me on. Congratulations on all the success for the podcast and keep it going.

TG Branfalt: Thank you kindly. You can find more episodes of the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast in the podcast section of ganjapreneur.com on Spotify and in the Apple iTunes store. On the ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the ganjapreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play. This episode was engineered by Trim Media House. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

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Studio Linear: Customized Cannabis Branding, Packaging, & More

8/17/2021

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Studio Linear is a female-owned creative design firm in Maine that specializes in the cannabis and CBD industries. From marketing, brand strategy and messaging, web design, unique product packaging, photography, and even typography, Studio Linear brings a powerhouse team of creative professionals who work together to bring cannabis brands to life and set them on the path toward a successful future.

Company founder Andrea Beaulieu says she first started Studio Linear as a side hustle, working hard out of her own kitchen in the evenings after the kids had gone to bed. Her continued dedication to the project had built a strong foundation for the company when it officially launched as a full-time agency in 2018. The company started out working for brands across a wide variety of industries—early clients included record labels, musicians, and food and beverage companies—but in 2019, Studio Linear took on its first cannabis client in Garden Remedies, a Massachusetts-based dispensary.

That project won the gold in Integrated Marketing Campaigns at the Broderson Awards (an annual creative design awards show). Following that successful experience working with the cannabis industry, Studio Linear decided to shift gears in 2020 and work exclusively with cannabis and lifestyle brands.

“We found that this was the one industry that allowed us to be as creative as we could possibly imagine and love the process,” said Andrea Beaulieu, Studio Linear’s founder and creative director. “We love package design and dreaming up unique experiences for consumers. That magical unboxing moment is huge and we love dreaming up that experience for our clients.”

When taking on a new project, the team starts their process with a discovery call to chat with and understand their client’s vision. They conduct a brand audit and discuss brand strategy, identity, design goals/possibilities, and more. Ultimately, Studio Linear promises to establish (or reestablish) a full branding package including logos, fonts, custom illustrations, brand guides, and more.

The team also considers the vision and creative input they get from clients and works to ensure they have some personal experience with the brands they represent.

“We love trying the products our clients create, from new CBD oils to tasty THC-infused lemonades,” Beaulieu said. “We truly have the best job in the world!”

While the firm is based in Maine, Studio Linear is digitally mobile and works with cannabis brands from around the country. They guarantee all brand packaging and marketing campaigns are appropriately compliant with each operator’s local market regulations. Studio Linear also collaborates with other top, female-owned photography firms throughout the U.S. and can make professional recommendations for product photography whenever said products are unable to cross state lines.

To learn more and/or get in touch, visit StudioLinear.com.

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PharmaCann Planning IPO with Potential Valuation of $1B+

8/16/2021

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New York-based cannabis firm PharmaCann is planning an initial public offering that could value the company at over $1 billion, according to a Reuters report citing sources familiar with the plan.

PharmaCann has not confirmed the IPO but it could take place this fall. The company reportedly submitted the IPO paperwork to U.S. and Canadian regulators within the last 30 to 45 days.

According to the report, Canadian investment bank Canaccord Genuity is expected to be the lead underwriter, with more banks likely to be hired. Canaccord did not comment on the report.

PharmaCann currently operates four medical cannabis dispensaries and one cultivation facility in New York and was one of just 10 companies given an initial license in the state. The company also operated in Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland.

In 2018, PharmaCann had agreed to a $682 million takeover by MedMen but that deal ultimately fell through. At that time, PharmaCanna and MedMen described the deal’s termination as “mutual.”

Over the last few months, the company had received multiple takeover offers, including from blank-check firms, according to sources interviewed by Reuters. PharmaCann could still decide to stay private, decide against launching the IPO or go a different route to go public, the report says.

In June, Cresco Labs took a 10.5% stake in PharmaCann for $110.4 million which valued the company at $1.1 billion.

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Danielle Marzarella: Designing Unique Cannabis Retail Experiences

8/10/2021

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What many early cannabis dispensaries lacked in presentation, they made up for by normalizing the act of retailing cannabis. But like in any other retail industry, the cannabis shopping experience truly benefits from high-quality interior design and experts like the team behind SevenPoint Interiors are starting to set new expectations for the cannabis space.

We recently interviewed Danielle Marzarella about SevenPoint’s design process for cannabis retail environments and what inspired the firm’s 2017 founding. This interview also covers the unique design and regulatory challenges related to cannabis retail, different requirements for different locations and legal markets throughout North America, the company’s design process and strategies, how they collaborate with clients to create engaging and experiential retail environments, precautions the company has taken in regards to COVID-19 requirements, and more!

Scroll down to read the full interview.

Ganjapreneur: How long have you been in interior design?

Danielle Marzarella: Our founders Robert Turk and John Simmen met back in 1989 and have been in the business ever since. They founded Visual Elements in 2010 which has been recognized as a global leader in retail environments manufacturing since its inception. Recognizing the need for design solutions in the cannabis industry, SevenPoint Interiors was created in 2017, offering full turnkey interior design and build solutions.

What inspired your entry into cannabis retail design?

We purchased an exhibit booth at Retail Trade Show, Global Shop, and created a small cannabis dispensary display pop up. With such a positive response, the team realized the need and demand for elevated cannabis retail design spaces by business owners. With the increasing legalization of cannabis around the globe, SevenPoint seeks to elevate the cannabis experience for the customer through retail and to elevate the process entirely for brands and dispensary owners in creating and executing their company identity/vision and offering turnkey solutions.

What design and/or regulatory challenges has your team faced that are unique to cannabis retail?

Current regulatory challenges in the Toronto market include prohibiting site lines into the dispensary from the street. However, we’ve used these challenges to our creative advantage. For one of our clients, Scarlet Fire, we used this as an opportunity to create a mystique at its storefront by designing a “transportation tunnel”. By strategically placing partition walls with circular cutouts and LED lighting — from the glass line through the back of the store ending at a circular LED screen playing psychedelic video graphics — the end result was a kaleidoscope effect as passersby peek in from the street.

Inside Scarlet Fire Cannabis Co., a Grateful Dead-inspired cannabis dispensary that was designed by SevenPoint Interiors. Photo credit: Erin Leydon 

SevenPoint has designed cannabis retail spaces in Toronto and in various states in the US, do the themes and focus differ between the two countries? What about between different states?

Themes tie back to brand and identity and whether it be Toronto, Michigan, or Massachusetts, each of our clients bring a different brand idea to the table. We service each individual client differently to help create and define a vision and theme unique to the brand. Compliance can differ by country and state and sometimes compliance regulations can have an impact on design as reflected in our transportation tunnel for Scarlet Fire. Even though it is a regulation, we used it as an opportunity to create a unique design solution to what might be viewed as a design problem. There has also been a surge in building smaller footprint dispensaries, especially in denser areas such as Toronto. These smaller boutique type dispensaries generally range from 700 sq/ft – 2000 sq/ft.

We’re seeing the growth of educated consumers looking to create a more sustainable lifestyle, which includes cannabis as a natural alternative to traditional medicine. In what ways do you look to incorporate LEED ID+C into your design or are there any other sustainable/green practices considered in your process?

While we will always look for opportunities to lower our carbon footprint, we have specific measures that we’ve implemented in our manufacturing facility and within our design and manufacturing process to capitalize on sustainability. We introduce and specify materials to clients such as our proprietary recycled powder coat finish that offers a unique design aesthetic for fixture and surface finishes.

What is your design process? Does the client set the vision of the space they would enjoy, is it collaborative or do you guide them toward the direction you think they should go? Is this unique to the cannabis industry?

Upon engaging with a client, we will identify their scope of work unique to their needs then provide them with a proposal for the design. We will then go through a series of steps starting with gathering requirements and objectives for their design, providing inspirational sketches and images to identify the look and feel that best represents their brand. Through this well-organized process and with client feedback, we will develop floor plans, elevations, fixture design and 3D images turning it into a final concept design package inclusive of colored renderings, material boards, floor plan, ceiling plan, lighting plan and elevations. We provide our client with a proposal for the fabrication of the fixtures and displays which is a seamless process to immediately move into the engineering and production phase wasting no time. Upon completion, we will ship and provide installation services and visual merchandising support when needed.

Inside Scarlet Fire Cannabis Co., a Grateful Dead-inspired cannabis dispensary that was designed by SevenPoint Interiors. Photo credit: Erin Leydon 

Lighting is essential to pick up some of the intricacies of the merchandise. How do you go about creating an optimal lighting plan for a dispensary?

Lighting is one of the most important considerations impacting the overall consumer experience. It sets the tone and mood for the consumer from the moment they step into the dispensary. General and decorative lighting play a part of this process; however, it is all about the product. Product lighting can really enhance the sell through of the product and can be achieved in multiple ways. Whether it be strategically placed overhead lighting to highlight wall displays or tabletops, we can also provide integral lighting options within the wall systems and table tops creating an aura of light for your product and that extra pop you need to elevate the product merchandising.

Where is there space in retail cannabis to innovate the design approach?

COVID fears accelerated cannabis consumption. As we exit the pandemic, there is a return to experiential retail sweeping across the cannabis industry. There is a lot of retail/commercial space open in cities, and owners are looking to capitalize on the opportunity. The customer is ready to get back into stores. They are bored of being trapped at home and want to return to live events and experiences. Creating engaging and experiential shopping experiences with a purpose are still on the rise. We continue our efforts to strive and offer innovation in our design concepts down to the specific product display such as our proprietary Flower Globe and Capsule to help create that memorable experience and drive loyalty.

Is there anything specific about the cannabis industry that drove the demand for the creation of the module system?

When we entered the cannabis space, we recognized very quickly the need for a systematic approach to supporting a category of dispensary owners requiring an easy and cost-effective design and fixture/display solution that worked with their individual budget needs and drove speed to market. The Module Collection is a pre-engineered fixture and display system that we can customize based on individual client needs. The fact that it is pre-engineered using standardized dimensions means we can offer a branded flexible and adaptable solution with a faster turnaround than going the fully custom route that takes more time and money. The collection is available in standard and custom colors, a wide range of finishes, and infinite configurations.

Inside Scarlet Fire Cannabis Co., a Grateful Dead-inspired cannabis dispensary that was designed by SevenPoint Interiors. Photo credit: Erin Leydon 

Beautiful accessories can enhance the cannabis experience. Can you speak more about your modular system line, how it developed and where you see it going?

Our Visual Merchandising System works hand in hand with our Module Collection. The components are intended for use with the system or independently. It’s simple, flexible and clean design offers a multitude of display and product storage options for under glass counters, on tabletops and shelving. Opportunities for product information placement as well as custom branding options exist to help educate the consumer during their experience. As with our Module Fixture System, we will continue to develop new elements to complement the existing collection offering fresh new ideas for fixture and visual merchandising displays.

How have COVID-19 safety precautions affected the retail shopping experience from a design perspective?

To follow COVID-19 regulations, we have had to be strategic in space planning to accommodate for social distancing. We also have to be creative when designing the modular fixtures because of this. Partition screens at the POS cash desks have become standard during this time. In the front of the store, we’ve had to integrate dedicated areas for curbside pickup to accommodate for increased online ordering. COVID-19 has taken away the sensory experience of cannabis retail. We aren’t allowed to touch or interact with the flower so that has been an obstacle that we’ve had to work around.

Thanks, Danielle, for sharing your expertise in retail design for the cannabis space! To learn more, visit SevenPointInteriors.com.

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Study: Legalization Sees Short-Term Decline in Opioid ER Visits

7/20/2021

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Researchers at the Pitt Graduate School of Public Health found that in the first half of 2017 California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada all saw a 7.6% decline in opioid-related emergency room visits but that those rates returned to pre-legalization levels after the six months, according to a WESA outline of the study.

However, Coleman Drake, the study’s lead author and assistant professor of health policy and management, said the researchers found no “evidence to support the theory that cannabis functions as a gateway drug.”

“If anything, we find that recreational cannabis legalization decreases opioid-related emergency department visits. … Cannabis is a substitute for pain relief, but it’s not a treatment for opioid use disorder. People might be finding that cannabis does help treat pain for opioid use disorder, but ultimately isn’t treating other symptoms of the condition.”— Drake to WESA

The study focused on California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada because the states had only legalized cannabis for adults in 2016. The study notes that the reduction in opioid-related ER visits was “driven by men and adults aged 25-44.” It also stressed, “while cannabis liberalization may offer some help in curbing the opioid epidemic, it is likely not a panacea.”

Drake noted that there have not yet been enough “high-quality studies” on post-legalization issues, such as opioid use or related ER visits, and Alice Bell of Prevention Point Pittsburgh, a nonprofit specializing in drug user health and harm reduction agreed, noting that it is hard to draw hard conclusions from the study.

“This data hopefully once and for all puts a nail in the coffin that marijuana is a ‘gateway drug,’” Bell said in the report. “It would be useful to do qualitative research and ask people who use drugs what they are actually doing.”

The study, “Recreational cannabis laws and opioid-related emergency department visit rates,” was published July 12 in the Health Economics Letter.

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AphriHelios Global LLC Announces Launch of Inaugural Advisory Board

7/20/2021

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Stellar Group of Advisors to Influence AphriHelios’ Strategy

AphriHelios Global LLC, poised to become the leading vertically integrated cannabis company bringing the highest quality Africa and African diaspora cannabis products and brands to the global market, today announced the formation of its inaugural Advisory Board.

AphriHelios CEO, Darin Hickman, stated “We are honored to have such an esteemed group of leaders avail their expertise, sage advice, and networks. Each member brings the intellectual insight we currently need in key strategic areas.”

The new advisors include:

Colin Clarke – Colin has many years of international law, private equity, and corporate finance experience with multinational organizations. He is currently Chairman of the Investment Committee and Executive Director of RH Bophelo Management Company Proprietary Limited. Colin’s educational background includes a (BA) Political Science, MBA (University of Oxford), Juris Doctorate (JD), and Advocate High Court, South Africa.

Dr. Desta Meghoo – As a creative consultant, cannabis activist, writer, author, community leader, and founder of D.Y.M.C. & ASSOC, Dr. Meghoo remains active in the Pan African and Rastafari movement, having managed the careers of icons such as Augustus Pablo, and two of Bob Marley’s I-Threes, Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. Further, she served as the Managing Director of the Bob Marley Foundation. Dr. Meghoo earned a Juris Doctorate from the University of Florida. She currently serves in Addis Ababa as Liaison to the African Union for the Diaspora African Forum. The Diaspora Africa Forum is the only African Diaspora organization in the world with diplomatic status. Most recently Dr. Meghoo appeared on Alpha Woman podcast to discuss Ethiopian cannabis laws and feminism in Africa.

Groovin Nchabeleng – Award-winning South African advertising and media guru. Groovin is the current Executive Chairman of Blueprint Group advertising agency, which has been in operation for the past 18 years. He is Chairman of Koni Multinational Brands and the Medisone Pharmacy Retail Chain and former CEO of Leo Burnett Group South Africa/MMS Group. He is a member of the Sekhukhuneland Royal Family (Bapedi) and a founding member and director for the United Royal Kingships Holdings, a first-of-its-kind investment entity representing 829 royal leaderships and a constituency of over 20 million people.

Montel Williams – Emmy award-winning media expert, podcast host, best-selling author, decorated U.S. Naval officer, motivational speaker, wellness entrepreneur, and cannabis advocate, Montel currently serves on the board of directors for the Fisher House Foundation and the Anne Romney Center for Neurological Diseases at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Williams holds a Bachelor of Science degree in general engineering and a minor in international security affairs from the United States Naval Academy. His podcast Let’s Be Blunt with Montel (which recently hosted AphriHelios CEO, Darin Hickman) features under-represented voices in the cannabis industry.

AphriHelios Global is excited about its new Advisory Board and how it can assist in creating transformative sustainable economic opportunities, in Africa and internationally, while also facilitating conversations about the intersection of African based company’s role in creating high value, low-cost production in the cannabis industry.

The company is also excited about its current capital raise. Consistent with its drive to create transformative economic opportunities, AphriHelios has launched a crowdfunding campaign concurrently with a traditional Regulation D private placement. With a minimum investment of $250, the crowdfunding campaign provides access to individuals who do not usually have access to these kinds of investments. The private placement campaign is focused on accredited individuals and institutions.

To find out more about AphriHelios, its Advisory Board, or its current capital raise, please visit their website at www.aphrihelios.com.

About AphriHelios
AphriHelios Global is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, with active offices in Cape Town, South Africa, and Maseru, Lesotho. The company was awarded its initial license in 2019 from the Kingdom of Lesotho’s Ministry of Health to cultivate, process, package, and export cannabis-related products to global markets from the capital Maseru.

For media inquiries:
Diana-Ashley Krach
krachkreative@gmail.com
‪(443) 619-7984‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

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Raheem Uqdah: The Importance of Corporate Social Responsibility In Cannabis

7/20/2021

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Despite the rapid and accelerating growth of the cannabis space, the industry comes from an oppressive foundation of drug war-fueled persecution. Many efforts are aimed at addressing this issue including social equity licensing requirements and similarly focused business incubators, but the responsibility also lies with current operators to help remedy the situation.

Even large cannabis companies like Curaleaf cannot ignore these unfortunate circumstances — in this Q&A, we ask Curaleaf’s Director of Corporate Social Responsibility Raheem Uqdah about the social justice responsibilities of current operators, balancing those responsibilities with brand building and outward expansion, the company’s various initiatives for social good, and more!

Scroll down to read the full interview.

Ganjapreneur: What was your background in nonprofit work and policy before starting with Curaleaf? How has this experience served you in your position?

Raheem Uqdah: Prior to joining Curaleaf I spent time with a handful of nonprofits in various roles for a couple of years. During my role with a nonprofit doing communications and community outreach was the first time in my career where I was able to intentionally blend brand building and social good into my work in a way that made sense and was meaningful to our constituents. I was able to take that grounding and have since applied it to how I approach all of our work at Curaleaf.

Curaleaf is currently operating in 23 states. Do each of its social responsibility initiatives extend into every state market?

The long-term intent of our work is to ladder down all our initiatives into each of our states and find local partners to support our work on a regional and state level. Our programs have been built to address what we think are the most important issues facing our industry today. The flexibility of our programs allows us to tailor each one to the specific populations of our communities.

How does Curaleaf balance its mission of social responsibility and its large retail footprint while competing with small businesses?

In each state that we operate, we maintain close relationships with our communities, from hiring locally to supporting community initiatives. Our scale means that we also have the resources necessary to lift up and support small businesses to facilitate a dynamic and diverse cannabis industry. Our 420×25 initiative is a great example of this, and we’ve set a goal to do business with 420 new cannabis brands, ancillary suppliers and advocacy organizations from underrepresented communities in the cannabis ecosystem by 2025.

Many cannabis industry companies are founded by people fueled by passion with a desire to do good in the world. For entrepreneurs and founders, what are the benefits of formalizing that intent with a statement of corporate social responsibility?

We believe in investing over the long term – in people, programs, and places. Each organization in the cannabis industry has a responsibility to leverage its resources and clout to create a better environment for patients, employees and the community. Formalizing that intent with specific objectives helps elevate industry standards and best practices that serve to create a fair, accessible and equitable legal cannabis space for generations to come.

Due to the historical criminalization of cannabis, many of the early activists and nonviolent offenders who were imprisoned for cannabis are still locked up despite its legal status in many states. What responsibility does the modern cannabis business/entrepreneur have in righting this wrong of the judicial system?

The collateral consequences that have ultimately impacted BIPOC communities is massive. There are organizations out there that are working with states on this topic and we support those efforts. Ultimately, we work with state coalitions to pass laws and regulations that support state level expungement of low-level cannabis-related crimes. That said, we’re choosing to most actively use our resources to provide mentoring and technical assistance for aspiring business owners, create pathways to ownership for social equity license holders, and increase economic opportunities for individuals from historically disadvantaged communities.

How have you handled Curaleaf’s social equity fund investments to best serve the future of the industry?

These investments are an attempt to intentionally build pathways to diversify the industry. By creating educational pathways for those who are interested in joining the cannabis industry we are hoping to spark economic opportunity for those from areas disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs. We believe that it is only through opportunity, education, and investment that we can see an inclusive cannabis industry flourish beyond the homogenized industry that we have today.

What direct actions have been taken since the founding of the Rooted in Good program?

We launched our DE&I program starting with our DEI taskforce which was made up of 62 cross-functional team members ranging from dispensary associates to vice presidents at Curaleaf. The taskforce ensures we’re reflecting through our actions and decisions that we value diversity and inclusion across intersections between race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability status, veteran status, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Through this taskforce, we have developed our Curaleaf ERGs, which have led internal virtual events celebrating Black History Month and Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Additionally, our Women’s Cannabis Collective ERG and “CuraForce” Workforce Development subcommittee partnered with Dress for Success to present the virtual workshop, Pivoting Your Career Path: It’s About More Than Skills.

Through our social equity work, we’ve launched our 420×25 initiative, and have established partnerships with organizations like Women Grow and Minorities for Medical Marijuana (M4MM) whose efforts support cultivating diversity in the cannabis industry. In July, we launched B Noble in partnership with visual artist, filmmaker and hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy and Bernard Noble, who spent seven years in prison on a 13 year sentence for the equivalent of two joints. This partnership is Curaleaf’s first large-scale brand venture in alignment with our dedicated social equity work and it’s an exciting opportunity to give back to communities impacted by cannabis prohibition, while also calling attention to Bernard’s incredibly harsh sentence.

Additionally, Curaleaf has hired Map-Collective, a female-founded green-tech startup to lead our Carbon Reduction Taskforce, an internal taskforce with a goal to reduce our carbon footprint.

What is the process of forming a new Curaleaf Employee Resource Group (ERG)? Does each ERG have independent leadership to represent their individual focus?

Our ERGs are employee led and are a way for our employees to manage upward and implement grassroots change in our organization. Leaders are often members of multiple ERGs, but each group works to bring the wishes of their membership to life.

What are the goals of the 420×25 initiative and how does this play into the bigger picture of social responsibility?

Curaleaf aims to create a diverse and vibrant cannabis industry. We believe that in order to meet the needs of our patients and customers, we must increase and broaden representation to accurately reflect all backgrounds. As part of our supplier diversity program, Curaleaf aims to do business with 420 new cannabis brands, ancillary suppliers and advocacy organizations from underrepresented communities in the cannabis ecosystem by 2025. Since we announced this commitment in February 2021, we have partnered with 60 of these businesses. One example is Rolling Bouqé, a premier rolling paper brand, whose products are now featured in all Curaleaf Maryland locations. Purient Bedroom, a brand of intimate personal lubricant and massage oil, is another example that joined our Massachusetts ecosystem in early 2020. We aim to achieve our own corporate diversity goals while also enabling the growth of diverse businesses in our communities.

Why did Curaleaf choose to partner with Women Grow for the 420×25 initiative? What kind of value does the partnership bring to the mission?

Our partnership with Women Grow is a key step forward in ensuring that our values are reflected at every level of the organization’s supply chain. From cultivators and manufacturers to ancillary businesses within cannabis, we have set a critical goal of diversifying our supply chain, and we look forward to working with Women Grow to make that goal a reality. Through our partnership, we look forward to connecting with women, BIPOC, Veteran and LGBTQ-owned business owners and building with these cannabis leaders across the 23 active legal states that we operate in.

How important is mentorship when forging a future cannabis industry with true social equity? How does Curaleaf support and initiate true mentorship?

The Executive Roundtable mentoring program at Curaleaf expands the economic opportunities in cannabis by providing entrepreneurs from across the ecosystem, access to the most senior leaders in Curaleaf. Protégés of the mentoring program include entrepreneurs in the CBD space as well as other ancillary business.

Entrepreneurs involved in the program have expressed that these relationships are game-changers for them, the access to networks and knowledge alone is well worth their participation. In addition to direct access to industry leaders, the program includes in-kind benefits from Curaleaf suppliers such as Brightfield Group which will provide technical assistance and access to consumer data at no cost. Some entrepreneurs will have access to scholarship dollars to fill a gap in their knowledge and expertise beyond what their mentors can provide.

The Executive Roundtable takes a 360 approach to mentoring by centering the needs of the individual participants designed to maximize their resources.

What is First Friday and when will this Curaleaf initiative officially launch?

First Friday is an education seminar that Curaleaf will offer for the underrepresented communities on the first Friday of each month. We are inviting BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+ and other communities in to engage and connect. Participants can expect to connect with leading voices in the industry, network for business and employment opportunities, and learn more about today’s cannabis culture. The program officially launched on June 4 with Minorities for Medical Marijuana.

Thank you, Raheem, for answering our questions! Learn more at Curaleaf.com.

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Reginald Stanfield: Roadmap for Launching a Successful Cannabis Cultivation Facility

7/15/2021

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To launch a successful cannabis cultivation facility, one requires a significant amount of planning, resources, and initiative. Launching during a worldwide pandemic, however, makes things a lot more difficult — and that was the unfortunate reality for Massachusetts’ JustinCredible Cultivation when they were finally approved to open last year.

Reginald recently joined our podcast host TG Branfalt to discuss his entrepreneurial journey toward the cannabis space, the lessons he learned along the way, and stories from the founding and creation of JustinCredible Cultivation, which is the first minority-owned general business applicant to open a cannabis cultivation facility on the East Coast. This interview also covers securing investments, Reginald’s tips for building a scrappy and effective C-suite team, what he looks for when hiring new employees, and more!

Listen to the podcast:

Read the transcript:

Commercial: At Ganjapreneur, we have heard from dozens of cannabis business owners who have encountered the issue of cannabias, which is when a mainstream business, whether a landlord, bank, or some other provider of vital business services, refuses to do business with them simply because of their association with cannabis. We have even heard stories of businesses being unable to provide health and life insurance for their employees because the insurance providers were too afraid to work with them.

We believe that this fear is totally unreasonable and that cannabis business owners deserve access to the same services and resources that other businesses are afforded, that they should be able to hire consultation to help them follow the letter of the law in their business endeavors, and that they should be able to provide employee benefits without needing to compromise on the quality of coverage they can offer. This is why we created the ganjapreneur.com business service directory, a resource for cannabis professionals to find and connect with service providers who are cannabis friendly and who are actively seeking cannabis industry clients.

If you are considering hiring a business consultant, lawyer, accountant, web designer, or any other ancillary service for your business, go to ganjapreneur.com/businesses to browse hundreds of agencies, firms, and organizations who support cannabis legalization and who want to help you grow your business. With so many options to choose from in each service category, you will be able to browse company profiles and do research on multiple companies in advance, so you can find the provider who is the best fit for your particular need.

Our business service directory is intended to be a useful and well-maintained resource, which is why we individually vet each listing that is submitted. If you are a business service provider who wants to work with cannabis clients, you may be a good fit for our service directory. Go to ganjapreneur.com/businesses to create your profile and start connecting with cannabis entrepreneurs today.

TG Branfalt: Hey there, I’m your host, TG Branfalt, and thank you for listening to the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast, where we try to bring you actionable information and normalize cannabis through the stories of ganjapreneurs, activists, and industry stakeholders. Today I’m joined by Reginald Stanfield. He’s the CEO and head horticulturist of Massachusetts-based JustinCredible Cultivation, the first minority owned general business applicant to open a cultivation facility on the East Coast. How are you doing this afternoon, Reginald?

Reginald Stanfield: I’m doing amazing, man. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. Happy to be here.

TG Branfalt: Me too, man. I’ve seen a couple of interviews with you. I’ve been watching your Twitter, and I’m real excited to pick your brain and get a little bit about your experience in this space. You have this super unique story, and I want us to talk first about that, your background, how you ended up in the cannabis space. I had read that you had actually slept in your RV at one point. Tell me the whole story, man.

Reginald Stanfield: I’m going to make it as short as possible. 2012, I was working for this great company called Adam and Watson Associates underneath this great boss called Janelle. She taught me a lot of what I do now, where I practice. But being the ambitious person I am, I didn’t like constantly signing their names. I would spend six, seven hours doing something and it’s Janelle or it’s Ivan, and I didn’t like that.

I started bartending. Had a girlfriend and wanted me to do it. Long story short, I did an event for a small company. I hated what they did. I was on a phone call with one of my best friends in life. I’m talking to him, I’m like, “Hey man, dah, dah, dah.” He’s like, “Well, why don’t you do it yourself?” I was like, “Fine. Help me do this.” We came up with the name Masters of Mixology. He came up with the logo and I started doing it myself.

Then I got addicted to the thrill of having the challenge to bring people what they want. That led to me taking what I graduated, which is accounting, finance degree, which I did most business classes, to building company structures. I had people message me, “Hey, I see that you run this business. Can you help me with this? How do you do that?” I was like, “Well, I might as well start a management company.”

Me and him, we started a management company. He’s a creative design. I’m the business structure. Neither one of us are organized at all. We added our she role, our boss lady, Che’toia to come bring some structure to us. At that time, I had a friend of mine who was a… I don’t like to say bully because you can’t really bully me, but he was somebody who we weren’t friends in high school, and then we became like brothers our last year.

He quit his job. He was like, “I’m miserable. I want to just come do what you do. So he joined with me. And then from that point, we launched Modern Monopoly Management, which led to us building businesses all across the United States, from JustinCredible weddings, to JustinCredible installs, to supporting brands like Infusions and HBCU Traveler. We built our own structure. One day we were sitting in Texas, something had went crazy with the Houston market. Hurricane Harvey hit, killed a lot of people, destroyed the industry.

We went to Dallas, Dallas wasn’t the same market. I was sitting there, my partner editing videos for hours and hours on edge and I was like, “Hey, Mass said they’re going to recreational. The regulation seems like we can go there. What’s up?” We shut down three of our businesses and we all moved back home to our parents’ house to save as much money as we could.

We did R and D. We drove to Colorado. We drove to Illinois. We drove to everywhere. We just went. We went to there and every dispensary were like, “Hey, how do you guys buy your weed? How do you do this? What’s the standard you have? Is it cured? How long does it cure for? How long is the drive for it? We got all the information from the bedtenders. We got to see a couple of grows. We got to do all of that. It was cool.

I even got arrested for my first time during that process. I got arrested in Illinois in Effingham. Effingham City, got arrested there for a marijuana possession for the first time. I’ve been doing this forever, just got arrested for it. We did a Google search because everybody’s saying, “How did JustinCredible end up in Cummington.” We did a Google search, boom. That was the only property we could afford and we just decided to go there. So that’s how we started off.

TG Branfalt: Tell me about leaving your job as a financial manager to strike out on your own, not just in the cannabis industry, but broadly. What advice can you offer to people who want to pursue their goals, but have stable jobs that might make them think twice?

Reginald Stanfield: You’ve got to know yourself, man. The same as the things that I go through, everybody go through. I actually brought my dad in to do IT work. I was 21 years old. Was an office. Average age there was 45. So me bringing my dad and him seeing me with this and him making money, he’s like, “You’re crazy.” I had jokes from parents. I had jokes from neighbors, peers, or just a little bit older than me making jokes about not having a job. It was hard. The only advice I could do is just never give up.

I’m not one of those entrepreneurs are going to sit there and it gives you that speech and any… It’s not for everybody. I have the ability to be extremely uncomfortable for very, very long periods of times, and a lot of people don’t have that. So you’re going to miss the family vacations. You’re going to miss the family reunions. I look back now. I’m on this track for eight years. I look back now and I’m not in a lot of photos. You know what I mean?

I’m thinking like, “Oh, I was there.” No, I wasn’t there. I’m reliving your memory. So you have to be able to be uncomfortable, but know yourself. Know what makes you happy. And then, does that type of sacrifice to your personal life, is that for you? Because if it’s not, then you should start your business while you’re working and you can have that duality where…

Your business success can take 20 years to become successful. You know what I mean? As an entrepreneur, if you quit your job, your bill’s going to come due once that saving runs out, and it always runs out two times faster than you expected. So you just have to know yourself, man. You have to know what you’re doing.

TG Branfalt: I think that’s really astute advice. I mean, especially since you’ve done so many different things. It seems like uncomfort makes you comfortable to some degree.

Reginald Stanfield: No, not at all. I make it look real easy, and I’m not… I swear. I promised to myself I would not be the entrepreneur that comes up here and lies to people. No, I’m not. It doesn’t make me comfortable. It’s very uncomfortable. I have people who believe in me, you know what I mean? I have people who quit their stable jobs, who gave us their money and I owe them not to quit. You know what I mean?

My company, we could have been successful all from one business, but I was preaching and we had meetings, and of course, arguments, because we’re all friends. We’re all living together. I’m like, “We have to be perfect. There’s people out there that can get by and make a lot of money doing what we’re doing, but we have to be perfect.” We want to be this top company. That’s why my name, I go by Forbes Next, because I’m going to be the next person number one on Forbes. So it’s a whole mindset.

I told them, standing in Texas, meeting after meeting, “Somebody is going to give us a million dollars to do one business, and we’re going to have one shot.” That’s how I do. I’m definitely not comfortable being uncomfortable. No, I’m not. I don’t want to lie.

TG Branfalt: You were the first minority-owned general business applicant to get a grow license in the state of Massachusetts and on the East Coast. I don’t know your background, I don’t know your history. And so, my first question is were you able to potentially get one of these economic empowerment or social equity grants in Massachusetts? If you were, why did you choose to take that general applicant route?

Reginald Stanfield: They only put out the equity program for like two weeks and then they closed it. I’m not going to come up here and trash talk the regulatory process like everybody does because they’re doing something that they don’t know how to do. You get what I mean? And you can’t just copy and paste Colorado or Illinois because the law and regulations and bylaws of certain places, they have certain nuances that we don’t know about.

I’m not a political major. I don’t know if this thing could be a conflict to this thing. It’s just like growing in my mind. Yeah. You can grow in Fox Farm soil and not have any heavy metal test, but let me grow this one strand and it does. So I don’t want to trash talk the regulatory process, but they opened up the portal for that for like a month maybe. It was open and close.

The go out there and have to find somebody to give away 50% of my business to, it just wasn’t… I couldn’t qualify for Massachusetts social equity or economic empowerment, coming from a different state and everything. I think that’s what’s weird about it. They now do have veterans owned, women owned, and minority owned business enterprise type of push through, but they should have known better. They should have known better.

TG Branfalt: Well, they are regulators. It’s not going to tell whether or not they will ever know better. Why cultivation rather than other retail or other sectors? Cultivation, from my understanding, is really one of the hardest licenses to not just get, but to also maintain. So why did you choose that route?

Reginald Stanfield: Because I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. Now, I’m just messing… I come from farmers, man. My parents made it and they did… They worked so hard all through my childhood to provide us with a stable family, but where we like to call what we call family poor. You know what I mean? We live in a nice neighborhood, but we take care of both sides of our family. You know what I mean?

My parents pay the bills for my grandparents, for people in our family, all the way through. Where we’re from, they’re both from Roxboro, North Carolina, 10 miles away from each other. They grew eight to one household and then like four to one household, making their money by farming. I grew up in the tobacco field. I remember, five years old, in the tobacco field, on the back of the truck, watching people pluck tobacco, giant worm falling on me, freaking out. You know what I mean?

Years later, I’m in the tobacco fields swearing I would never do this again. You know what I mean? I grew up with it. I grew up with the hog pen, running past the hog pen. If you’re hungry, there is no inside. You go grab a peach, or a plum, or you go grab some fruit, go to the strawberry patch, hit the water hose. You know what I mean? That’s how I grew up. I didn’t grow up with technology or in the city. I grew up on a farm, and I can grow.

My mom, in Upper Marlboro, if you would see our backyard, we have 25… We have all this fruit stuff, fruit in everywhere, bell peppers, lemon trees. We have everything in a suburb backyard. So I grew up touching a plant. I love growing. I started growing in my closet, seeing my cousins grow, and their guerilla grows. I’ve been a part of that. It’s easy for me. Growing, even when I’m teaching, you go teaching certain methods and I’m like, “You just have to learn how to touch the plant.” You know what I mean? I have that feel.

So it was natural in my mind to go into the industry. Also, as well, I don’t believe retail is going to be the future. You know what I mean? If anything, Blockbuster told us that once Netflix starts knocking, you should start switching too. You know what I mean? Blockbuster could have switched their methods right when they saw Netflix. They could have done the same thing and could have maybe stayed. But I think retail, with the virus happening, with people… Uber Eats.

I go to Atlanta, I’m spending money off of Uber Eats. I don’t care if it’s $20 more than me taking a 15-minute drive. But there’s no way I’m going outside if I can get somebody to bring me my food. So I believe that’s the method of the market. We’re going to go towards delivery. Also believe in controlling the textile. Cannabis itself is what we’re selling. Even if you’re making into edibles, tinctures, you have to start with me.

I want to be watching Jeff Bezos and how he did his empire. He started controlling things that made for Amazon’s success. It wasn’t just marketing. It wasn’t just, “I have the…” No, I’m going to control distribution. Then I’m going to control the internet, the services. And then I’m going to control all the products. You know what I mean? So for me, once this blows up, I’m trying to control what everybody else is forgetting about.

I think, if you go West Coast, it’s brand, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. If you go Colorado’s brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. Well, I get it, so many of us right now. But eventually, it’s going to get down to who cares about the plant most, and that’s where I’m putting myself at, to maintain.

TG Branfalt: I really appreciate you sharing. It’s an incredible story, man. I live in a rural location now, but I have access to technology. So to think about tobacco fields in North Carolina, I mean, it just seems like a world away.

Reginald Stanfield: Yeah.

TG Branfalt: You’ve done incredible things with raising money. Your business has raised $1.3 million. Can you tell me what you think stood out to investors, that led to you successfully raising those funds?

Reginald Stanfield: Me? I mean, I keep it 100%. It’s me, but I don’t want that to come off narcissistic or cocky, like me on my team. You get what I mean? I have people behind me who are going to be just as uncomfortable as I am. The fact that I go into these meetings and they’re doing their work, they don’t want to be seen. You know what I mean? My partners aren’t scratching for the limelight. To be honest, I’m an introvert myself. So I’m just the one that stepped forward.

The way we sat down and we think about things, we go over stuff, we’re so positive and we’re so people-first that we can come in and read a room. I’m sitting here listening to investors. I go into the town of Cummington. My first meeting I go there is the general store, Dollar, pitching to come there as well. And they rip into them. They just go, and I’m like, “Yeah, we’re going to scratch that whole 40,000 square foot facility idea. We’re going to have to go small and then expand.”

So we go back and we dig into the numbers and I’m like, “Well, how do we get this here and what do we do? Well, let’s focus on the brand of JustinCredible. We can go as small as possible.” What we did is we shrunk the plan and we made it small. Well, on that news, doing research, a lot of people aren’t investing in cannabis as well. So me walking up to you, you don’t know me, “Give me 10 million.” Come on. That’s different than me saying, “Hey, I need 300,000.” You know what I mean? I can say 300,000 and turn it into four or five million. You know what I mean?

That’s what we did. And then, luckily we caught a bigger investor halfway through and he loved just a pitch. Same as that pitch I gave everybody, sensible. We’re going to start for us where we get into the market and then we’re going to expand fast. He loved it. We just built our relationship from there. That’s where we got the rest of our capital from. We raised half, friends and family, and the other… Well, I’ll say, the other 800,000 came from one source.

TG Branfalt: You talk about members of your executive team, they don’t really want the limelight, that they’re working while you’re doing this, you said. What do you look for in members of that executive team? And what about the day-to-day employees? As the CEO, what qualities are you looking for in these people?

Reginald Stanfield: Yeah. I’m what I like to call a people-over-profit CEO. That’s a cool question. I’ve never been asked that question about, what do I look for, for my C-suite. Loyalty is the most important thing, and it’s what I call maximum effort. If you can’t jump 10 feet, I want to see you squatting as low as possible. You know what I’m saying? Thrusting yourself up high as possible. If you only hit eight, then I can take your eight and make it into somebody else’s barely… I can do 10 by just jumping, because that maximum effort is what it takes.

I tell my team all the time, it’s not really what you do all the hundred times. It’s that one time. All it takes is that one time. If you’re not giving maximum effort, if you’re so used to, “I can jump 10 feet no matter what,” then you’re going to do it and sometimes you’re going to fail. And that one time you fail is the time you jump seven. You get what I mean? That low is too much, because we have to be perfect. We have to be 99.9. So I need you to jump that eight every time. You get what I mean?

If I go and I pitch to you, “Hey, I’ve got somebody that could jump eight every time. No matter what they do, they’re going to jump eight.” If you give everything to me, then I can pitch that. I can sell that to a person, I can’t sell, “He’s a super talented person, but sometimes I don’t know what I get from him.” And that’s what that person who can jump to 10. He can probably jump to 20. But when you slack off and you take for granted your talent, I can’t use that. So I look for that loyalty and that maximum effort, people who are going to come in and believe in me and say, “I want to give your all.”

From employees, and it’s weird, because it’s one of our first times with this grow, over the last couple of weeks, have been dealing with lower level employees because it’s just been us owners. Man, I just want somebody who cares about the plant and they want to build their future. They don’t want somebody to give them a future. It doesn’t have to be, “I’m going to be a millionaire.” No. I want to pay for a nice, comfortable house and I want to grow weed. This is my dream.

If you come to me and just like we have a guy named Dat, who came to me and he’s like, “I really love the plant. I want to learn.” That’s all I need. I still need your maximum effort as an employee, for eight hours. I’m not going to expect you to do ownership, but coming here and showing me that you do care about the plant. If you sweep floors, show me that you’re really great at sweeping floors because when I expand, I have 15 people working here, we’re going from 15 to 120. You get what I mean? So this executive manager spot’s open, so I’m going to see that, you know what I mean? I’m going to take care of you. You take care of me.

TG Branfalt: With these lower-level employees, are you the one who actually conducts the interviews?

Reginald Stanfield: No. Che’toia, she does the interview because I don’t have the patience for that. But I’ll walk in and I have my vibe I do. I throw a couple of questions out there and I just see how they react. I like to use some 40 laws of power and see how they react to this… You’ve got this gorgeous woman, short, because she’s small. Che’toia’s like 4, 3’11. She’s small. We have this small person who’s smiling. Yeah. You’ve got this pretty smile and beautiful eyes looking at you, this soft voice talking to you.

Then here comes 6’4 walking in the door and I’m like, “Hey, yeah. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about this?” And I’ll walk out. I’ll be in an interview and I’ll just get on the phone and walk out. We’ll have a conversation later. So I hit a little bit, you know what I mean? I don’t believe in interviewing. You know what I mean? Interviewing is interviewing. Everybody puts their best foot forward. No, I like to jab a little bit and do my own thing with that one. I’m not a HR person.

TG Branfalt: You might be the most interesting CEO that I’ve ever interviewed.

Reginald Stanfield: It’s winning. I’m winning on that one.

TG Branfalt: Obviously, the last year, we’ve been in the middle of this pandemic. How’d you manage your cultivation business during the pandemic? What were some of the challenges?

Reginald Stanfield: We were almost one of the businesses that were lost during the pandemic. On the day Massachusetts shut down the cannabis industry was the day we get our license. Like I said, we were sleeping in RVs building the building before we were licensed, doing everything we could do to get this building up and running. Like I said, we didn’t have an unlimited budget. We didn’t get 1.3 million, go. We got 125,000, another 125,000. Here goes 25. Here’s 22. So we got our money in pieces all the way up to the very end.

Even with our big investor, we had to keep going back to them like, “Hey, we need more.” To be honest, Sonny, great dude. He went on and find more investors. I have to frame that correctly. It’s not like we had some money and then we went and got a whopping sum. No. We went and got this group with a great person that’s out of it, who was well-connected who, “Hey, man, 200,000. We need another 150.” So during the pandemic, we got shut down.

This is going to sound so weird. I already feel like I’m eccentric going to this interview, but that was one of the most proudest moments. At the same time, it was bittersweet. It was proud and then it hurt, because we stayed up for four days. I’m not over-exaggerating because I say stories and people will think that I’m over-exaggerating, until they actually come to the building or something happens. But we stayed up for four days.

I don’t mean you work 20 hours to get four hours of sleep. I’m talking about 24 and you’re still going. Go back to the hotel, take a shower. Get you an hour and come back to the site. We had to get to the point where it has to be three people in the car, somebody watching the driver. You get what I mean? Because it had to be two people watching the driver, because that’s how exhausted we were. Running to go to Home Depot to get this paint because we have to paint this or patch this hole, or this door doesn’t have a lock on it. We forgot to replace the lock.

It was a crazy four days, everybody on my team. And then, it got to the point where I saw everybody peak and it was beautiful. It’s like you get that synergy, that ring coming together. And it was like, at this point, nobody can give anymore. I was like, “This is how I know we’re going to be successful,” because everybody gave that last little bit you had, you know what I mean, when you know you can’t go no more, and then you keep going, and then they finally hit that, that’s what I saw.

So it was beautiful. But breaking the news to the team was hard. You know what I mean? It shocked me to my core. We had moved the RVs to get ready for the inspection. We were getting them clean just in case we got shut down, because we didn’t want to leave them full of food and sitting out in the site. Right when I parked the RV, I’m getting ready to go into the hotel to switch out to a nice shirt, to get ready for this inspection, because I don’t know what to think of. It’s like nine o’clock, they’re going to be there at 11:00.

My phone rings with the inspector, his name is saved. I’m like, “All right, he’s calling me, telling me he’s on the way,” because we have a really connected relationship. I’m like, “Hey, Mike,” because he won’t let me call him Mr. McCarthy. I’m like, “Hey, Mike.” He’s like, “Hey, Reginald.” I hear it. I’m like, “Maybe he’s just going to postpone it.” He goes and say, “I hate to tell you, we’re going to have to indefinitely postpone the inspection.”

And then, at that moment, it’s like… I almost threw my phone and I just dropped. He’s like, “I’m sorry. I’ll let you know when I figure some stuff out.” I asked him some questions and we hang up, and then everybody, the people outside are looking at me. I think it’s my cousin, he works for us, he’s looking at me. And then my business partner, Jonathan, and they’re like, “What’s up?” And I’m like, “Man, they just canceled the inspection.”

I said, “I don’t tell nobody. Call them down to the lobby of the hotel.” So then I called everybody into the lobby of hotel. But Justin, being a rock star he is, he’s at the building for the fourth day. He’s the one who stood behind making sure we’re getting our CO that morning. We’re getting the building… We have the building inspector, fire chief, electrical inspector there. The internet went out and you need the internet to do the CCC inspection. So we have the internet dude on the roof. He’s there handling all of this and I’m trying to call him. He’s not picking up.

I wait. I just break it to everybody. And then, you know what I mean, of course, people were moved to tears. And these are people I don’t really see cry that often. I was like, “You all, go ahead chill out here. I’m going to go ahead and go back and get T and tell him what’s up.” So I go back and then he calls me. He’s like, “Yo, we got the CO. The internet’s working and we’re ready for an inspection.” I was like, “All right. Cool. I’m going to talk to you when I get there.” I tell him when I get there, and then he takes it in and doesn’t allow me to see him react to it, because then he has to come next to me and become the leader for the rest of everybody else.

We get back together and I go buy bottles. You know what I mean? We’re going to go buy some bottles. We’re going to get some bottles. They stayed up and enjoyed the bottles. I wasn’t going to. I tried my best to, but I just went to sleep. I kind of passed out. I couldn’t take it. Because I’d taken everybody’s energy. I feel like I absorbed all the sadness and all that for them, and I went to sleep and they stayed up right next to me, partying, had a good drink on.

Then we just went home. Everybody went home and waited. That was crazy. Sorry, I know it took so long, but eventually, we got the call July 11th. July 11th, we went back up. We did the inspection. We passed the inspection. Then we had to do another one for a final. We did on the eighth. They put us up on the agenda. And then I noticed, after my research, nobody has made the agenda that had been declined. So I’m sitting there like, “Oh.” And they’re like, “It’s going to be virtual.”

We’re on the phone, and we’re driving, and we’re all in Massachusetts, like, “Hey.” Then we get the call like, “Boom, you guys are ready to go. You can start growing.” You know what I mean? Then it’s just crazy because then now we’re out of money, so we have to raise more money. We have to learn how to do this with just us because we were going to add some people. But I have terrible asthma. I actually had to be resuscitated in 2018. I was on life support for like five days, yeah, died for like five minutes.

Luckily, my parents got me to the ER in time. I know she didn’t bring this up, but they got me there in time to resuscitate me. I was dead on the pavement. The ER was pulling up, and they got me, brought me back, and I was gone for five minutes. But I have terrible asthma. There was no playing around for me when it came to COVID. So we all went home and we quarantined. I think we all needed it. You know what I mean? I think we all spent the three months literally… We were maybe the only people in America who actually stayed home and didn’t [inaudible 00:30:06]. We were in the house.

So it was a challenge. Even still now, hiring people is a challenge with COVID. You’re in a grow. You’re already hot. You’re already moving around sweaty and now you have a mask on and already you have your PPE. You’re gloved up. I know people say that there’s no oxygen change with masks. But I’m sorry, it’s different. It’s a different thing. It makes you hotter. It makes your breath humid and it’s discomforting. Now having to enforce that where…

All of the owners, we live literally in close proximity. We either stay in the same apartment or we ride together to work. So we don’t have no mask on while it’s just us. But adding more and more people, now everybody has to follow it. So it’s tough, man. People are losing their businesses. And then, at the end of the time, only big businesses get the grace of COVID. They get to learn how to operate with COVID. Small businesses, we have to be perfect. I know that was a lot. I apologize.

TG Branfalt: No, no, no. I mean, it’s very interesting. I mean, you were trying to get a license when they shut it down, and ultimately, they ended up declaring cannabis as an essential business.

Reginald Stanfield: They never did with us. They never did with Massachusetts.

TG Branfalt: Really?

Reginald Stanfield: Yeah. They just ended the shutdown.

TG Branfalt: Oh, got you.

Reginald Stanfield: We never got declared essential, which is bad mistake.

TG Branfalt: One of the other issues with Massachusetts is relatively new. It’s the strict microbe testing policies. Can you tell us more about that and how it’s affecting you as a cultivator?

Reginald Stanfield: I’m trying to understand more of the science, so I’m not sounding ignorant. But from what I got is they’re testing all microbes, not just bad ones like chlorophyl or all the other bad ones, yeast mold, even to that point. They’re not testing things in the way… They have a total bile test, that if you consume it, what happens in your gut? But nobody takes raw flower and eats it. You get what I mean? Yeah, unless you’re trying to get away from the cops, which you’re not worried about anymore.

So it doesn’t make sense to test for certain things if you’re not using it in that fashion. If I can then turn around and make it combustible, you know what I mean, which gets rid of everything that wouldn’t get rid of if it wasn’t combustible, you know what I mean? It just doesn’t make sense. For me, I was one of the trash talkers of the industry, like, “Man, my Massachusets weed is terrible, is this…” I understand it now because you grow in soil, you have plants everywhere, you’re kicking on microbes. You know what I mean?

You land on your plant. You fail a microbe test, you just lost 75%, 80% of the value of your product, just by a microbe. You know what I mean, landing on your plant, and then they breed. So you can’t follow the sprayers often as you want to. You can’t really treat. It’s making us grow super sterile. Where is the study saying it has to be this way? You know what I mean? I listened to one of your podcasts about the guys with the edibles at Colorado, and I totally disagree with everything he’s saying, you get what I mean?

He should be talking about medical. And if he is, then I agree with him. Medicals should be straight. Let it have nutritional values. Let’s test the hell out of it for medical patients. But I can go get a bottle of tequila and I don’t know what’s in it. There’s no nutritional fact. I’ve done the studies. People die a lot, thousands of thousands every single week, in America from drinking. You get what I mean? We’re not even talking about the cancers they’re producing. We’re just talking about strictly drunk drivers.

So why can I destroy my body with liquor? I haven’t even touched on tobacco, but with liquor, if I can’t destroy it with marijuana, when we’ve been smoking untreated weed for hundreds and hundreds of years and ain’t nobody died from it yet. So where’s the evidence that me smoking moldy weed ain’t going to do nothing but make me cough too much and I’m going to hate it? Where is the examples that heavy metals are going to make me sick if it never has done it?
If you are a patient, I think you should go to the medical side. Go get your car. If you have to give up your guns because of that, I’m sorry. You know what I mean? If you don’t care about that, we should have a market that is called recreational, adult use. I’m an adult. Let me choose what I want. You get what I mean? Let it be up to us how we pursue it. You don’t go get a pack of Marlboros like, “I know this tobacco ain’t got no yeast on it.” You know what I mean? I don’t get it.

It logically doesn’t make sense to me. And then all these other recreational people who don’t want to go medical, I guess, they’re trying to win over regulators and new states by champion for testing and champion for this and that. I’m not for it because even THC and terpenes, we don’t even understand it to the point where we know this amount of THC does this for sure, does that for sure. We don’t even know that yet.

What you’re doing is you’re making it so that the bigger guys who can afford to massively produce and they can fail 30% of their flower and not care about it because they can send it up the chain vertically to get turned into edibles and other things. You’re giving it so that little guys like me, we can’t survive because we have to pass testing. 10 pounds for me being failed is $40,000 I lose. That’s huge. You get what I mean? That’s huge when we’re operating, we’re paying for everything ourselves.

I think it needs to be readdressed and we need to get more… We have to make a decision. Is cannabis recreational or we just all medical? You know what I mean? Or we’re all just using it for medical, then get rid of the recreational market and just say, “Everything’s medical and these are the guidelines.” I don’t know the difference between what I have to do and what they have to do. I’ve been told the only difference is my tag is blue when there’s this pink. So I just think it’s crazy, man.

I don’t care about yeast and mold if I’ll have… Sometimes somebody might want to buy some yeast and mold. You know what I mean? They’ve got $50 and I go get some oz. You know what I mean? And they want to buy it. I’m not saying visible, but a high yeast count or a high microbe count. Come on, now. If you started smoking in the early 2000s, you come from some brick, Mexican weed. You all get a little bit too fancy.

TG Branfalt: I miss beasters to this day. I still miss beasters. I mean, to your point, I mean, I’ve been smoking weed since I was 15 years old, but on a basically daily basis. And I’ve smoked moldy weed, like literally saw the mold and said, “Fuck it. What else am I going to do?” And I’m fine, and I was fine then.

Reginald Stanfield: You’re not going to go complain to the weed guy because then you might not get the good deals anymore.

TG Branfalt: It was fine. It was fine. I figured it out. No, and I appreciate your candor, man. I really do. I mean, on this show, I have a habit of complaining about over-regulation. This is something that I never really thought about because I’m not a cultivator, just the onerousness of this. For you, what do you think the most pressing social equity issues are in the Massachusetts industry? And what about the industry as a whole?

Reginald Stanfield: Ooh. Okay. I don’t want to sound like the bad guy. I am not a proponent of social equity. I’m a proponent of economic empire, and it’s because of why? It’s not because I don’t believe that this market was not built on people like me, because it was. Every governor, mayor, who championed for marijuana, cannabis, stood up and said, “We’re going to undo the right that dah, dah, dah, dah. We’re going to make it.” And they lie. They all lie. Because what you’re doing is then you’re turning around, creating something that’s over-regulated for people that are not like us. You get what I mean?

A lot of my people who do grow, who do sell, they are not structured business people. You get what I mean? They don’t know how to fill out an application of security SOPs. And then you turn around and have to have all this stuff done before you get a license. By the time you get to that stage, you already either have to sell all your business away to another person because they know how to do a business and all you know how to do is grow, all you know how to do is make edibles, all you know how to do is sell, and they know how to get a license.

By that time, you done sold your business away, or you don’t even operate it. You operate one portion or you become a figure head. And they tell you who your C-suite is, who all that is. I have my business. All my partners and everybody who is C-suite I’ve known for 10 plus years. I’ve decided to go my way to build people up because, say, one of them want to leave my company today, they can go start four or five businesses and they can give somebody else their viewpoint.

So I don’t agree. There’s a lot of social equity plans that they go and find already successful minority entrepreneurs and then give them the license. That’s not the way you teach. You know what I mean? I don’t agree. I think Jay Z said it, about how teaching somebody, once they’re rich, once that person has already made it rich, to go back and teach is impossible. You know what I mean? The people who are with me, they’ve seen the struggles of their boss from zero to now successful.

So they know everything. Even if they don’t want to redo it, they can go teach it. They can go and say, “Hey, no. You’re going to have to talk to people a certain type of way. This is the war zone working with your friends. Here’s the role. This is what Reggie did. If I’m successful now, I get people to support me who already are business people. Then when I’m successful, all these steps I took, I forget, you know what I mean?

So, in my opinion, if we want to build the social equity and the economic empowerment, we need to find entrepreneurs like me, and shout out to Elev8 Cannabis after all like Seun. We need to find those entrepreneurs and we need to empower those people, the people who will sleep on their couch. I mean, there’s a lot of us out there. There’s Ulysses, and Laurie, Major Bloom. There’s Rebel and Greybeard.

I know a lot of people who are like me, who are cut from the same cloth, that because of them, now five or six of their friends have jobs. They go from making 30,000 to now almost at a hundred thousand because of their expertise. So, no, having this open portal, yes, it does work. But look how long it takes. It’s only in Massachusetts, two maybe social equity applicants open after three years. There’s only two. What sense does that make? But it’s already three general applicants open. You get what I mean? And that’s us with nothing.

Think if you take that social equity and give it to more people like new who can’t qualify. You get what I mean? Let’s make standards. You have to hire so many people. We can do this. I feel like that social equity stuff is too… Why does it matter who lived there? You know what I mean? It doesn’t matter who lived there. Maybe let me start the business and say, “Hey, the employees you hire have to live here.” But I’m going to do that anyway because it doesn’t make smart sense for me to ship 50 people up here and pay for the housing to have them work security guard jobs. You know what I mean?

So, no. Yeah, my C-suite may be from out of state, but the other 116 employees will be Massachusetts residents that get great jobs, you know what I mean? Let’s come with income thresholds. You know what I mean? We can do so many different things, but it just seems like they just followed the medical market and that’s just the way they wanted to go by it. And then, nobody sat down and said, “Hey, how can we actually effect change?”

But there are businesses out there that are big, that are doing that. Shout out to Curaleaf. They’re doing that. I have calls with them and we talk, and they’re like, “How do we do this?” I’m like, “I don’t believe you guys taking your money and giving it to a small business is the way to go. Help me expand.” You know what I mean? Then you get 115 people like me. You know what I mean? Business isn’t charity, number one, and is not for everybody to win no matter what you do, no matter how much help you get.

Business is so hard and so rare that even in a market like what… Even if you want to open up a bakery and you have the money for it, you’re not guaranteed to succeed. You know what I mean? So we should have those people who can fight and get to this process that I’m at. Let’s support those because those are the outliers. You know what I mean? Those are the ones who can find some way to make it. I didn’t throw my hands up and say, “Ah, Maryland won’t let me in.” No. I’m like, “Fuck it. I’ll go to Massachusetts.”

I’ll go live in a mountain in the middle of snow country, around people who don’t know me. I’ll sleep in an RV if I have to. Seun, same thing. He tried to go to Washington. Washington wasn’t working. He went to Oregon and he built for $50,000. He slept at a shop. He built a shop. Those are the people in the stories that are the ones that we need to put, and there’s multiple of us. But a lot of us are not, you know what I mean, not in that state. So I think we have to redo social equity, 100%.

TG Branfalt: Would you support, I guess, maybe smaller versions of licenses, say, a street dealing level license where people can continue to do what they’ve been doing, just no longer fear legal reprisal? Is that something you might support?

Reginald Stanfield: I think we need to blow up every recreational market and get rid of all this license stuff, to be honest with you. I think you operate your business, just like if I want to open up a bartending, I get my business license, you know what I mean? I didn’t have to submit my security plan to the state of Maryland. You know what I mean? I didn’t have to submit my financial plans to the state of Maryland. I didn’t have to get my investors vetted by the state of Maryland. No.

I want to start a bartending service. If I want to teach people, I have to get my curriculum pass, but that’s it. You get what I mean? If you want to grow weed, you should get a business license and then go grow weed. You deal with it. You find a way. But the only thing I can still agree with, let’s get it tested so we know what we’re selling and there’s not liars. But even still then, I mean, that’s going to phase itself out because the consumers are going to say, “Ah, they’re selling junk. We’re not…” You know what I mean?

Same thing with cigarettes or bad tequila. You go on there and if you go and pay $30 for a bottom shelf tequila, I can take bottom shelf tequila, pour it in a glass bottle. And if I keep selling in that way, eventually I’ll go out of business. You get what I mean? That’s okay. I’m fine with that. We are America. We are a free-market country. Why when it comes to cannabis, where does this restricted… This is the first prohibition they have done this, they have ended this way, and I don’t understand it because there’s a lot of hypocrites now.

Everybody’s speaking, “Marijuana isn’t a drug, it’s a flower.” It’s this and that. And then they turn around to other, “We should regulate it.” Come on. You’re contradicting yourself. If it’s not a drug, then why are we treating them like Oxycodone? It shouldn’t be treated that way. It should be treated like a flower. I should be able to grow it if I want to. You get what I mean? If that’s the case, I grow my weed the way I want to, you can’t tell me not to grow it.

I should have to compete with Bob in his basement. You know what I mean? The difference is that Bob in his basement only has enough to sell to his friends. I can grow huge. You know what that does? It keeps me as a business level. Just like when I broke into the bartender industry, I made so many events because all the other bartenders were coming from crappy service companies who went to Fridays and like, “Hey, you want an extra job? We’ve got a temp service. We’ll send you out to this caterer.”

I went and rose the level of bartenders so that every bartender this caterer got was trained to bartend your private event at a house on a table, with limited staff. So they stopped going to the temp services. I didn’t sit in and say, “Regulate bartending. Let’s have a license that pass across the whole United States that everybody…” No, we don’t have to do that. You know what I mean? There, if you want to sell weed, you sell weed. I think it should be open free market.

Of course, it’s terrible for my bottom dollar. But I’m real, you know what I mean? I am a business person, but I’m real. I should have to compete with somebody who can get a tent and grow in their basement. That’s going to make me grow better.

TG Branfalt: This has been fascinating, man. There’s just not a whole lot of cultivators out there who are like, “Yeah, the individual should be able to grow in their basement, even though it might cost me some money.” The fairness mind that I feel like you have, just based on this conversation, people before profits, man, I appreciate the hell out of it.

Reginald Stanfield: Yeah. I mean, I’m a capitalist, I’m an opportunist, but I believe everything that’s for me is already there. It’s already given. I just have to be positive. Like I said, I’ve died before. I’ve seen a lot of money. I’ve been successful. I don’t really care about it. I don’t really care to be greedy. You know what I mean? I want to do everything I want to do to help change the world. You will hear different from people who just want to make this their business, and they’re super ambitious. So they want to be number one.

I do want to be the number one cultivator. I want everybody on the East Coast to know who JustinCredible is. But I’m going to get there because of me. You get what I mean? I don’t want to have to get there because there’s this brand who can outgrow me in a basement. No. If he’s that good, then I need to level up. Trust me, there’s some guys that are growing in their basement, that they grow… Trust me, my guys rarely go to dispensaries. That’s all I have to say.

There’s some fire stuff out there coming from some kid, 23 years old, who got his hands on a thousand-dollar light and growing in some soil that he made and he’s growing some fire. You get what I mean? That’s what makes it different. That’s what makes it better. I think he should be able to come and say, “Hey, buy my weed. I’m setting up a retail shop,” in his store. You get what I mean? And the same as that wave. If I sell food, you know what I mean, I get that it’s a consumable, and that’s where we have the differences. But we have a standard, and that’s all.

If we keep the testing, get rid of the over-excessive, the micro test, I think we should get tested and that test label should go on your product and people should know. Just like, “Hey, if I smoke your weed and I get sick, I bring it back.” I can buy molded bell pepper, and what do you do? Safeway doesn’t get fined or whatever you guys got up there. They don’t get fined. They bring you back your molded product. They take it and they give you more or they give you your money back. Why can’t cannabis be that way?

I can eat salmonella chicken and then the company doesn’t… Perdue doesn’t get shut down. Perdue does a recall. What’s wrong with that? You know what I mean?

That’s what I don’t get.

TG Branfalt: I mean, and that’s how I end up smoking moldy weed because I just cut the mold off the pepper. I’m that guy. Man, I could sit here literally and talk to you for the next like three days, but we can’t do that. No one would listen for that long. But where can people find out more about you, find out more about JustinCredible cultivation?

Reginald Stanfield: Yeah. Our Instagram justincredible_cultivation. Our website is jccultivation.com. My Twitter is forbes_next, and I think we have a JC Cultivation Twitter that I have to get somebody active on there. We’re coming. We will be in stores. I know for sure we’ll be in Curaleaf. We’ll be in Rebel. We’ll be at Elev8 come 420. So we’ll for sure be in stores, so look out for us. Look out for our own. We didn’t get to touch on our strands and none of that stuff.

We have our own strains. We have the Garrett Morgan gas masks. We have the JustinCredible, and the Fruitvale Station. Also, we have Kobe that will be hitting the market too. Look out for the things that we’re doing, and hey, hit me up on the DM. I usually answer every… I don’t think I don’t answer stuff. I have like a OCD of seeing a new message, so I’ll always answer messages. Hit me up on LinkedIn, Reginald Stanfield. I’m there, you know what I’m saying? I’m for the people.

TG Branfalt: Elev8’s one of the dispensaries that I actually do frequent.

Reginald Stanfield: Oh yeah.

TG Branfalt: So I will definitely be on the lookout for your product and for your strains the next time that I make it to Massachusetts. Reginald, dude, this has been really great. I hope to have you on the show again. I hope that you stay in touch with us and with me. Congratulations really on your-

Reginald Stanfield: Thank you, man.

TG Branfalt: … success. I can’t wait to see you Forbes next, right?

Reginald Stanfield: Hey. I appreciate that, man. It was a pleasure. I think this is one of the best podcasts I’ve done so far. I just thank you. Keep doing what you’re doing and keep talking to these people about the real cannabis industry and get it out there.

TG Branfalt: He’s not just the greatest, he’s not just the best. He is CEO of JustinCredible Cultivation, CEO and Head Horticulturist of Massachusetts-based JustinCredible Cultivation. For the wrestling marks, they’ll know “Not just the greatest, not just the best” line. Anyway, the first minority-owned general business applicant to open a grow facility on the East Coast. Thanks again, man. I really can’t wait to see how you grow. No pun intended.

Reginald Stanfield: All right, man. I appreciate you.

TG Branfalt: You could find more episodes of the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast in the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com on Spotify and in the Apple iTunes store. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily, along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play. This episode was engineered by Trim Media House.

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CannaCon: Facilitating Cannabis Industry Connections & Education

7/14/2021

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It’s been nearly five years since the first-ever CannaCon landed in Tacoma, Washington. Since then, the business-focused cannabis trade show has brought its unique networking-building experiences to new cannabis markets, big and small, across the United States.

CannaCon was founded by Bob Smart in 2017 because, as a medical grower himself, he found that professional education and networking options for people with serious aspirations in the cannabis industry were severely lacking. His vision was to provide a “one-stop shop” trade show where aspiring cannabis entrepreneurs could come together, learn from and teach one another, and connect with the many ancillary industries that are seeking to serve them. Bob had worked previously in trade shows and used that knowledge to kick off the original CannaCon — and the success of that early show indicated that demand for a B2B cannabis conference was indeed strong and the business model had merit.

Each CannaCon event features educational keynote presentations, panel discussions with a mix of entrepreneurs, industry representatives/lobbyists, and regulators, and a properly packed exhibition floor.

Since launching, CannaCon has hosted medical and adult-use cannabis industry expos in Washington state, California, Alaska, Colorado, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Massachusetts. This year, the team still has two events planned: one for Illinois in August and one for Virginia — one of the latest states to pass adult-use legalization laws — in November. CannaCon also recently announced conferences planned for 2022 in New York, Oklahoma, and Michigan.

Considering the proliferation of its trade shows, one might assume there is some sort of corporate powerhouse driving CannaCon’s success but that is not really the case. In fact, CannaCon is a family-run business with only a handful of full-time employees, according to the company’s marketing director Angela Grelle. That said, things are still run “very much like a business.”

“It helps because since we’re such a small team, if we see something that needs to get done, we just do it,” Grelle said.

That collaborative spirit has led to dozens of successful trade shows over the years, and CannaCon has risen to become an industry standard for other cannabis conferences and expos.

Over the years, Grelle said it has been particularly rewarding to see some now-household industry names getting started with just a tiny tradeshow booth only to grow within a few years into a magnificent trade show presence, buying out huge sections of the exhibition floor to better facilitate those early conversations. She obviously won’t take full credit for their successes but likes to think that the company’s early CannaCon experiences played some role.

She recalled one specifically satisfying story about an Oklahoma processor’s first CannaCon experience — “They did so much business at our first Oklahoma show that they went and bought a new 15,000 square foot extraction facility,” Grelle said. “He emailed us afterward and said it was, ‘one of the best trade shows we have ever done.’”

Perhaps the biggest indicator of CannaCon’s success, however, is that their presence is essentially temporary in any new market they visit. This is because CannaCon is dedicated to facilitating important early conversations between cannabis farms and processors and the ancillary firms who service them — and once those conversations are sparked, the attendees who go out and launch successful cannabis companies won’t necessarily be looking to return to another CannaCon-type event in the future. Consider that while the first-ever CannaCon was hosted in Washington state in 2017 and the cannabis industry is still very much going strong there, event organizers have decided they won’t be returning to the Evergreen State anytime soon because “those relationships are already made,” Grelle said.

While there are new and bigger cannabis markets opening up each year, eventually prohibition will be fully lifted and there won’t be any new markets opening up. At that point, CannaCon is likely to shift its business model to either focus more on larger region-specific shows or to look internationally as other countries open up their cannabis markets — but until then, there are new cannabis marketplaces and businesses popping up around the country, and the show must go on.

CannaCon currently has upcoming events scheduled in Illinois, New York, Virginia, Michigan, and Oklahoma. Visit CannaCon.org to learn more.

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Apple Lifts Ban on Cannabis Apps in App Store

7/05/2021

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Apple will allow cannabis-related apps in its App Store, Marijuana Moment reports. Updated on June 7, the policy change includes restrictions that require cannabis delivery apps to be geo-restricted within legal cannabis boundaries, and applications must come from legal entities and not an individual.

The original policy read:

“Apps that encourage consumption of tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol are not permitted on the App Store. Apps that encourage minors to consume any of these substances will be rejected. Facilitating the sale of controlled substances (except for licensed pharmacies), marijuana, or tobacco is not allowed.” — Excerpt, Apple’s previous App Store policy, via Marijuana Moment

But a change in the policy wording last month carved out specific allowances for “licensed pharmacies and licensed or otherwise legal cannabis dispensaries.”

Chris Vaughn, CEO of the California delivery service Emjay, believes Google, which updated its policy in 2019 to explicitly ban cannabis apps, will “follow quickly” on Apple’s lead, he told WeedWeek. He said Apple was likely nudged by the legal cannabis movement in general — five states have legalized cannabis in 2021 alone, including New York, and the nation’s largest employer in Amazon this year announced it would stop drug testing employees for cannabis and would engage with lawmakers to help progress a federal cannabis bill.

Facebook, which has been accused of “shadow banning” some not-for-profit cannabis organizations including even the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission — the state’s cannabis regulatory agency — has not yet moved to change its cannabis policies, according to the report.

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California Assembly Committee Approves Psychedelic Decriminalization Bill

6/30/2021

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The California Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday passed the Senate-approved psychedelic decriminalization bill, the Associated Press reports. The version approved by the committee includes psilocybin, DMT, ibogaine, mescaline (excluding peyote), LSD, and MDMA but does not include ketamine due to concerns over its use as a “date-rape drug.”

Committee Chairman Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D) said including ketamine in the legislation “would have just confused what [lawmakers] want to get accomplished.”

The bill allows for “social sharing” of psychedelics by adults 21-and-older and eliminates the state ban on cultivating or transporting psychedelic mushroom spores.

Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat and bill sponsor, said the bill works towards ending the War on Drugs that, he said, “has made us less safe because people use in the shadows” and described opposition to the reforms as “the psychedelic equivalent of ‘Reefer Madness,’ that this is going to do all sorts of horrible things.

“And that is just not true,” he said in the report.

The bill also includes language to end abstention messaging in state drug and alcohol programs.

The cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz, California have already decriminalized some psychedelics derived from plants and fungi. Denver, Colorado was the first-in-the-nation to decriminalize psilocybin more than two years ago. Since then, Washington, D.C.; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts passed similar measures.

During the 2020 General Election, Oregon voters approved a ballot question to decriminalize all drugs.

The bill moves next to the chamber’s Health Committee before a potential floor vote.

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Cronos Reaches Deal with Pharmacann That Would Allow 10.5% Ownership Stake

6/15/2021

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Licensed Canadian cannabis company Cronos Group Inc. announced on Monday it had reached a deal with Pharmacann that would allow a subsidiary of the Toronto-based firm to acquire a potential 10.5% ownership stake Chicago, Illinois-based cannabis operator.

The option would be exercised based on various factors, Cronos said in a press release, including U.S. federal legalization and regulatory approvals in the states where Pharmacann operates. The company operates both medical and adult-use locations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Maryland, according to the Pharmacann website.

Kurt Schmidt, president and CEO of Cronos Group, said the company was attracted to Pharmacann “because of their disciplined capital allocation, strong track-record, and compelling licensed manufacturing and retail footprint.”

“Our U.S. growth strategy focuses on delivering long term shareholder value by assembling a best-in-class brand and intellectual property portfolio and positioning to deploy our products in the U.S. market through investments and opportunities with U.S. leaders who share our vision and commitment to responsibly distributing disruptive cannabinoid products that improve people’s lives.”—Schmidt in a statement

Cronos paid $110.4 million for the option which will be distributed directly to Pharmacann shareholders, the company said.

Pharmacann CEO Brett Novey said the investment “validates [the company’s] position as a leading vertically integrated U.S. cannabis company” while highlighting the firm’s “ability to continue to expand and enhance” its asset base.

Cronos trades in the U.S. on the NASDAQ under the CRON symbol.

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rollingstone-curaleaf

Curaleaf Announces Partnership with Rolling Stone

6/09/2021

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Massachusetts-based Curaleaf Holdings Inc. on Tuesday announced a partnership between its Select brand and music and culture magazine Rolling Stone, including products for Select’s first pre-roll offering and for Select’s proprietary pod system, The Cliq.

Both products will feature three strains and flavor profiles hand-selected by Rolling Stone: “Overdrive,” a berry-forward sativa; “Reverb,” a complex and full-bodied indica; and “Phaser,” a fruity and calming hybrid, according to a press release announcing the partnership.

Rolling Stone President and Chief Operating Officer Gus Wenner said the partnership gives the 54-year-old magazine, oft known for its counter-culture roots, “the opportunity to design a product that elevates the music listening experience and celebrates the deep connection between the two.”

“Music and cannabis go hand in hand. Rolling Stone has a legacy of celebrating this connection and a long history of reporting on the fight to legalize cannabis.”— Wenner in a statement

Joe Bayern, CEO of Curaleaf, described the magazine as “known for having one of the most authentic and discerning voices in modern journalism, and, as part of that, they’ve included cannabis in their coverage for the past 50 years.”

“Part of my job at Curaleaf is building brands people love,” Bayern said in a statement. “Select is a brand built around the relentless pursuit of progress and going to great lengths to create the best possible experience for our consumer. This is a synergy we are honored to share with Rolling Stone.”

Rolling Stone and Select also plan to open a “first-of-its-kind retail space” in Las Vegas, Nevada next year. The Rolling Stone-branded products are set to first be released in Vegas through Select’s wholesale partners and at Curaleaf retailers.

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How FLO is Designing Safer Vapes to Set a Higher Standard

6/07/2021

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In the age of social media, misinformation is becoming more and more common. Unfortunately, facts frequently face intense scrutiny and are sometimes just brushed aside. This is an occurrence we see often with extremely polarizing issues, and this is what leads us to the tug of war we are seeing in the world of vaping — with its tremendous rise in popularity over the past couple of years, there has been an intense focus on both the risks and benefits that come from vaping. This focus was magnified in 2019 when we were faced with a full-blown, vape-related lung disease epidemic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the first vaping-associated lung illnesses were identified in Illinois and Wisconsin in April 2019, with cases peaking in September 2019 and slowly declining thereafter. In all, the CDC reported that there were a total of 2,807 hospitalized cases, including 60 confirmed deaths, as of February 2020.

Figure 1, Lung Illness Related Hospitalizations and Deaths, CDC, 2020

The alarming number of cases not only made headline news but also left many companies in the vaping industry scrambling to find solutions. Southern California-based FLO is one company taking initiative on the issue — FLO believes it has perfected its vaping cartridge offerings to not only deliver a flawless product but also give consumers peace of mind that they won’t risk going to the hospital with a vaping-related lung illness.

An epidemic of counterfeit & shoddy vaporizers

So, what exactly are the issues that FLO, and many other vaping companies, are up against? For one, things were so serious that the US government considered completely regulating the vaping industry by removing all flavored vaping products. Instead, the government raised the legal age requirement for tobacco and vaping products to 21.

But while raising the legal smoking age does make it slightly more difficult for teenagers to get their hands on smoking products, it still doesn’t accurately depict the issues with these vaping products in the first place. According to the CDC, the median age of individuals hospitalized with severe vaping-related lung illnesses was 24 years old. Furthermore, 79% of hospitalizations and deaths were of persons under 35 years old, with ages ranging from 13 to 75 years. These numbers illustrate that any age is at risk, so raising the legal age to 21 doesn’t necessarily solve the issue stemming from the epidemic.

Raising the legal age is a positive, especially considering the alternative proposal, but it’s important to truly understand what the main culprits of the vaping epidemic were.

One issue likely stemmed from vitamin E acetate — which is commonly used as an additive or thickening agent — being used in counterfeit vaping products. Research shows that while vitamin E acetate is used in supplements and skin creams and does not cause harm when swallowed or used topically, the chemical can impair people’s lung function when inhaled. According to health officials with the CDC, the chemical turned up in “every sample of lung fluid collected from 29 patients with vaping-related illnesses in 2019” and was being used as an ingredient in many counterfeit THC products. The fact that vitamin E acetate was found in every sample from 2019 could also explain why the epidemic sprung up suddenly that year and not before, even though vaping had been around for much longer.

But we shouldn’t be so quick to blame this just on vitamin E acetate because, according to Kathleen Raven of Yale Medicine, “officials stressed their findings remain inconclusive, and more than one chemical could be contributing to lung damage.” In a Scientific Reports study by Monique Williams, researchers conducted a topography on chemical elements and metals in the aerosol of tank-style e-cigarettes. The aim of this study was to examine other vaping-related culprits that may have led to lung illnesses. Researchers found a bevy of heavy metals in these vapors, including aluminum, copper, calcium, chromium, iron, lead, magnesium, nickel, silicon, tin, and zinc. They determined that the liquid is heated in these e-cigarettes, the metals essentially leach from the heating coil. Ultimately, the more metal parts there are in an e-cigarette, the higher the likelihood heavy metals are going to be present.

What happened?

So, was cheap material at least partially to blame? According to Michael Blood of the Associated Press, “Bootleggers eager to profit off unsuspecting consumers are mimicking popular, legal vape brands, pairing replica packaging churned out in Chinese factories with untested, possibly dangerous cannabis oil produced in the state’s vast underground market.”

China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and exporter of e-cigarettes, according to the China Electronic Cigarette Chamber of Commerce, and the country has been a frequent target of criticism due to the number of counterfeit and unregulated vaporizers being manufactured there. There have been numerous lawsuits against vaping manufacturers from China, including some by American companies. According to a May 2020 press release, “DS Technology Licensing, the owner of registered trademarks associated with the ‘Puff Bar’ vapor device, and Puff Inc., an authorized US distributor, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against over 20 Chinese and American companies accused of distributing counterfeit vaping devices.”

The firestorm of illnesses and the fear of cheap counterfeit products led to a dramatic drop in e-cigarette sales. Jane Technologies Inc. reported in 2019 that the market share for vapes was down 15% in medical states including Oregon and states with high levels of cannabis tourism such as Nevada and Massachusetts showing the worst declines. Furthermore, vapes’ share of sales fell 65% in New Mexico, 62% in Oregon, 37% in Massachusetts, and 32% in Nevada. As the illnesses wore on in 2019, so did the decline in vape sales across the country.

Figure 2, Vape Sales Dropping, New Frontier, 2019

And to be frank, this was all largely expected with the 24-hour news cycle churning out one negative article about vaping after another. Eventually, Chinese e-commerce sites like Alibaba noticed the outcry and removed e-cigarette components for the United States. According to a Reuters report, Alibaba began to feel pressure as their lack of regulating what was sold on their site came into the spotlight amid “many reports of death and injury in the United States” being tied to “makeshift brands with no identifiable owner.” Before the products were removed, it was very easy for consumers to hop on Alibaba and purchase devices, component parts, and packaging from the site — the move to suspend these sales spoke volumes to their connection to the counterfeit products. Another Chinese e-commerce site, DHGate, has also been accused of allowing counterfeit vaping products to be sold with no regulation. So, this is definitely a problem that even permeates the e-commerce world.

Localizing the US vape industry

Considering all of the issues above, legitimate vaping companies must take steps to ensure that their products are both safe and reliable. One strategy companies are pursuing is to create vaping cartridges that are free of heavy metals.

How does this circle back to FLO and its mission to put forth a reliable and trustworthy product? By assembling all their vaping cartridges locally, the company leadership is able to oversee the entire operation and make sure all regulations and standards are met. This is in contrast to many other vaping companies who go through China-based manufacturers and who sometimes must deal with the repercussions of inadequate material.

To combat the issues that other companies have faced with their vaping cartridges, FLO uses extremely heat-resistant organic Plexiglass, which contains zero heavy metals. FLO has also perfected the exact diameter thickness and heating resistance, and equipped the cartridges with patented ceramic coil technology that allows for perfect heating temperatures and will not leave a smell after use, and offers more-than-adequate airflow. Another important factor to FLO’s glass cartridges is that they are tamper-proof after being assembled, whereas many glass cartridges that can be screwed back out from the bottom have cause leakages when consumers attempt to unscrew the battery from the cartridge only to unscrew the cap that holds the whole cartridge together.

Ultimately, vaping is not going to land on anyone’s “most healthy” list. The fact is there will always be risks. But trustworthy and diligent companies like FLO do everything in their power to mitigate these risks as much as possible. Adult smokers need alternatives to cigarettes and giving them a safer and more reliable option is still important. FLO is leading the charge into a new era of vaping where counterfeits, heavy metals, and inadequate products are the furthest things from the consumer’s mind.

FLO products are available for purchase at Catalyst Dispensaries in LA and OC County.

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Rhode Island Seeks to Revoke Medical Cannabis Operator’s License Over Bribery

6/01/2021

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Officials in Rhode Island are seeking to revoke the medical cannabis cultivation license of Colorado Ave LLC, which is owned by Brian Bairos – who agreed to pay a bribe to disgraced former Fall River, Massachusetts Mayor Jasiel Correia, WPRI reports. Correia was found guilty earlier this month of extorting cannabis businesses and fraud.

Bairos testified in Correia’s trial that he paid the $150,00 bribe, in return for a non-opposition letter to open a dispensary in the city, in a combination of cash and more than 12 pounds of cannabis to a Correia associate named Tony Costa. Bairos was given immunity in exchange for his testimony.

In a show-cause order issued in February, the Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation (DBR) said Colorado Ave failed to ensure the agency access to its real-time camera feeds and failed to appropriately track and trace plants and inventory. The order also says the revocation is due to Colorado Ave’s “failure to uphold its fitness to engage in the medical marijuana industry by Mr. Bairos’ participating in Giving Tree’s extortion.” Giving Tree was the name of his proposed cannabis dispensary in Fall River.

The case has also ensnared David Brayton, a Rhode Island man who testified at Correia’s trial that he paid a $100,000 bribe to the former mayor for a non-opposition letter to open a dispensary. Brayton has successfully applied for the Rhode Island license lottery for his plan to open a dispensary, Faded Minds, in Providence, the report says.

Brian Hodge, a spokesperson for the DBR, said the agency is aware of Brayton’s links to the Fall River scandal and that regulators reserve “the right to disqualify applicants based on new information” but could not “comment on ongoing investigatory matters.”

Following his conviction, Corriea claimed he would “have a great day of vindication and eventually the real truth will come out” adding that “there were no facts that were brought forward [and] no overwhelming evidence.” He has promised to appeal.

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Connecticut Cannabis Legalization Bill Could Be Considered Next Week

5/28/2021

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The Connecticut House Majority Leader said he expects at least one legislative chamber to act next week on a bill to legalize cannabis in the state, WTNH reports. State Rep. Jason Rojas, a Democrat, said he expects the measure to be heard, first, by the Senate.

Rojas added that lawmakers plan on making social equity applicants a priority in the first round of licensing.

“The whole conversation around equity is about ensuring that entrance to the marketplace is able to be accessed by communities and or individuals who live in the communities that have been most impacted by the war on drugs.” – Rojas to WTNH

State Rep. Matthew Ritter, the Speaker of the Democratically-led House, indicated that he was “struck by the number” of lawmakers that “were ‘no’s’ previously, or ‘maybes’ who are kind of getting there.”

House Minority Leader, Republican state Rep. Vin Candelora, said conversations were still needed because of “health issues” associated with “people that are vaping 90% THC.”

A recent Sacred Heart University poll found nearly two-thirds (64%) of Connecticut residents support adult-use cannabis legalization in the state with about 29% opposed and 7% unsure. The survey also found that 61.6% of respondents supported legalization-related criminal reforms such as the expungement of low-level cannabis crimes, which is included in the bill making its way through the Legislature.

The reforms are supported by Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, who has indicated that if the Legislature fails to approve the reforms this session – which ends June 9 – the issue would “probably” end up being put to voters next year.

Connecticut is bordered by legal states Massachusetts and New York, the latter of which only approved the reforms in March and has not yet launched legal sales.

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Adult-Use Legalization Has Led to $7.9B in Tax Revenues for States

5/27/2021

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Adult-use cannabis legalization in the U.S. has led so far to a combined total tax revenue of $7.9 billion in states that have approved the reforms, according to a Marijuana Policy Project report. Washington state, which launched adult-use sales in 2014, has seen the most cannabis-derived income with nearly $2.6 billion in revenues from sales, according to the analysis.

Colorado, which also launched sales in 2014, has taken in more than $1.5 billion and, as of April, the state’s public schools have received $404.5 million of the total revenue generated from adult-use cannabis sales in the state.

California, where adult-use sales began in 2018 despite being the first state to legalize cannabis for medical use, has collected about $2.1 billion from adult-use sales. The state saw a 62% revenue increase from cannabis sales from 2019 – about $638 million – to 2020 when revenues reached $1 billion for the first time.

Oregon, which launched adult-use sales in 2016, has garnered slightly more than $540 million over nearly six years of sales, which 40% of revenues being distributed to schools.

Nevada has generated $374 million from cannabis sales since they began in the state in 2017. In the first two months of 2021, the state had netted about one-fifth of the total tax revenues it saw in 2020.

Illinois, which launched adult-use sales six months after the Legislature approved the reforms, has already added nearly $295 million to its coffers from adult-use cannabis sales. In 2020 – the first year of sales – the state generated $174.9 million from sales and almost $120 million already this year.

Massachusetts, the first New England state to allow sales, despite being the second (after Maine) to approve the reforms, has gleaned more than $260 million from adult-use sales, which began in 2018. Through the first two months of this year, the state has already collected nearly half (about $64 million) of what it saw it collected in all of last year (about $118.5 million).

Michigan has reaped about $137 million from adult-use sales since 2019. The state Department of Treasury reported in March that nearly $10 million has been disbursed to municipalities and counties and around $11.6 million will be sent, this year, to the School Aid Fund for K-12 education and another $11.6 million to the Michigan Transportation Fund, once appropriated.

Alaska, the least populated of all the states to legalize adult-use sales, has garnered $78.2 million since the retail launch in 2016. The MPP notes that “a number of factors initially resulted in slower revenue generation than in some other states,” including the lack of dispensaries allowed under the state’s medical cannabis program, which limited the number of businesses that could transition to the adult-use market. The report also said that, due to a limited supply chain, “many stores closed for large stretches of January 2017 or operated with reduced hours.”

Maine has, so far, seen the lowest amount of revenue from adult-use sales, with just $1.7 million since last year. The rollout of retail sales, which voters approved in 2016, was marred by vetoes from former Republican Gov. Paul LePage and then slowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

So far this year, lawmakers in New York, New Mexico, and Virginia have approved the reforms, but sales have not commenced. During the 2020 election, voters in New Jersey, Arizona, Montana, and South Dakota approved adult-use sales; however, in South Dakota the amendment is being challenged in the state Supreme Court.

In Vermont, which legalized use, possession, and cultivation but not sales in 2018, an adult-use market is expected to open next year.

 

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Poll Finds Strong Support for Legalization in Connecticut

5/20/2021

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Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Connecticut residents support adult-use cannabis legalization in the state with about 29% opposed and 7% unsure, according to a Sacred Heart University poll conducted last month and released on Monday.

The poll found support for the broad reforms was down slightly from a survey by the university published in March which found 65.7% backed legalization.

The survey also found that 61.6% of respondents supported legalization-related criminal reforms such as the expungement of low-level cannabis crimes, while less than half (47.8%) said legalization would lead to more drivers operating motor vehicles under the influence.

A supermajority (76.1%) surveyed said cannabis had “fewer” or “the same amount” of effects as alcohol and 70% indicated they believed cannabis had fewer effects than other drugs, such as heroin, amphetamines, and prescription pain medications.

Poll respondents were split as to whether they believed cannabis was a gateway drug, with 41.8% agreeing with the statement with 49.5% disagreeing and 8.7% unsure.

Earlier this week, Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont met with legislative leaders to discuss legalizing cannabis in the state, according to a Marijuana Moment report. Last month, the General Assembly Judiciary Committee approved a legalization proposal and lawmakers hope to vote on the measure before the session ends on June 9, Lamont said.

Earlier this month, Lamont indicated that if the Legislature fails to approve the reforms this session, the issue would “probably” end up being put to voters next year.

Connecticut is bordered by Massachusetts, which legalized cannabis in 2016, and New York, which approved the reforms in March. It is also nearby New Jersey, where voters approved legalization via the ballot during last year’s General Election.

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Cannabis in the South: Past, Present, & College/University Involvement

5/20/2021

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The United States’ South includes Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to the federal government.

Most of America has experienced ugly history, but this region’s history has been one of the harshest. The South has experienced slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, civil rights demonstrations, and black codes, which even further delayed society’s push for equality. For these reasons and others, the advancement of cannabis legalization and research in the South deserves recognition, especially when led by Black people.

Louisiana State University and Alabama State University are showing that a change is coming. Louisiana State University launched their Therapeutic Cannabis Program, and Alabama State University also recently started to allow medicinal cannabis research. Though neither offer degree or certification programs, allowing for research is a sign of good faith. Wellcana Group in Louisiana and Cannabis Group South LLC are leading the change in partnership with the universities.

The Past – Cannabis and Slave History in the South

In most U.S. history lessons, students are taught that slaves were forced to grow and harvest crops like cotton, tobacco, and sugar. But a lot of American history leaves out the early role of hemp and cannabis cultivation and how it relates to enslaved African Americans. Much of American history is whitewashed, so it’s easy to forget how hemp crops saved early settlements in Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and throughout the South. Additionally, the country’s early cultivation power was concentrated in the South, where large numbers of enslaved African Americans were forced to plant, grow, harvest, and process hemp.

James F. Hopkins confirmed in his 1951 book, A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky, “on the hemp farm and in the hemp factories the need for laborers was filled to a large extent by the use of … slaves.”

The Present – Cannabis Legalization in the South

Though the South was an early adopter of cannabis/hemp cultivation, it has largely been the last to legalize/decriminalize. As of May 2021, just two jurisdictions in the South have legalized cannabis for adult consumption: Washington D.C. and Virginia, but legalization there still carries restrictions.

In Virginia, dispensaries are not anticipated until 2024 but residents who are 21 or older can grow up to four plants (two mature, two immature). In D.C, medical and adult consumption are legal, but adult-use sales are still outlawed. Adults can only legally purchase cannabis if they have a medical card (although the rise of  cannabis “gifting” services in the District has somewhat addressed those concerns).

But as for the remaining southern states and their cannabis priorities:

  • Alabama – illegal
  • South Carolina – illegal
  • Arkansas – medicinally legal
  • Delaware – medicinally legal
  • Florida – medicinally legal
  • Georgia – only CBD oil is legal
  • Kentucky – only CBD oil is legal
  • Louisiana – medicinally legal
  • Maryland – medicinally legal
  • Mississippi – medicinally legal
  • North Carolina – illegal
  • Oklahoma – medicinally legal
  • Tennessee – illegal
  • Texas – only CBD oil is legal
  • West Virginia – medicinally legal

Involvement of Higher Education

Though the South has been very slow in its cannabis legalization efforts, as highlighted above, two states — Louisiana and Alabama — are allowing cultivators to partner with colleges/universities. In Louisiana, Wellcana Group, a fully integrated and diverse Louisiana biopharmaceutical company, is contracted with Louisiana State University (LSU) to cultivate and process hemp.

“In the state of Louisiana, LSU is one of two licensed by the state to cultivate and manufacture cannabis,” said Ra’mon Richardson, Lead Cannabis Cultivator with Wellcana Group, adding that, “I may be the first African American to cultivate and process medical cannabis [in the South].” A powerful statement made by a Black man, in the South, on the same soil where Black people were oppressed and enslaved through black codes and the 13th Amendment.

In Alabama, Cannabis South Group LLC (founded by Matthew Ibidapo), one of the first Black-owned industrial hemp companies, was awarded a license to cultivate hemp as a partner of Alabama State University, which is an HBCU (historically black college or university). Together, Cannabis South Group and Alabama State will work to establish the infrastructure needed for future farmers, entrepreneurs, and retailers.

These strides are important efforts that will shape our future through research that will lead to the further removal of Reefer Madness-era stigmas. These partnerships are also important because as shown above, the South’s reform efforts frequently carry restrictions like banning smokable consumption options — but rules that would ban smokable cannabis while allowing the smoking of tobacco are oppressive and overly restrictive.

The Work Continues

Wellcana Group has a Black lead cultivator, and Cannabis South Group is owned by a Black man — and these are two of the only companies that have been awarded cultivation licenses in the Deep South. Cannabis is certainly not legal in Alabama or in Louisiana, just as a restrictive medicine, but through LSU, Alabama State, and their partnerships with these two cultivation companies, a change is coming — and the South needs it. The South needs a massive change of pace with regard to freedoms, liberties, and reparations.

These licenses, partnerships, and efforts serve as powerful destigmatization tools that will lead to legalization and hopefully, a more balanced field for business opportunities in the cannabis industry. Education is key, and in a region where enslaved African Americans were beaten and worse for reading and trying to learn, thrown in jail through black codes, and robbed of their human and civil rights, historical efforts like these showcase accomplishments that enslaved ancestors could have only dreamt of.

Representation is also an important piece of this puzzle: Black students attending these colleges and seeing these Black men grow cannabis is important because for many, any Black man or Black person touching cannabis — that leads to jail. Many of their family members are in jail because they touched cannabis and many want to have careers in cannabis but are in a region that doesn’t support it.

Like with every other civil and human rights issue, the South needs to join the rest of the country and do what’s right: free the people by freeing the plant.

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Former Fall River Mayor Found Guilty of Extorting Cannabis Businesses

5/17/2021

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The former mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, Jasiel Correia, was convicted by a federal jury on Friday of extorting cannabis businesses and defrauding investors of more than $200,000, the New York Times reports. Correia, 29, was arrested in 2019 for extorting cannabis companies in exchange for non-opposition letters, which are required under state law in order for cannabusinesses to open in a municipality. He was initially indicted in 2018.

Correia solicited bribes ranging from $75,000 to $250,000 in cash, campaign contributions, and other payments from cannabis industry operators. He also bilked investors in his app, SnoOwl, out of at least $360,000, the report says.

Correia, who was elected in 2015 at 23-years-old, was convicted on charges of wire fraud, falsifying tax returns, and related counts of extortion. Last December, his former chief of staff, Genoveva Andrade, pleaded guilty to charges of extortion, bribery, and making false statements in connection with Correia’s scheme.

Nathaniel R. Mendell, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, described the verdict as “a fitting end to this saga.”

“He sold his office, and he sold out the people of Fall River,” Mendell said to the Times.

Correia indicated he would appeal.

“It’s not a great day but I’ve had other not great days and everybody here knows that that’s watched this unfold. But we’re gonna have a great day of vindication and eventually the real truth will come out. There were no facts that were brought forward, there was no overwhelming evidence. Unfortunately, there was a couple things that didn’t go our way that were technical today and that’s where we’ll be on grounds for appeal and we’ll win that appeal and I will be vindicated, and my future will be very long and great.” – Correia, to reporters, via WPRI

Correia was both removed from office and voted back in during a special election in March 2019. He ran for re-election that November and lost to Paul Coogan.

In a statement published by the Fall River Reporter following the conviction, Coogan said it was a “dark day” for the city but the “end of a long chapter” in its history.

“A chapter that does not at all reflect the true character of our City,” he said. “The verdict today confirmed that Jasiel Correia used the Mayor’s Office in Fall River for his own benefit. He made the unfortunate choice to use his official duties and powers to benefit himself, when he should have been acting in the best interest of our community.”

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Skittles Manufacturer Sues Cannabis Brands for Trademark Infringement

5/06/2021

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New Jersey-based candy maker, Mars Wrigley, is suing cannabis companies in Illinois, California, and Canada to stop them from using its brand names and marketing for infused edibles, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, accuses the companies of infringing on the Starburst and Skittles candy brands.

“Mars Wrigley strongly condemns the use of popular candy brands in the marketing and sale of THC products, which is grossly deceptive and irresponsible. The use of Mars Wrigley’s brands in this manner is unauthorized, inappropriate and must cease, especially to protect children from mistakenly ingesting these unlawful THC products.” – Mars Wrigley in a statement via the Sun-Times

The lawsuit names Terphogz and five companies that sell a cannabis strain and related products called Zkittlez, the report says. The unnamed defendants are “unknown” to  Mars Wrigley but they are accused of purchasing the goods in question to resell to Illinois customers.

The California lawsuit targets products called “Medicated Skittles,” “Life Savers Medicated Gummies,” and “Starburst Gummies” – marketed by GasBuds – which appear to mimic the packaging of the popular, non-cannabis, confections.

The legal actions are the latest against cannabis companies for trademark infringement of popular consumer products.

Atlanta, Georgia-based Edible Arrangements in September sued Chicago’s Green Thumb Industries for using their brand name in their Incredible product, according to the Sun-Times. Two months later, Ferrera Candy Co. sued California-based Tops Cannabis over its “Medicated Nerds Rope.”

Other lawsuits have brought over the “Woodstock” brand; the logo of a Massachusetts lumber company; the Citibank name, parodied as “Citidank;” the Tapatio hot sauce name and logo; the Gorilla Glue brand; and the logo of the National Hockey League’s Toronto Maple Leafs, among others.

Mars Wrigley is seeking $2 million for each counterfeit trademark named in the California lawsuit, along with attorneys’ fees and costs in both cases.

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Edmund DeVeaux: Pushing for Equitable Cannabis Opportunities in New Jersey

5/05/2021

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New Jersey’s cannabis legalization bid was a long-sought and hard-fought victory, only achieved through the collaboration of advocates, lobbyists, and lawmakers. As President of the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association — which works to promote jobs and growth in a sustainable, responsible cannabis industry — Edmund DeVeaux was closely attuned to the process.

In this episode of the Ganjapreneur.com podcast, Edmund joins our host TG Branfalt to discuss his life and work as a cannabis industry lobbyist, New Jersey’s exciting industry prospects, and his efforts to ensure fair and balanced cannabis industry opportunities for all. This interview also covers legalization in neighboring states including New York, the nature of political compromises, his advice for budding cannabis entrepreneurs, and more!

Note: This interview was recorded after New Jersey’s cannabis legalization initiative was approved by voters and lawmakers delivered a cannabis regulations bill to the governor, but before the governor officially signed the bill into law.

Listen to the podcast:

Read the transcript:

Commercial: Ganjapreneur is excited to announce the launch of our new YouTube series, THE FRESH CUT, hosted by Cara Wietstock.

Cara Wietstock: Hi, I’m Cara Wietstock, host of THE FRESH CUT by Ganjapreneur. In this interview series, we get straight to the source and speak with the real people working in the industry. In our first episode, I spend time with Nancy Southern, whose current mission is to educate seniors on cannabinoid medicine. She lets us know how to facilitate a comfortable retail setting for older adults and provides product recommendations directly from her own experience. Catch this and all future episodes on YouTube.

TG Branfalt: Hey, there. I’m your host, TG Branfalt. And thank you for listening to the Ganjapreneur.com podcast where we try to bring you actionable information and normalize cannabis through the stories of ganjapreneurs, activists, and industry stakeholders. Today, I am joined by a very, very interesting guest. His name is Edmund DeVeaux. He’s the president of the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association. He previously served as its policy director and worked in the New Jersey Treasury Department. He was also a commissioned officer in the US Army and is also a partner at the lobbying firm, Burton Trent Public Affairs. How are you doing this afternoon, Edmund?

Edmund DeVeaux: Oh, I’m doing great, Tim. Thanks so much for having me.

TG Branfalt: It’s really a pleasure. You have such an interesting background that I want to get right into it, man. Tell me about your background and how did that bring you to the cannabis space?

Edmund DeVeaux: Oh, wow. Well, public policy is my first love and I have always been in public policy. In fact, when I say that, I even include my years as a commissioned officer because that’s public policy. You get your orders from Washington, ultimately. So, I’ve always been in public policy and spend a number of years in the private sector and in the public sector. So one day, I decided to join a very good friend of mine at Burton Trent Public Affairs. I walked in the door as its executive vice president.

TG Branfalt: Wow.

Edmund DeVeaux: You fast forward, and four years ago, Burton Trent accompanied New Jersey‘s legislative delegation out west to pick out cannabis legalization. We were with senators and members of our assembly in Colorado and in Nevada. When we came back to our Trenton office, we sat around the coffee table and we said, “Look, this is going to be big. We have to get in this in a big way. What are we going to do?” So we co-created the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association, the state’s first and largest trade association built on the cannabis industry.

But it’s funny, Tim, even before we all agreed to do that, we went home for the weekend. I always like to share this part because look, I’m not a real cannabis user and so people will question, “Well, why are you doing this?” And so, we went home over the weekend and I shared it with my daughters that I was thinking about doing this, shared it with my parents.

TG Branfalt: Wow.

Edmund DeVeaux: I even went to a dear friend who’s a member of the clergy. I said, “Look, if you don’t think that this is a good idea, please do share it and I’ll make my decisions accordingly.” And my good friend simply asked me one question. He says, “Well, why are you doing it?” And I replied, “Because I want it done right. I want it done right because I am a parent. I want it done right because I am an officer in my church. I want it done right because I am active in my community.” I can’t leave such serious policy up to just anybody, right? It’s the old adage, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: So if I’m not part of this policymaking, then how can I complain about what occurs? That was the decision, Tim.

TG Branfalt: How did those very important people in your life react? What was the reaction? Did anyone say you’re out of your mind?

Edmund DeVeaux: No. No, in fact, it was funny. I got cool points with my youngest daughter. And so, it was my oldest daughter who followed me into the policy world, she said, “Wow, that sounds neat.” And my parents, they just said, “Look, we grew up at a time when it was reefer and you were smoking dope.” They said, “Look, if you think it’s a good idea, we like the fact that… Look, you’re our son. You’re pretty smart. Yeah, we trust you.” And when it came to asking my good friend in, in the clergy, he basically said, “Look, whether you know it or not, we’ve had members of our congregation who were cancer patients-“

TG Branfalt: Wow.

Edmund DeVeaux: “… who are seniors who got their medical cards.” And sure enough, I’m thinking back about them, we lost one or two of those members, but their last days were improved. Their quality of life was improved because of cannabis. So he was just like all over it. And so it made it simple. When we got back to the office and I think my partners were waiting for me to say I was in and I said it. So we were good to go. Thus, the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association.

TG Branfalt: When you say, “I wanted this to be done right.” What is done right look like to Edmund DeVeaux?

Edmund DeVeaux: When we look at policy and done right, first and foremost, for me being a man of color, I’m African-American for those folks that can’t see me and can’t tell by my voice. I’m African-American. And I do know because of family members and friends that were victims of the war on drugs, they weren’t victim of drugs, they were victims of the war on drugs. And I saw the unfair treatment of my friends and family. I saw what happened to certain people when they didn’t have a choice of cannabis versus other substances. So getting it done right clearly was expungement, long answer to expungement and reversal of the policies that not only demonized cannabis, but weaponized cannabis. And so, that’s getting it done, right.

But getting it done right means because I am a parent and because I am active in my community with members of the youth groups, I want to make sure that, number one, that they can wait until they’re 21 to make a reasonable decision about what substances they want to choose to use. And then when they choose, it’s got to be safe. You know, I remember back when it was really dangerous, and it’s only gotten more dangerous if you were buying your cannabis in the black market. You just really didn’t know what you were getting. It went the spectrum, Tim, from either it was weak and it was stemmy, right, or seeds and was no good.

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: Or it went in the complete other direction and it was dangerous, right? Whether it was embalming fluid or something else. And so, I want it done right because I want it safe. So even if you’ve got it, God forbid, you should be a minor and somehow get ahold of it, at least we know it came from a regulated market.

TG Branfalt: You talked about the weaponization of cannabis laws and I got chills just because I am a white guy and we got away with a lot. So to hear it with such strong sort of terms is chilling to me. In the legislation that was approved, and we’ll talk about sort of where that process is kind of a mess right now, talk to me about the social equity provisions that are included in that legislation. What is the opinion of your association with regard to those proposed rules?

Edmund DeVeaux: Well, it’s funny, this was an evolutionary process. When Governor Murphy first took office back in 2017, he said, “First 100 days, right, we’re going to legalize cannabis in New Jersey.”

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: Well, we got to 100 days and the 100 days turned into 200 days, turned into 365 and so on. In those early days, the conversation did circle around social equity, social justice, economic parity. And believe it or not, the early iterations of the legislation didn’t touch it. And it wasn’t until …

TG Branfalt: Wow.

Edmund DeVeaux: Well, it wasn’t until we got to this last iteration. I know a lot of people were unhappy because it didn’t quite go far enough. Look, I get that. But being in public policy in my whole life, you got to start somewhere. So fortunately, what did occur in the current legalization bill is that we do have a class of future applicants, minority, women, and veterans. So we got that in there. We got expungement in the bills as well. We got legalization up to six ounces. Then anything after that… And you’re talking about it’s something on par with a traffic ticket, right?

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: We took away the criminality of the substance. So when we start talking about social equity, could it have gone farther? Absolutely. But are we angry that it didn’t go further? No, we’re not because we can always pick it up from there.

TG Branfalt: You are a lobbyist, and in this industry, that is a dirty term. What role do lobbyists have in the cannabis space and moreover, what role should they have?

Edmund DeVeaux: You know, that’s a great question because I do get that a lot especially with speaking to high school students who ask, “Well, what is a lobbyist?” Right? And so, you have the fun telling them, “Well, the term actually was generated because people were waiting in lobbies, right?

TG Branfalt: Yep.

Edmund DeVeaux: That’s how you stoke the conversation. But more importantly, and I know this is a bit of a digression, I asked people, I said, “Do you realize that you were a lobbyist by the age of two? You were negotiating for that cookie, right? You were negotiating getting that sweet. You were negotiating. And that’s what you did by the age of two, you are certified lobbyists.” And that’s what everybody is.

TG Branfalt: Waiting in the hallway.

Edmund DeVeaux: Waiting in the hallway. Right. Waiting in the doorway of that kitchen, right? So being a lobbyist, it’s all about getting to yes. It’s how do you get to yes. And that is the positive aspect of being a lobbyist, right? If the answer’s always no, then that creates challenges, it creates hurdles, it creates hard feelings. My opinion and many of the other good lobbyists, try to figure out how do we get to yes. Compromise is not a dirty word, and so you get to yes. And so, with the cannabis space, it has always been about getting to yes. It’s always been about how do we get to legalization. How do we get a medical program? How do you get to yes? You’re talking to legislators who many are my age and older who grew up thinking that all drugs are bad, right?

TG Branfalt: Yep.

Edmund DeVeaux: We have younger legislators and policymakers who were part of the D.A.R.E. Program, right? The Drug Awareness and Resistance Education. They were part of D.A.R.E. and D.A.R.E. said, “All drugs are bad.” right? “Don’t do it.”

TG Branfalt: Meanwhile, it made me more curious about them, right?

Edmund DeVeaux: Right. Yeah. So much for the D.A.R.E Program and the D.A.R.E. dog, right? So, you got that stuff going on and so in the lobby space, in the cannabis industry, we have been successful nationally by getting to yes. In over 30 states, we got to yes. In our medical programs, we got to yes. It makes sense, right? We’re getting to yes in terms of the federal government, right? You get the Sessions Memo which shocked everyone which was the successor to the Cole Memo, where even though the AG of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States says, “Back off of cannabis convictions. You’ve got better things to do.” So we’re getting it right. We’re getting to yes.

TG Branfalt: The legalization bill of course was basically approved by voters after lawmakers approved that bill to go to the ballot. Since then, it’s had an up and down. We expected it to be signed. And then it went down again when there was some issues with penalties for children or lack thereof. They put out another version of the bill. And then the sponsors, Scutari, who’s been a big player in this since the beginning, him and another lawmaker and I’m forgetting the name right now, but they pulled that bill. So where are we right now? How are members of your association weathering this legislative rollercoaster?

Edmund DeVeaux: Well, it’s interesting. Go back two years and everyone thought that it was never going to happen. We had members of the association who more or less were trying to figure out if they should stay as members of the association.

TG Branfalt: Interesting.

Edmund DeVeaux: They were saying, “Look, New Jersey isn’t going to do it. New York and Pennsylvania are going to beat us to it. We had requests for applications go out. We had applicants get held up in court. Things really weren’t looking good.” The fact that the legislature punted to the voters was still yet another challenging sign. But look, the voters overwhelmingly said, “Cannabis is a legitimate business. Get it up and running, get adult-use up and running.” So here we are, got the legalization bill passed through both houses, gets to the governor’s desk and the governor doesn’t sign it. Governor doesn’t sign it and he says, “Well, look, talking about not going far enough, you’re not going far enough with respect to making sure that there are penalties in place for minors because there are penalties if a minor gets caught with alcohol, there’s got to be penalties if a minor gets caught with cannabis.”

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: We have to make it clear from the governor’s perspective. And he’s not wrong, that just because we use the term legalized, it’s not legalized for everybody, right?

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: It’s legalized for 21 and older. In fact, we just had a recent conversation when you read the summary of the bill, the legalization bill. And the bill uses the term certain adults. Somebody asked me, “Well, what’s a certain adult? I said, “When you’re 18, you’re legally an adult.” Therefore, see, the nuances of the political language, nuances of policy, certain adults, 21 and older. The governor wanted to make it clear that legalization was not going to be this tossed around term, much like recreation, right? We’re learning not to use the term recreational because it takes away the seriousness of what you’re about to do.

Here’s the dilemma. The short of it is, governor wants something in place protecting the kids, right? It’s all about the kids, it’s all about the children. Now, the legislature says, “We’ve done enough. Sign the bill,” right? “Sign the legalization bill. We’ve done enough.” And so, now we’re at this stalemate. And they’re not wrong. They really have. They’ve worked on this thing. They fought in both houses. They fought in the Senate. They fought in the Assembly scrambling to get votes. They kicked it to the voters, gets done, and you’re still fighting to get the language. You get it through with both houses, so they’re not wrong either. So we’re at this point now where everyone is principled on this, which is kind of odd, right? But everyone is principled, and so, we’re stuck.

Now that being said, here’s a little technical put the dime in the meter, after the bill passes, after any legislation passes, if the governor doesn’t sign it within 45 days, it automatically goes to the books. It automatically becomes a law.

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: But the exception to that is if the governor vetoes the legislation. So now we started the clock and we’re just a couple of weeks away from 45 days. Does the governor not sign it, not veto it and just allow it to become legislation or law? Or does he veto it? In which case, that’s really not a good look. Look, the bookies are out from who you’re betting on.

TG Branfalt: In New Jersey to override a veto, does it require 2/3?

Edmund DeVeaux: Yes.

TG Branfalt: Do you know if the appetite is there for 2/3 of lawmakers?

Edmund DeVeaux: You know what? Let me rethink that. Because in New Jersey, it’s kind of interesting. The governor can veto… Yeah, I believe it is 2/3 as opposed to a simple majority.

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: Right, to change it. I think the willingness will be there. I think they could. I think they would.

TG Branfalt: Okay. In a previous interview, you said that the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association will work to support an industry without “artificial barriers”. I found that to be a very interesting term that I hadn’t really heard from anybody before. Can you explain what you mean by the term artificial barriers and what the association is advocating with regard to these barriers?

Edmund DeVeaux: The New Jersey CannaBusiness Association is, I’ve dubbed it the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce. We represent all of the businesses, not just the people who touch the flower, but all of the ancillary businesses as well. As the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, what we have to make sure is that everyone has an opportunity to be part of this responsible, sustainable, and profitable industry. When we talk about artificial barriers, you look at the application processes where just currently under the medical program, it costs thousands, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to muster an application based on the way things are now. It doesn’t need to be that way. You’re stifling the industry. You’re clearly stifling communities of color and disadvantaged communities when you create these financial barriers that just don’t need to exist.

Look at Oklahoma. Oklahoma, you apply for a license, it costs you a couple of thousand dollars and you get a license, of course, after background checks. But why can’t New Jersey be that way, right? Why can’t we just say a cannabis operation is like a CVS. You don’t put CVS through the ringer like this, right? You don’t put any food chain through the ringer. Stop creating these hurdles that are just unnecessary. We are missing out on the possible tax revenue. We’re missing out on regenerating neighborhoods. We’re missing out on doing all of these great things because we think we need to do these financial hoops and financial hurdles. Those are artificial barriers. They’re barriers to entry into the industry.

TG Branfalt: Keeping on the subject of businesses, how important is keeping the industry in the hands of small businesses or putting cannabusinesses in the hands of smaller entrepreneurs specifically in New Jersey? How will the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association work to this end? I think that’s what a lot of people worry about when we’re talking about lobbyists and we’re talking that it’s only the big companies that can afford the big guys to go in there and get that yes. What’s your take on that?

Edmund DeVeaux: No, that’s great. In fact, my predecessor, Scott Rudder, he was also my partner at Burton Trent. Scott came up with the phrase, “Main Street before Wall Street,” right? We definitely have to support local business. We have to make sure that the person living in a community has the opportunity to bring that investment to their community. They have to be able to keep that dollar circulating in that community, right? You can’t have a dollar or $5 come into the community and then exit that community in a short period of time because a larger out-of-state operator is sending its profits back to Illinois, or back to Nevada, or back to Colorado. It does not benefit New Jersey. It doesn’t benefit the neighborhoods that we’re trying to positively effect.

What we really need to do as an association and we’ve taken this stance, we’re talking about, number one, lowering that financial bar to entry. Lower it, get people involved. Number two, Main Street before Wall Street — make sure that if I’m in a neighborhood, I can invest in my neighborhood, that I can get to the storefront and I can rent that storefront or buy it and raise my business, stand up a business, especially cannabis. Why not? And so, when you look at the landscape of New Jersey and you see vacant strip malls now.

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: The large shopping malls are going away. There is a need to create opportunity locally and make sure that we benefit the local participants before we start benefiting the out-of-state participants.

TG Branfalt: You now gave me this vision of strip malls full of dispensaries or indoor malls full of dispensaries in New Jersey. That would be really exciting. Is it surprising to you that New Jersey beat out more liberal Eastern states to the punch on this? You had said earlier such as New York, right? We’ve had Cuomo for decades now it seems. Connecticut, which has had democratic leadership since 2010. And I mean, New Jersey has only had one Republican governor since 2002, but it was Chris Christie who hates cannabis.

Edmund DeVeaux: That’s right.

TG Branfalt: What was it like for you to watch, dude, small New Jersey beat out their big liberal counterparts?

Edmund DeVeaux: You know, Tim, I use the phrase, “We’re the tortoise that beat the hare.” People looked at us and we were the last… No one was betting on us to pull this off, right?

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: It was a perfect storm. You had New York and the fact that the governor-

TG Branfalt: They tried three times in a row?

Edmund DeVeaux: I mean, look, I was involved with discussions in New York. I appeared on panels in New York, and I’m sitting there next to governor’s aides. And they’re like, “Look, it’s in the budget bill. It’s going to happen in April. It’s going to happen in April.” Never happened. It never happened. At least in New Jersey, we kept plugging along like the tortoise, right? Sometimes, we got tucked in our shell, but by and large, we just kept plugging along. And so when we kicked it over to the voters, when the legislature did that, what better way to take your chances, right, if you can’t get the votes.

And so, all of the work that was going into the polling, the pre polling was telling us, “The voters are for this.” And so, even if you were opposed to cannabis being legalized, the voters were telling you through all of the polling data, conservative communities, liberal communities. And sure enough, cannabis legalization passed in every single town. Passed in every town.

TG Branfalt: In every town?

Edmund DeVeaux: Every town. Every town voted yes by majority.

TG Branfalt: Wow.

Edmund DeVeaux: And so, when you look at that, New Jersey beat New York, beats Pennsylvania to the punch simply because we just kept going at it.

TG Branfalt: I mean, you guys are fortunate to have a ballot initiative process. I mean, in order for a ballot initiative to happen in New York, it has to be a constitutional amendment. It’s impossible, basically.

What is your vision and that of your organization for the New Jersey cannabis industry? You get the headstart on New York. You’re definitely going to get a lot of downstate New Yorkers coming over the same way that our sub-staters go to Maine and Massachusetts. What does it look like to you?

Edmund DeVeaux: Here’s what I think. I never stopped thinking, of course, being a New Jersey executive, right? I worked for multinational corporations and I totally understand, well, I try to understand business, right? We are a regional economy, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.

TG Branfalt: Yep.

Edmund DeVeaux: Whether you like it or not, everything is based on what happens in our region. Our hub, our Tri-state area is what drives the nation. And so, you can’t just think in a vacuum, Tim. This has got to be a, “Well, what happens when New York gets it across the finish line? What happens when?” So from a New Jersey standpoint, the things that I think we do is we definitely have to be careful with the tax issue. Don’t overtax the product. You have to be creative with respect to standing up the industry, making sure that groups like my membership, like the association’s membership, everyone gets a shot. Whether you’re in IT, whether you’re in engineering, architecture, whether you’re in real estate, everybody’s got to get a shot.

And so you create the opportunities for everyone to get a piece because all of those companies in New Jersey will probably have some footing in New York. They’ll have some footing in Pennsylvania. And you know darn well that New York companies are looking and they’re trying to figure out ways to get in. It’s really creating a platform, making sure that the scaffolding is there when you’re building this thing so that all of these companies, not just the people who touch the flower, but the ancillary businesses are getting a shot at growing their businesses. And you do it from a regional perspective, right? Knowing that you’ve got to be competitive.

TG Branfalt: In your role with the cannabis association, are you seeing a lot of sort of inquiry from more traditional, it could be ancillary companies, coming to you and saying, “Hey, what could I do here?” Are you seeing a lot of that?

Edmund DeVeaux: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We are. We’ve gotten calls from people from out of state who were looking and they have said, “Look, I want to do cultivation. I want to do manufacturing. I want to do retail.” And then I do get the calls, “I’m in security. I’ve got a security firm. I do delivery. I’ve got all of these great business models.” And so yeah, they are here and they are joining the association, which is really neat. We are getting this interest. As the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, it’s making it great, because we actually get to talk business. I would say up until November of last year, the social justice discussion, the economic parody discussion and the commerce discussions were all being done mutually exclusive. People were either talking about social justice or they were talking about commerce.

Thank goodness, as of November 3rd, 2020, these conversations are now inclusive. So now, I get the benefit of talking about commerce and social justice and economic parody, not or. And so, when all of these companies are calling and reaching out trying to figure out if New Jersey, not if, but how they do New Jersey, I get to have that conversation. “Are you a Black-owned business or a woman-owned business? If you’re a veteran, let’s talk about our history,” right? And so, we get to talk about that. Also, from a policy, from a lobbying standpoint, how do I create the framework? How do I get to yes so that these businesses can get in, get stood up and be profitable.

TG Branfalt: I love your energy, man. You’re just smiling the entire time you’re talking. It might seem some sort of like benign to a lot of people, but to me, who does a lot of these conversations, I mean, it’s really something special to see the joy in your face. You can tell you’re very excited about building this industry and working towards these goals that you’ve set throughout. When somebody comes to you from the industry or from outside the industry and says, “Edmund, how can I be successful in the cannabis space?” What’s your advice for those people?

Edmund DeVeaux: Number one, be patient because it is a brand new industry. I do smile because this is just an amazing time. Tim, we’re making history. When was the last time this country saw an industry from the ground up? It’s been decades. And so, here we are. So number one, be patient, because there’s going to be several iterations as to how we create the industry. Patience is number one. Number two, and I do love this about being a lobbyist and having friends that are in the lobbying industry and business consultancy space. It’s exciting because create teams, create networks, be able to pivot. We’re talking cannabis today, tomorrow, we might be talking hemp.

TG Branfalt: Yeah.

Edmund DeVeaux: Let’s be able to pivot, create these relationships. Because look, as a lobbyist, I love relationships, right?

TG Branfalt: That’s how it goes, but yes.

Edmund DeVeaux: Especially ones you don’t have to pay for. So yeah, be patient, build your networks, build your business wisely and be flexible.

TG Branfalt: This has been really enlightening and fun conversation, man. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. I was fortunate with having a great conversation with you prior to this. It’s really great to meet you and to have you as a guest. Where can people find out more about the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association and more about you?

Edmund DeVeaux: Oh, well, the website is www.newjerseycannabusiness. You spell out New Jersey, and cannabusiness is C-A-N-N-A, business, newjerseycannabusiness.com. My email is ed — ed@newjerseycannabusiness.com. Please, feel free to reach out, check out our website. In fact, we’re going to be redoing it. I got an intern. I got a college intern. I’m going to let her redo the website. It’s going to be cool.

TG Branfalt: That’s great for the resume. I’m going to send some of my students your way. They could be your communications interns. I know a couple.

Edmund DeVeaux: Yes, feel free.

TG Branfalt: That’s Edmund DeVeaux. He’s the president of the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association. He previously served as its policy director and worked in the State Treasury Department. He was also a commissioned officer in the US Army and is a partner at lobbying firm, Burton Trent Public Affairs. Edmund DeVeaux, thank you so much for being on the show. I look forward to seeing what role you play, which probably going to be an out-sized one, in building New Jersey’s industry. Really appreciate it.

Edmund DeVeaux: Tim, thank you for having me. A pleasure.

TG Branfalt: You can find more episodes of the Ganjapreneur.com podcast in the podcast section of Ganjapreneur.com on Spotify and in the Apple iTunes store. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you’ll find the latest cannabis news and cannabis jobs updated daily along with transcripts of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com app in iTunes and Google play. This episode was engineered by Trim Media House. I’ve been your host, TG Branfalt.

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