$1.6M Spent on Pennsylvania Cannabis Reform Lobbying Last Year

3/17/2025

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Twenty-six companies spent over $1.6 million on lobbying in Pennsylvania for cannabis reforms last year, according to a Spotlight PA analysis, with over $800,000 coming from multistate cannabis companies.  

Trulieve, which operates cannabis businesses in nine states, spent over $210,000 on lobbying in Pennsylvania last year, with $165,000 spent on direct communications and $45,000 on indirect communication. The Pennsylvania Cannabis Coalition (PCC), a trade organization, spent $171,720 on lobbying last year, which Meredith Buettner, the group’s executive director, told Spotlight was used to advocate for “modernization to the medical marijuana program,” and “advancing adult-use legislation.” 

According to data from the state Department of State Lobbying Disclosure Database, in addition to Trulieve and the PCC, 24 other companies and organizations spent money lobbying for cannabis reforms in the state, including: 

  • Cresco Labs – $149,084 
  • PA Options for Wellness, Inc. – $105,000 
  • CannTech PA – $90,770 
  • Veranos – $90,000 
  • Curaleaf – $90,000 
  • Penn AltOrganics – $78,000 
  • Organic Remedies Inc – $75,157 
  • Acreage Holdings – $69,066 
  • Restore Integrated Wellness Center – $68, 641 
  • Ascend Wellness Holdings – $65,942 
  • Holistic Farms, LLC – $60,871 
  • Maitri Holdings LLC – $48,000 
  • Metrc – $39,000 
  • FarmaceuticalsRX – $38,500 
  • GIT Pennsylvania – $36,040 
  • MLH Explorations, LLC – $28,984 
  • Terrapin – $24,586 
  • US Cannalytics – $24,000 
  • ACT Laboratories, Inc. – $20,000 
  • Jushi Holdings – $19,500 
  • Green Leaf Medical, LLC – $16,250 
  • Whole Plants – $15,000 
  • American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp – $6,653 
  • Leaflink – $3,260 

Some cannabis company executives also contributed to political candidates and lawmakers in Pennsylvania, including Benjamin Kovler, CEO and founder of Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries (GTI), who contributed $45,000 to Pennsylvania’s highest-ranking lawmakers last year. Kovler gave Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) a $25,000 donation while splitting evenly the remaining funds between state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D) and Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R). Anthony Georgiadis, president of GTI, contributed $10,000 apiece to state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R) and State Sen. Dan Laughlin (R), who also chairs the chamber’s Law and Justice Committee. 

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Missouri House Committee Again Rejects Hemp Regulation Bill

3/17/2025

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For the second time this month, a Missouri bill to regulate THC-infused hemp products – which is backed by hemp companies in the state – was voted down in the House General Laws Committee, the Missouri Independent reports. The measure was rejected by the committee in a 1-13 vote on March 4, while the committee voted down the measure 5-7 on March 13 after hemp beverage distributor Steven Busch, who helped draft the measure, emailed committee members asking them to vote against it.

The bill voted down last week was amended from the previous version to include requests sought by the Missouri Hemp Trade Association, including increased sales taxes and self-distribution, but also allowed the continued sale of THC-A flower, which Busch opposed.

“It would really jeopardize the whole industry if they keep trying to push THC-A as hemp. If somebody wants a product like that, they can very easily get it at a dispensary and that’s where it should be obtained.” — Busch to the Independent

Two other hemp regulation bills, backed by the Missouri Cannabis Trade Association, are being considered by the state legislature and have already cleared House and Senate committees, the report says. Those bills seek to ban most intoxicating hemp products from being sold outside of dispensaries; but hemp beverages would only be sold in bard and liquor stores.

Busch told the Independent he would back those bills, which he said “have all the protections” needed for “consumers and businesses in there to make the product safe and properly regulated.” He added that if the bills don’t pass, the state’s hemp industry would “be in no man’s land again.”

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Federally-Funded Study to Investigate Agricultural Benefits of Hemp Cultivation and Biochar

3/17/2025

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The U.S. Department of Energy is funding a $5 million study investigating the agricultural benefits of hemp cultivation and biochar, a charcoal mixture similar to planting soil. The joint effort will include researchers from Western Washington University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Connecticut,  and the six-year study will focus on soil health under the effects of biochar and rotations of hemp, wheat, corn, chickpeas, and other crops.

According to David Gang, the project leader and director of the WSU Center for Cannabis Policy, Research, and Outreach, “Hemp and biochar are potentially powerful tools for invigorating agricultural soils. Together, they might amplify each other’s effects.”

“We want to see how different combinations of hemp and biochar affect the entire cropping system over time and how beneficial these practices are for soil health.” — Gang, in a press release

The study will include soil analysis efforts by the private firm Yard Stick PBC, which is developing a spectrometer probe and learning models to measure different forms of carbon in the soil.

“Biochar’s role in the rapid, durable decarbonization of agricultural supply chains is very promising,” said Chris Tolles, Yard Stick CEO. “Our mission is to activate soils for climate and agricultural impact. We are thrilled to provide soil carbon measurement expertise to this innovative project and are grateful to the Department of Energy for their leadership.”

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Minnesota Cannabis Business Applications Portal Crashes Ahead of Licensing Deadline

3/17/2025

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The online portal for submitting cannabis license applications to the Minnesota Office of Cannabis Managment (OCM) was unexpectedly shut down at 9:00 p.m. last Friday, just a few hours before the state’s adult-use cannabis business applications window was scheduled to close, FOX 9 reports.

Accela, the third-party vendor behind the online portal, said the site was back up and running by 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, although the application window was scheduled only until midnight. Ultimately, state officials extended the deadline to 11:59 p.m. on Sunday.

The cannabis licensing window was open to both social equity and general business applications, and the available licenses included cannabis microbusiness, mezzobusiness, cultivator, manufacturer, retail, wholesaler, transporter, testing facility, delivery service, and medical/adult-use cannabis combo licenses. Some of the license types have a hard cap allowed under state law, including the cannabis mezzobusinesses (100 licenses), cultivators (50 licenses), manufacturers (24 licenses), and retailers (150 licenses). The remaining six license types are uncapped.

This was just the first application window: lotteries for cannabis event organizer licenses, and low-potency hemp edible manufacturer and retailer licenses, are expected later this year.

Meanwhile, a report earlier this month found that Minnesota’s incoming cannabis industry is likely to be among the top U.S. contributors to cannabis industry sales growth over the next three years.

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Joseph Ziolkowski: Navigating Insurance, Regulation & Risk in Cannabis

3/14/2025

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Insurance is a crucial yet often overlooked pillar of the cannabis and psychedelic industries. As businesses navigate complex regulations, raise capital, and manage risk, securing proper coverage can make the difference between success and failure. In this episode of the Ganjapreneur Podcast, Joe Ziolkowski, CEO and founder of Relm Insurance, shares insights on the unique challenges cannabis and psychedelic companies face in the insurance market. With a background in alternative risk transfer and a focus on emerging industries, Joe has built Relm into a forward-thinking insurance provider willing to cover businesses that traditional insurers avoid.

From the impact of federal policy changes to the role of radical transparency in securing investment, this conversation sheds light on a side of the industry few talk about—but all businesses need to understand. Listen to the episode below, or scroll down for the full transcript!

Listen to the episode:

Read the transcript:

Editor’s note: this transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

TG Branfalt:

Hey there, I’m your host, TG Branfalt, and this is the ganjapreneur.com podcast where we try to bring you actionable information and normalized cannabis through the stories of ganjapreneurs, activists and industry stakeholders. Today I’m joined by Joe Ziolkowski. He’s the CEO and founder of Relm Insurance, which offers insurance for the cannabis and psychedelic industries. How are we doing this afternoon, Joe?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Awesome, TG, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

TG Branfalt:

I’m real stoked to get into what you do because I think it’s a very underlooked sort of portion of both the cannabis and emergent psychedelic industries. But before we get to that, man, tell me about yourself. How’d you end up serving the cannabis and psychedelic industries? How’d you get involved in insurance? Tell me the story, man.

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you the quick and dirty version of it. Ultimately, I’ve been in the insurance industry for about 15 years, and fortunately I came into the insurance industry through, in hindsight, a specialized niche of the global insurance industry. I came into the insurance industry focusing on the alternative risk transfer side of the business. So without going too far into the details, the traditional insurance industry is massive. It’s global. It accounts for trillions of dollars of capital sitting on balance sheets of some of the biggest companies in the world. It accounts for trillions of dollars of premium that are paid by companies in 180 plus different countries. And the traditional insurance market encompasses a lot of traditional companies doing traditional things that yield traditional types of risks. But there are a portfolio of exposures and products that are very non-standard, and a lot of the companies that are looking for solutions or conclusions that just aren’t possible to achieve through the traditional insurance marketplace will turn to what’s called the alternative risk transfer sector, or this alternative aspect of the insurance and reinsurance industry where bespoke products are developed, capacity is created with, let’s say third party investor, capital insurance infrastructure and reinsurance infrastructure is set up to solve very specific and tailored problems.

And if you look at the Fortune 1000, 90% of those companies are accessing products and solutions through the alternative insurance and reinsurance marketplace. And so that’s where I came into the insurance industry really in what I think is probably the most stimulating entry point to an industry that’s considered so boring and opaque by so many others. And I spent eight years just going through solution after solution and product development initiative after product development initiative, really getting I think a unique and super interesting perspective on how this industry works.

TG Branfalt:

So what drew you to it initially?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, I had a finance background and I was working for a real estate development company that needed an alternative solution to some of the bonding performance and payment bonding that they were required to secure for some of the projects they were working on. And I got exposure to the execution of this type of solution where they were essentially self-insuring, right, utilizing insurance infrastructure that they owned and controlled to finance those risks in a way that enabled them to keep a portion of the risk on their own kind of affiliated balance sheet and then access reinsurance on a wholesale basis. So the idea ultimately is instead of paying premium to an insurance company that you have no control over, no affiliation with, and you continue to do that year after year after year without filing any claims, that third party insurance company gets to keep the premium and all of the retained profits. In the alternative sense. You could use some of your own insurance or reinsurance infrastructure to retain some of those profits and investment income that would otherwise be kept by some insurance company you don’t own or control. And so I got exposure to that and realized how prevalent this type of solution is for a very specific set of companies doing some of the most sophisticated things in the world and then found myself in the insurance business.

TG Branfalt:

So this is obviously a, could we call it non-traditional sort of insurance? Absolutely. So how is this sort of a non-traditional model ensuring non-traditional businesses such as cannabis and psychedelics?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Well, so I think when you look at the types of risks or the types of companies that approach these non-standard solutions, they are companies in some instances, they’re companies doing new things. If you think about the way that the insurance industry works, it is a backwards looking industry by design. It takes a whole bunch of historical data about a particular type of loss, and it models that data millions of times to effectively predict the future. It’s taking all those historical loss incidences and forecasting the anticipated future frequency and severity of that similar type of loss happening under similar sets of circumstances. And so when you have that historical perspective of a lot of data, it puts the insurance industry in a position better than most industries to actually predict the future. But when you lack that historical data, when you’ve lacked that historical perspective, the insurance industry almost seizes it, right?

It almost can’t put forward a product at a premium that they can stand up in front of regulators and say, with a high confidence level, this premium is going to be adequate relative to anticipated loss because they have no historical data on which to base that prediction. And so regulators essentially put the kibosh on traditional insurance companies trying to come into market for solutions related to new things. And it’s one of the challenges of being an innovator. It’s one of the challenges of pushing the boundaries in even a traditional industry is that when it comes to seeking insurance, which is something that underlies the bedrock of any sustainable industry, accessibility to insurance is a hallmark of a sustainable industry. If you can’t access that coverage, it is literally an impediment to your business model. And unfortunately, a lot of companies who’ve been operating in the cannabis space for the last decade have been running into brick walls trying to find a line capacity that’s going to enable them to raise rounds of funding, get regulated, satisfy insurance requirements in different sorts of contracts, et cetera. So it’s a major challenge for any new industry to find these types of insurance or reinsurance solutions.

TG Branfalt:

So now, are there differences, let’s say, between insurance for a business that touches the plant like cultivators and that sort of thing versus one in the industry that may not?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Right. And so I think when you look at where I came into the insurance industry and where we’re at today with Realm, it was really kind of this transition of setting up these bespoke insurance or reinsurance solutions for individual companies gaining an understanding of what the insurance industry does really well and understanding what the insurance industry doesn’t do particularly well. And if you’re going to try to maybe compete isn’t the best way to describe it, but if you’re going to try to bring a value proposition to a market as big and as deep and broad as the insurance industry on a global basis, you really have to find those sectors or areas where the insurance industry doesn’t function particularly well. So as I was kind of coming out of the alternative insurance and reinsurance space and looking to provide broader market solutions, it was really a function of saying, what are these sectors that are truly innovative, are emerging, and that I believe are going to be here for a long time?

Not trends that are going to pop up and disappear, but really innovative and emerging technologies or products and services that are going to likely fundamentally change the way that we interact or trade or consume or travel. And those are the industries that I want to focus on from a product and solution standpoint. And the idea ultimately was back in 2019, was to set up an insurance company that we had full ownership and control over that was really only focused on looking forward instead of looking backward. And so when we launched, after receiving our license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority in 2019, our entire strategy as a traditional insurance company was to focus on companies doing really innovative things and bring informed and dedicated insurance capacity and products to the market. So companies across the cannabis supply chain or early stage psychedelics companies looking at different ways of treating really important neurologic diseases could access the type of capacity that they ultimately need. And that’s really the genesis. And I would say the reason for our existence at Realm is to find these companies doing really interesting and important things, but are really inhibited by the slow moving nature of an industry that they didn’t even realize they need the support of in order to grow their business and scale it. Does that make sense?

TG Branfalt:

Yeah. What are some of the challenges when you’re approached by a company, when they’re talking about when they’re looking for your service, essentially, what are some of the challenges that they’re trying to figure out? What sort of roadblocks have been in their way and then they come to you? What do you typically hear? Sure.

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah. So when you look at companies operating in the cannabis space, it’s pretty varied, but one I think really important one is if you’re a private company looking to raise your first round of funding or you’re looking at bringing a physician partner onto your staff as a senior advisor, or you’re looking for an independent director to bring credibility to your business model, those individuals are typically bringing a really important professional reputation to the company, and very few of them are going to be inclined to serve in the absence of having directors and officers liability insurance. So if you look at something like directors and officers liability insurance, it exists to provide protection to the directors and officers of your company for doing things in their capacity as a director and officer. And in the absence of that coverage, if you get sued by a regulator, if you get sued by a competitor, if you get sued by a consumer and the individual directors and officers of your company are named, they’re personally liable for defense expenses and judgments that are ultimately levied against the company and them in their capacity. So when you look at companies trying to raise funding and advance clinical trials, it puts the company in a position to onboard really credible talent because it gives that talent a level of confidence and protection against the things that could go wrong in any company that’s pushing the boundaries. Does that make sense? So that’s directors and officers liability insurance, which is a really important coverage.

TG Branfalt:

It’s really interesting because that’s not something that I don’t think anyone listening would really think about is as sort of top line of one of the problems that faces the industry. Now, I get press releases quite frequently, and there’s often some sort of, there are insurance companies or are these sort of different people taking different angles? How can operators figure out what the best option is as far as insurance providers goes?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I think one of the hallmarks of a business that is differentiating itself from its competitors in some of these innovative and emerging sectors like cannabis or psychedelics, is a company that actually has a perspective on risk management. It sounds really boring, and it sounds certainly not really sexy compared to a lot of cool stuff that’s happening in the cannabis and psychedelic space. But these companies are trying to build something sustainable. They’re trying to find something that is attractive to as a potential acquisition target, or they’re looking to build something that’s attractive from an investor perspective. And to your point, these entrepreneurs and these founders or these companies of early stage or growth stage companies are so focused on generating revenue and not really appropriately focused on the things that are going to enable them to ultimately scale their business. And when you look at risk management and you look at the important role that insurance plays in any single industry that’s been around for a long time, it is an enabler.

So the thing that I would recommend most to any company, regardless of their stage of existence, but particularly for early stage, is to find an insurance broker that has experience solving insurance related problems for companies operating in their industry sector. And I think in that respect, it’s important to create clarity between the two roles that need to be distinguished within the insurance placement process. You have brokers that work with these companies to understand their business and understand their kind of insurance related needs, and then the brokers go to the local and global insurance market to try to find an insurance carrier that has the capacity and products and willingness to actually take on the risk of insuring these types of companies. So realm is a risk taker, right? We are an insurance carrier that works through brokers who have clients operating across the cannabis or psychedelics ecosystem that need certain types of coverage. So the answer to your question ultimately is the first step is really as a owner or operator of a company in the cannabis or psychedelic space, find a great broker broker that understands your business and start engaging in transparent dialogue about how your company is positioned, the products and services you’re looking to put into the market. And that’s a really critical door opener to understanding how you should be thinking about insurance and risk management.

TG Branfalt:

So what about when you launched your company? I’m sure there weren’t a whole lot of brokers that knew you existed or there weren’t a whole lot of brokers working for cannabis industry companies. How did you sort of link up with them? How did you make those connections?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, so it’s really interesting because in an insurance market, as big as the global insurance market is what Realm offered was extremely unique. I mean, globally, I think I can sit here and say five years later, we were the only insurance company back in late 2019, early 2020 that had a strategy that was laser focused on providing solutions for companies operating in the cannabis and psychedelic space. The other sector that we were servicing a ton was companies operating in the crypto and blockchain space. So when you look at our overall appetite, it looks nothing like a traditional insurance company. And for us, that means we’re not encumbered by legacy data. We’re not encumbered by bureaucratic hierarchical organizational structures that are used to doing very traditional and normal things. And now we need to branch out and do something very abnormal. Our DNA is really forward looking.

So from our perspective, what we were bringing to the market was number one, a commitment to companies operating in the sector that we actually genuinely believed in and wanted to support. And then if you look at the way insurance brokers work, and this is not to denigrate at all insurance brokers, but it’s largely an income stream that’s based on commission. So if you are functioning as an insurance broker and you have a growing pipeline of clients in the cannabis space that need certain products and you can’t find them anywhere, and you get a whisper of this new insurance company that’s just hit the market that may have an appetite for this sort of thing, you’re going to find out about it real quickly. In our first year of operations by December, we had insurance brokers sending us business from Australia to Canada and some of the biggest names, no way. And it goes to show you the importance of product market fit. It goes to show you the importance of identifying a problem that exists in a particular industry and spending a lot of time making sure you’ve got something that helps solve it.

TG Branfalt:

So you talk about risk and that realm is a risk taker. One of the biggest risks obviously is the sort of status of cannabis and most psychedelics under federal law. Obviously there’s talk from the DEA rescheduling cannabis, keeping in mind that the Trump administration could undo the Biden recommendation and everything like that. But how could insurance cannabis businesses change if the DEA reschedules cannabis or even if a new administration decides to move backwards, what are the ramifications there?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, right. This is one of the reasons the cannabis industry is so easy for the insurance industry to kind of turn its back on, particularly in the us. I mean, the schedule one status is an absolute non-starter for most insurance companies. And then when you look at the insurance companies that are willing to support companies, let’s say non plant touching companies in the United States, those insurance companies then have to get comfortable with this state-based approach to regulation and legalization. And that adds a whole area of complexity around what happens to companies operating on an interstate basis. And before it just becomes so easy for insurance companies to say, we’re making, we’re generating a lot of premium over here for traditional companies doing traditional things, and the amount of effort in red tape I’ve got to jump through to dip my toe in the water of something that’s really complicated and problematic, it’s just not going to happen.

And so I think when you look at the idea of regulations or legislations rolling back, I guess what we could call momentum in the United States at a federal level, I’d say it’s problematic for companies operating in the sector. It’s only going to make the availability of capacity and products. These companies need to grow their businesses harder to come by, and they’re left with a supply demand dynamic. And this supply demand dynamic exists in every type of business. If there’s a growing need for something and there’s a dearth of supply, it gets expensive and the types of solutions you need become harder to come by. So that would be an unfortunate turn of events, I would say, at least in the us.

TG Branfalt:

What happens if it goes the other way? Does that open up, if they do reschedule cannabis, would that open up the industry for maybe more traditional players? And is that something that your company is looking at in the future?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Two part question. If they reschedule cannabis, let’s say as a Schedule three substance, I think you’ll see much more market participation. And by market participation, I mean a lot of other insurance carriers who’ve been sitting on the sidelines come into the market with an appetite. And it’s insurance companies that are comfortable ensuring agricultural businesses. It’s insurance companies that are comfortable ensuring consumer packaged goods businesses. It’s insurance companies that are comfortable ensuring retail and wholesale type distribution and retail arrangements. When you look at cannabis as a product, either on the agricultural side of things or something that sits on the shelves of a retail outlet, it looks like a lot of other products with the exception of the fact that right now it’s federally illegal. And when that federal status changes, I think what you would see and certainly would be a benefit to companies operating in the space is increased availability of the type of coverage and capacity that these companies are going to need over the long haul to protect their businesses as they grow up.

TG Branfalt:

And the other thing that you’ve mentioned a couple of times is the reinsurance industry. And we’ve been hearing a lot about that on the news because of all the sort of natural disasters that have occurred in Florida and other states is the changing insurance landscape for things like homeowner’s insurance due to climate related disasters, having any impact on ensuring the cannabis and psychedelic industries. Because from what I’m sort of here and reading the news is that many companies are trying to get out of insuring certain states. And so if you’re insuring, say a lot of businesses in, say, Florida, for example, and is there more risk associated with those manufacturing businesses or those cultivation businesses?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, listen, I would say there is a loose correlation between the really negative profitability impact that a surge in natural catastrophes have on certain insurance carriers, and the challenges that companies operating in the cannabis space face trying to find coverage. So what I mean by that is the insurance marketplace is very segmented the same, the insurance companies that are insuring a lot of residential houses in natural catastrophe exposed areas like Florida or wildfire in California are not at all necessarily the same insurance companies that are focused on providing a little bit of capacity companies operating in the cannabis and psychedelic space. So there are circumstances where that correlation is non-existent. But the overall, I think takeaway is that whenever there’s a surgeon in loss experience in one corner of the insurance industry, it can have knock on effects in other aspects of the insurance industry. And typically that knock on effect is reduced capacity increase in prices. So that’s really the major thing to look out for. I would

TG Branfalt:

Say, I just remembered that during the wildfires a couple of years ago, a lot of cultivators, especially in northern California, they did not get those insurance payments, which is why, and I’m not sort of accusing the insurance company broadly or the insurance industry broadly. It’s one of those things that has come up sort of in the past.

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think those challenges are, I feel for a lot of the companies operating, especially in the cannabis space in some of these more cat exposed areas, because you can be transacting or providing very vanilla products and services in the California market right now, if you have any sort of property that has wildfire exposure, you’re going to face really extreme challenges finding adequate cover. And then if you bolt on any sort of marijuana related business component to that, the limited pipeline of companies that may have an interest in providing you some sort of property cover gets reduced even further. So again, it’s that supply demand challenge that’s difficult for a lot of companies to navigate.

TG Branfalt:

So what are you looking at as far as the future of the psychedelic industry over the next several years? If it’s something that you’re already looking at, you say you look forward at these industries instead of looking backwards. What do you see that industry looking like as it takes shape, which is obviously happening much slower than cannabis?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really fascinating. If you had asked me in 2019 if there was a chance by at some point in our early existence, we’d be ensuring companies using psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, DMT Ayahuasca, I would’ve said, you’re crazy. Maybe I could see it somewhere in the distant future. But the fact that we’ve been able to engage with companies utilizing these psychedelic compounds to treat things like substance abuse and depression and PTSD, these really impactful, negatively impactful neurologic diseases that don’t really have any solid, consistent, dependable means of treatment, at least in the pharmaceutical sense to me, is super compelling and really important. And when you look at the slow, but maybe building momentum on a global basis of different jurisdictions, legalizing or decriminalizing, you can kind of get a sense for where this is going. I mean, I think Alberta was the first province in Canada to legalize psilocybin.

And you’ve got two states in the us not necessarily the best examples, but they’ve kind of decriminalized. And then you’ve got Australia, which I think is the first country, and you’ve got Switzerland that enables certain types of early stage stuff. On the psychedelic side, you’ve got state referendums here in the US that are on the table to legalize or decriminalize certain psychedelic compounds. And while I agree with you that the momentum certainly has been slower, you can see it building over the next 10 years, and you also can see some of the interest from traditional pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies that are looking at making investments or making acquisitions of companies that are pushing the envelope in some of these early stage psychedelic initiatives. So to me, I think it’s a really interesting perspective and a privileged perspective that we have as a pick and shovel that these companies can use to try to push their initiatives further along.

TG Branfalt:

So lemme ask you personally, because did you know that psychedelics had these sort of medical, let’s call ’em benefits just for the sake of this conversation before getting into potentially ensuring these businesses? Or did the companies come to you and say, Hey, this is what we’re doing?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, it is a great question and there is an important line there because we really moved into the market with an appetite to support companies operating in the cannabis space and a really beneficial byproduct of ensuring venture funds that were making investments into marijuana related businesses and service providers to companies in that industry. And then of course, companies operating directly themselves as part of a cannabis supply chain is we kind of developed a reputation with insurance brokers of an insurance company, number one with a non-standard appetite, but also one that was willing to put its money where its mouth is, right? And that was a function of quoting and binding coverage for companies doing non-standard things. So to your question, I mean, I wish I could say back in 2019 that I knew psychedelics was going to be this really compelling thing to come around and provide potential solutions to people suffering from these really onerous and painful ailments.

But the beautiful part about us operating in the industry servicing an adjacent sector is that we then became aware of this growing opportunity from brokers that are saying, Hey, would you look at companies using psilocybin for this use or that use case and our objective or our natural response to that type of an inquiry is absolutely, we want to hear about it. And we try to curb our enthusiasm in the sense that just because we say we’re interested to a broker doesn’t mean we’re definitely going to ensure this company just because we hop on an underwriting call and we listen to the company leadership, explain to us how they’re positioning their products or their services, or maybe we get a look at an investor deck and we understand the types of investors they’re trying to raise capital from. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to ensure that company, but it absolutely means we’re going to do our best to investigate, make informed risk selection decisions, and as long as we can get access to this information, we’re going to put our products in capacity behind it. And so that is, I think, a really interesting way that we came around to supporting companies in the psychedelic space.

TG Branfalt:

Can I ask what you say no to?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah. I mean, we say no to lack of information. We say no to, obviously, no, we don’t say yes to anything illegal, but when it comes to ensuring companies in these sectors, for us it’s almost like give us you’re tired, you’re meek, you’re humble, you’re poor, which is to say we anticipate that a lot of the companies that are trying to make headway in these industries are going to be early stage. A lot of ’em are not going to have detailed audited historical financials. A lot of them are going to have cash runways that are measured in months, not years. And our whole objective is we’re not looking for the most mature or the most liquid or a company that’s publicly listed versus privately held. We are looking for companies that are willing to give us access to the information that we need in order to make informed risk selection decision.

So really where we draw a hard line is if our underwriting review and the subsequent question and answers that inevitably precipitate through broker via email or video conference come to an abrupt halt, then we move on to the next risks. And because of that, we have insured companies that are going into bankruptcy or coming out of bankruptcy or are trying to raise a bridge round of funding to keep their company alive or trying to secure a regulatory approval that’s going to enable them to be commercially viable. And so yeah, where we stop is when the information stops flowing,

TG Branfalt:

How closely do you have to monitor state regulations, which change frequently? Does that have an impact on your sector at all?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah. Yeah, it does. I mean, when you think about something like directors and officers liability, that has, depending on the scope of coverage that can provide protection against regulatory enforcement actions. So when you look at the way that we can manage some of that exposure for, let’s say US companies operating in the cannabis spaces, there are a number of regulatory technology companies, reg tech companies that are bolting on to let’s say banks or other service providers that are enabling these companies to manage more programmatically in an automated fashion that they’re doing the appropriate things on a state by state basis to maintain compliance. And so we can leverage access to that technology in order to make much more efficient decisions on not just the current posture of how a company’s operating, but their ability to proactively monitor the impact of state by state changes in regulation.

TG Branfalt:

I will say when I booked this interview, I didn’t expect it to be so full of nuance and risk. I mean, quite frankly, and I’ve spoken to a lot of venture capital CEOs, firms, that sort of thing, and would it be safe to call you a venture insurance company because you’re doing something, you’re working with these startup companies, you’re doing all of these really unique sort of things that I think sort of put you in that category?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, it is an interesting way of looking at it. A venture insurance company, I think it’s fair from the standpoint that our starting point is a fairly well-defined thesis in support of companies operating in a particular manner. We have never looked at our movement into an innovative or emerging sector as a hit it and quit it type of strategy. It’s always been a function of is our commitment defined by a belief in what these companies are doing in a way that’s going to yield a sustainable industry that will enable us to scale products and top line revenue in a profitable manner? If the answer’s yes, then we are going to go deeper and broader into that sector with products and solutions and ideas, and that’s probably pretty consistent with the way that certain venture funds approach the way that they deploy capital in a particular sector.

TG Branfalt:

So finally, I want to ask you as a pick and shovel business as a company that really got in before many others, if not completely first mover, what advice do you have for businesses or entrepreneurs that are maybe in your position that are just sort of starting any business really, because I think that you might have an interesting perspective because there is a lot of risk in what you do.

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I think it could be summed up in two words. Radical transparency. If you are starting a business and you are thinking about building something that is sustainable and is scalable, you need to be prepared to be transparent about the foundation that you’re building that’s going to enable you to do something different than your peers in the market. I think. And if you take our appetite, for example, you can have a company that’s big generating a lot of revenue, but is clearly disorganized to the point where they can’t answer basic questions about their liquidity or their financial position, or they don’t have cap tables that are up to date in order to give us current information about who their shareholders are and to what degree, or if they don’t maintain current entity organizational structures to understand the growing complexity of their operations and organizational structure.

It becomes almost impossible to underwrite those types of companies. But if you’ve got a company that from the beginning is organizing themselves in a way that’s not bureaucratic and full of red tape, but is sensitive to the type of people that they’re bringing onto, their board is very particular about the way that they’re maintaining their financial reporting and is providing and building transparency around the overall operations and their service or product delivery, it is a massive differentiator, not just for an underwriter, but for investors looking to raise capital for counterparties, looking to engage in contracts. And so I think to me, no matter how innovative or emerging the thing is that you’re doing, you’re going to need to face counterparties. Those counterparties are going to have demands of disclosure that you may never have been prepared to provide at the beginning. And the sooner you can position your company and your leadership team to build that approach to radical transparency, I think it’s going to set you distinctly apart from your competitors in the market.

TG Branfalt:

That’s really some of the most, I think, profound sort of advice that I’ve never heard before in my seven years doing this show. So thank you for being so radically transparent. Joe, where can people find out more about you and more about realm insurance, get in touch with you, that sort of thing?

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, I mean, our website is realm insurance.com. You can go on there and learn more about where we’ve come from, where we’re headed, the types of products and services and solutions that we offer. And I think that’s really the best starting point. We have a lot of really smart, capable, creative people inside realm. We’ve got a full-time team of more than 75 people across five different countries now that all bring a really unique perspective on the sectors and the products that we support. So I think that’s really the best starting point for reaching out. We’re happy to have conversations with companies about how they’re positioned, what they’re trying to do, and if they ultimately need insurance, we’re always happy to pass ’em off to an insurance broker that we know is capable and competent of doing business in their sector.

TG Branfalt:

Awesome, man. That is Joel Ziolkowski, the CEO and founder of Rome Insurance, which offers insurance for the cannabis and psychedelic industries. Thank you so, so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me, really enlightening, really interesting, and I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Joe Ziolkowski:

Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

TG Branfalt:

You can find more episodes of the ganjapreneur.com podcast and the podcast section of ganjapreneur.com and wherever you get your podcast. 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 entrepreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play. This episode was engineered by Wayward Sound Studio. I’ve been your host, TG brand.

 

End

Nevada Proposal Would Create Psychedelics Therapy Pilot Program

3/14/2025

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A proposal in the Nevada Assembly is seeking establish a psychedelics therapy pilot program for patients with certain mental health conditions, Marijuana Moment reports. Assemblymember Max Carter (D) filed the bill on Monday with 18 cosponsors after participating in a psychedelics policy summit in February hosted by the Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic Medicines.

The proposal, AB378, would task the state Department of Health and Human Services with administering an Alternative Therapy Pilot Program authorizing the medicinal use of psilocybin, psilocin, DMT, ibogaine, and mescaline. Psychedelic treatments would be available for a wide variety of mental health conditions, but only honorably discharged military veterans and people who were previously employed as a first responder would qualify for the program, according to the bill’s text at first reading. Treatments would be administered “under medical supervision and control” by an HHS-approved practitioner.

Meanwhile, the Nevada Senate Committee on Legislative Operations and Elections heard a resolution Tuesday urging Congress to expand research on the therapeutic use of certain psychedelics, NEWS4 reports. The resolution was presented by Sen. Rochelle Nguyen, who joined Assemblymember Carter at the policy summit earlier this year.

“At the end of the day, we need the federal government to take the lead and give guidance to all 50 states. Otherwise, we’re going to end up in a similar situation that we do with cannabis, where you have individual states doing things on an individual level.” — Sen. Nguyen, via NEWS4

 

 

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Massachusetts Cannabis Agency Requests 55% Funding Bump

3/14/2025

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The Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) is asking the state for a large bump in funding for the agency in fiscal year 2026, WWLP.com reports.

CCC officials said that to keep up with the testing, licensing, and hiring requirements of overseeing the state’s legal cannabis industry, the agency will need a budget of $30.8 million, which is a $10 million jump from its current annual budget of $19.8 million. The agency had requested $25 million for fiscal year 2025 but did not receive the entire sum.

The agency’s new Executive Director, Travis Ahern — who was selected for the role late last year and was formally appointed just last week — said the industry’s rapid expansion justified the request.

“Though the commission has historically categorized much of its funding requests as ‘expansionary,’ the reality is that these funds are necessary to implement legislative requirements and maintain the safety of the industry.” — Ahern, via WWLP.com

One of the agency’s major goals for the fnuding is to fund credible cannabis testing labs, the report said. Testing labs in Massachusetts, like in many other states, struggle against widespread “lab shopping” practices, which is when cannabis operators prioritize bringing their products for testing to labs that provide more desirable results, including higher (and often inflated) THC potency and more lenient product safety screenings.

The founder and CEO of SafeTiva Labs Megan Dobro said during a Massachusetts legislative hearing last year that, “When there’s variability in the results, the producers are shopping for labs that are going to give them results that allow them to sell their products for more.”

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Ohio Officials Withholding Cannabis Tax Revenues Meant for Local Governments

3/12/2025

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Ohio officials say they are withholding cannabis derived tax funds from municipalities because the voter-approved legalization law did not include the appropriation of funds to cities, WJW reports. Dan Tierney, press secretary to Gov. Mike DeWine (R) told WJW that the governor plans to use the funds to improve local jails, fund the 988 behavioral crisis hotline, and for law enforcement.   

“Issue 2 as passed did not appropriate any funds to cities. We understand the frustration of being told this by those who drafted Issue 2 and coming to find out Issue 2 did not contain appropriations of funds the drafters promised any government entity.” — Tierney to WJW 

Under the proposition, 36% of tax funds generated through adult-use cannabis sales – about $10.8 million so far – was believed to be earmarked for municipalities that opted to allow cannabis businesses. 

According to the language of Issue 2, 36% of tax revenues derived from the state’s cannabis industry are set aside for “the host communities facilities fund” but it does not implicitly state that the funds should or would be sent to the communities themselves.  

Tierney said that “The state funding these priorities will free up local funds for other purposes and local priorities.”

End

Maine Bill Would Ban Cannabis Advertising

3/12/2025

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A bill proposed in Maine would ban cannabis advertising in the state, WGME reports. State Sen. Scott Cyrway (R), the bill sponsor, said the legislation is needed because the state’s adult-use cannabis law had a “lack” of guardrails around advertising.  

“I always think of the children first, and it is a big problem that we have not considered them, and that is why I am doing this.” — Cyrway to WGME 

The bill includes exceptions for advertising on company websites, company signage and properties, and in business directories. The proposed ban would cover advertising for both medical and adult-use cannabis businesses. 

The current law contains some regulations on cannabis advertising including a ban on misleading and false claims or claims about the health benefits of cannabis, and prohibitions on ads within 1,000 feet of schools.  

Kasper Heinrici, CEO of dispensary Seaweed Co., told WGME that he opposes the ban, and that advertising should be permitted as long as it doesn’t appeal to children. 

“We believe that cannabis can enhance wellbeing when used in the proper way,” he said, “so that is not to be used by minors, and we try to adhere to that, and we think that should be applied to all cannabis use, whether that is medical or adult use.” 

The proposal is currently in the Senate Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee. 

End

Colorado Bill Seeking to Place Age Limits on Some Cannabis Products Pulled by Sponsor

3/12/2025

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A bill that would have allowed increased potency of some cannabis products sold in the state was pulled by its sponsor in committee on Tuesday due to provisions in the proposal that would have added age restrictions to higher-dose products and enhanced regulations on some edible products, Colorado Public Radio reports. The legislation would have capped the potency level and amount of cannabis that someone 25 or younger could purchase at 10% and restricted the purchase of inhaled products with added flavors by people 25 or younger.

Additionally, the bill included new packaging rules that would have required cannabis products to contain different color strips depending on THC content and dispensaries would have had to display signage explaining the strip system.

State. Sen. Judy Amabile (D), told CPR that the “negative attacks” on the proposal “have been…misguided.”

“There’s been a big reaction to the bill, and I just want to say we’ve been responsive to that and we have made some major adjustments to the policy and put forward a much smaller policy.” — Amabile to CPR

Jon Spadafora, founder and CEO of Flower Union Brands, argued that the law continues to spread the “brutal stigma” around cannabis.

“None of us are trying to create something that appeals to a child,” Spadafora told CPR. “There was a time when that was happening. One of the very first products on the market in Colorado was cannabis to spray on top of gummies, all kinds of different candy that you would find in the grocery store. That’s gone. It should be gone.”

Amabile has indicated she plans to significantly amend the bill and reintroduce the revised version.

End

Idaho Senate Passes Bill Asking Voters to Give Up Legalization Rights

3/12/2025

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Lawmakers in the Idaho Senate have passed a House-approved bill asking voters to approve a constitutional amendment that would remove the electorate’s right to pass cannabis legalization laws or any other drug reforms, the Idaho Capital Sun reports.

The bill, co-sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Scott Grow (R), was passed by Senate lawmakers in a 29-6 vote on Tuesday. Having already been passed by the House earlier this month, the Senate’s approval means that voters will get to decide during the 2026 election whether to amend the Idaho Constitution so that only the Legislature has the ability to pass cannabis and other drug reform laws.

Supporters of the bill argued the amendment would help Idaho resist the wave of loosening restrictions on the cannabis plant in neighboring states and throughout the U.S.

“Too many legislatures across this nation have sat back and just waited as initiative after initiative would come after them, until they finally overwhelm it and overwhelm the legislature. We are acting because that’s our responsibility.” — Grow, via the Idaho Capital Sun

The bill is the second piece of anti-cannabis legislation passed in the state this year after the Legislature in February passed a law creating a mandatory $300 fine for low-level cannabis possession charges.

Idaho is one of just a handful of U.S. states that have yet to provide for legal access to cannabis for any reason.

Meanwhile, the “Decriminalize Cannabis Now” campaign to legalize low-level cannabis possession in the state, stopping short of establishing a regulated marketplace, is collecting signatures to qualify for the 2026 ballot. If the campaign succeeds, both questions — one to legalize cannabis, and one to give up the ability to pass legalization laws via citizen-led initiatives — would appear on the ballot.

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San Diego City Council Increases Local Cannabis Tax

3/12/2025

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The San Diego City Council voted Monday to increase the cannabis tax paid by licensed cannabis businesses in the city from 8% to 10%, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports. The city earned about $17 million from the tax last year and by hiking the tax rate on cannabis companies by 2%, city officials expect to receive an extra $4 million in annual taxes.

Proponents of the tax hike said the money could support city services like roads and parks. Council President Joe LaCava argued that a 2% bump would “not be felt by the average consumer,” at least not to the point of driving an otherwise legal shopper to an illegal source.

Meanwhile, opponents of the tax hike argued the industry is already over-taxed and struggling, and that increasing prices would harm local licensees by pushing consumers elsewhere for cheaper product — likely to the illicit market or to jurisdictions with lower tax rates.

“I have some hesitation about the fact that so many of our neighboring cities have significantly lower levels. I think the consumer is particularly sensitive to this adjustment.” — Councilmember Raul Campillo, via the Union-Tribune

The tax bump also ties San Diego as having the highest local tax rate in California, alongside Los Angeles and San Jose, which each collect 10% in local business taxes from the cannabis industry. With San Diego’s now 10% local cannabis tax and the city’s 7.75% sales tax — combined with the statewide cannabis tax, which will raise to 19% on July 1 — the tax rate on legal cannabis purchases in the city will exceed 35%, the report said.

End

Interview with Jonathan Black

Highly Enlightened: Jonathan Black, CEO of Cheech and Chong Global

3/11/2025

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In this episode of Highly Enlightened, host Jon Purow interviews Jonathan Black, a seasoned business attorney and entrepreneur with expertise across real estate, entertainment, tech, retail, cannabis, and law, currently serving as the CEO of Cheech and Chong’s Global Holdings. After earning his degree at the University of San Diego and completing law school, Jonathan founded Weston Law Group PC. Over the years, he has also worked on securing government contracts, managed a real estate fund with over $200 million in assets, and produced two Hollywood films. In 2019, he became the COO of MediaJel, a cannabis Adtech company, and, through multiple successful exits, continues to hold ownership and board positions in various ventures. Jonathan resides in the Bay Area with his wife and three children.

Listen to the episode below or wherever you get your podcasts — you can find more episodes of Highly Enlightened on Buzzsprout.

Listen to the episode:

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Read the transcript:

Editor’s note: this transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

Jon Purow:

Welcome to a Highly Informed Interview episode. I’m your host, Jon Purow. Now, before we get to an awesome interview, I just want to note that any opinions I express are my own. As always, I have to do my quick prayer to the video chat. Gods may. Our wifi connections be sturdy. All dogs and my children remain quiet and may Amazon Prime another time. Amen. Alright, now I have the pleasure of introducing Jonathan Black, the CEO and Director of Cheech and Chong’s Global Holdings Company. How are you doing today, sir? I want to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join me for this joint endeavor. Pun is intended.

Jonathan Black:

I love it, Jon. I love it. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here and chatting with you.

Jon Purow:

Yeah, no, so look, I always start off with just the hard hitting question, right? So it gets easier after this, so out of exactly, just like I’m just going to crush you right at the beginning, just so it seems easier after that. So how much of your success, how much do you think what you’ve been able to accomplish in life is owed to the fact that you have the best first name in the history of humanity? Not that I’m biased.

Jonathan Black:

All of it. All of it. All of it. Isn a part of it.

Jon Purow:

Okay, perfect. That’s the right answer, right? It only gets easier from here.

Jonathan Black:

It’s a great name, man. I love the name Jonathan, and obviously you have the same similar love and passion for the name that I do. So

Jon Purow:

Does anyone call you Johnny, is the question?

Jonathan Black:

No. When I was younger, some of my uncles would call me John. John. I don’t know where that came from. There’s been other nicknames I’ve had that are probably not verbally appropriate to express on your podcast growing up playing sports because I definitely was tenacious in what I was trying to accomplish.

Jon Purow:

You’re going to have to tell me that one after, right?

Jonathan Black:

Absolutely.

Jon Purow:

It just lends to so many nicknames. I mean, since I now am saddled with the nickname Broke Back, John, since I literally broke my back jumping in Jamaica, I just think it lends itself to nicknames there, but that’s great. So I’m glad to hear that This’s worked out so well for you. So look outside of Brian Gerber from Harris Supply. Basically everyone that I’ve spoken to on the podcast came from somewhere and was working somewhere before coming into the industry. So I’m curious, out of all the experiences, indoor skills outside of being named Jonathan that you brought from your prior work history and everything into the cannabis industry, what do you think was the most helpful and why?

Jonathan Black:

Yeah, that is a really good question. I have a very diverse background and experiences. My attitude in trying to find out what I wanted to do was learning by the things I didn’t want to do, engaging in things I didn’t want to do. I was with publicly traded companies. I owned my own businesses myself. And so ultimately, I think the best experience that I had was really in some of the ownership of small businesses, growing businesses, even selling businesses. I always had great partners. That was kind of the key to success. And here at Brandon Harshberger, the president of Chichen Chang Global Holdings is a fantastic partner. So a lot of the things that I learned was if you want to grow, how do you trust in people? And this was throughout these companies experiences from standard Pacific Homes all the way to owning several different businesses myself.

It became something I learned in order to grow, you’ve got to have a way of dividing up what each person is good at, putting them in their best position, trusting the people that you have with you to do their job. And so what I took from that was obviously branding and what a company should look like and what things should feel like and what a consumer experiences when they’re making that snap judgment on a product. They might be on their phone standing in a dispensary, they might be in front of a glass door looking at drinks. They might be online shopping. What does that experience in that consumer activation look like? And so that goes from branding a name, something people can trust and something people want, a product that you’re proud of. Early in my career, I made two movies, not very proud of them. I produced those, raised the money, went out and made and had theatrical releases and they were crap, but they made money. And

Jon Purow:

May I ask what they were? Do you not want that to be public information? Are

Jonathan Black:

You actively running? Yeah, no, no. Yeah, I mean, I made Dark House early on in my career and I don’t mean crap mean we had some really good actors, a great director, my co-producer partner on it was awesome and amazing, but they weren’t something that was going to get an award. We weren’t winning an award. We put together a way of trying to monetize a horror movie into income, which we successfully did twice ultimately. But something I learned a lot from that, right? I learned a lot in dealing with celebrities, number one and number two obviously how to put together a production in the team and trust in the team and what everybody was going to do in that. So I think that when you look at all the experiences from movie making to land acquisition, to running government contracts, to working for California Assembly and the governor in the process of working on bills and building multiple businesses, working on taking them public, obviously I was at Media Jail for a while too.

Building this ultimate idea of what a brand should be, a look and a feel is very important. But definitely having people around you such as a good partner in Brandon that I trust, or previous to that Jake Lit key who I trusted a lot and liked a lot is so important because it’s so hard at the top to make a company maneuver in a manner in which you want it to grow because you got the day-to-day ultimately, and then you got the long-term vision. And sometimes those things will collide for a variety of different reasons. It could be finances, it could be personnel, it could be products, it could be legislation. So ultimately in my mind, having an ability to work side by side with somebody is important as it is the understanding. I feel like a lot of CEOs have their board and then they have people that they kind send orders to, so to speak.

And you’re operating on only so much information. So assuming a good CEO is operating on 10 to 20% of the information available to make a decision, if you have a partner in that business with you, that moves you up to 20 to 40%, right? Your chances of getting it right, almost double. And so that’s been kind of crucial in my experiences is finding the right team. I think people invest more in teams than they do an idea. Ideas are great, you got to have a good idea, but if you don’t have people that can execute, ultimately it’s just a good idea.

Jon Purow:

No, a hundred percent agree speaking as someone who’s in intellectual property, an idea isn’t worth anything. It can’t get protected on its own. It’s the team. So I think that to a certain extent, you almost even kind of segmented into an answer for the next question in terms of advice that you would give regarding leadership to leaders in the cannabis industry. So I think one of the first things you say is pick the right team starts with that,

Jonathan Black:

Pick the right team. And I think ultimately, besides picking the right team, it’s trusting the team and giving them room to operate as team players. I think the other thing you got to look at is what are the things that bite people or cause difficulties in the situation? And so I really look to four factors ultimately in that. One is the grass is always greener. So comparing against another company is, I think problematic because you have no idea the details in which you’re comparing to. You’re just looking at whatever they’ve posted on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever it is of their success in that moment, but you have no idea of the stride that they went through to get there and what it may have cost them to get it. The second one, which is a big one, is the attitude. We’re not going to make it right. That attitude has to go away. If that’s the attitude going into something, it’s not going to work, right? It’s doomed ultimately there. The third one I look at a lot is we’re not good enough. That concept of we’re not good enough or that imposter syndrome that follows people around through their careers is absolute bs in my mind. I think if you put your mind to something and you’re willing to work at it and you’re willing to take time to understand it, you’re as good as anybody else out there ultimately.

And I think the issue is people operate on not enough information. And ultimately the last one that comes to mind a lot of times is just an ability for people to be able to, what are the three characteristics of a person’s makeup and looking at a problem or solution. And to me, if they have a work ethic desire to want to learn new concepts and ability to speak their mind to address things that people aren’t going to want to hear, they have room for that. You’ve got a successful personnel around you and a successful culture, which is everybody wants to talk about culture, but I see these ploys that don’t work like pinball machines and drinking at noon on Fridays or whatever it is, that’s great, but the culture that needs to be there is people are able to express the dissent in a situation without fear of losing their job or fear of backlash from another coworker.

That attitude, I guess the fourth one really is people are out to get me kind of attitude. It has to go away. You’ve got to be able to express dissent, and if you feel everybody’s against you, you’re not going to express descent. So that’s kind of the four factors that ultimately we try to look at and do. I think Brandon would say we try everything once, which is a great slogan, but I think it’s a little more detailed in how I look at it and how he looks at it in dealing with the team both internally and externally with partners, vendors, people we’re doing business with.

Jon Purow:

I recently tried to put it together in my head by saying that we become what we fear, and the way that you kind of express that there is it’s negative energy in a work environment of different types. We can’t pull this off. I can’t pull this off. I’m an imposter. And your goal is essentially to have a workplace environment that doesn’t have any of that, right? And even something that you could look as being a dissenting viewpoint is an opportunity to learn something. And so if you don’t, and a dissenting viewpoint is an opportunity to be creative, and if you’re to create an environment that stifles that, and I mean so long as you have the people who could execute it because they have the work ethic, they have the intelligence, and they have that enthusiasm, I think you eliminate those things. I think it’s just very, very astute what you’re saying that you could accomplish anything with the right team members in that environment. So I think that that’s super valuable advice. What would you say is one of the main things that you’ve learned as a leader specifically in the cannabis industry? I

Jonathan Black:

Learned leading is very, very tough ultimately being a leader. I guess I joke with other people like this is the last time I played the role of CEO, I’ll be a board member going around. I think leading is ultimately very tough. You can’t lead from the back of the field. You’ve got to be out in front of it. You’ve got to be experiencing it. You’ve got to want to have the hard conversations and understand concepts. You’ve got to be flexible on how you plan ultimately the scope and the direction of the company because I think people get cemented into what they tell board members or investors. And without flexibility, there’s no room for growth. You need fertile soil or you can expand roots. So when I look at leadership, and I don’t think I’ve necessarily done a great example of this for my team throughout the whole time of being CEO of this company. I think I’ve struggled with it to be just really honest. But I think ultimately with the right people around you, you will get it right. You will get on track with it and it’ll start to come together. But you need the grace of people that work for you and you need to give them the grace that you have backwards and forwards. So that can cement itself into a strong working relationship and bond.

Jon Purow:

Got it. So obviously Chechen Chong, in terms of old school brands, name recognition, you’re starting with that mean. So putting that aside, what do you think are some of the biggest factors in how you’ve been able and how the company has been able to grow over the years?

Jonathan Black:

Yeah, it was tough. I mean, ultimately Tommy and Che came back together to curate this brand. At the end of the day, they made the decision to come together and get this to work. There was some lineage stuff that had been done that had to be cleaned or tweaked. They both had their separate brands going when I walked in the door, which was very, very confusing for a consumer, for the public offering and where these products were being offered and the style in which they were going accustomed to. But they came together. And so I think as the brand came together and the marketing side like Steve Gunn and Brandon who just understand ad buying spots and creative more so than I will ever, we were able to make something more of it. It’s shocking because some people recognize the name but couldn’t tell me a movie or a joke from the guys just because they’ve seen so many ads, endless ads out there from us.

So I think the big thing, that’s a big mistake. We use Ben Mason at Pillars or Agency. We’ve invested a lot into the marketing side of this company. I think you have two extremes. People that invest too much. People don’t invest anything into it because they feel like, Hey, we got to get products on shelves. Getting products on shelves is half the battle. Consumer interfacing is other half the battle, and people spend too much on marketing the product’s on the shelves. They’ll sell it, but people will come back and buy it. So there’s a very delicate balance there in getting a brand and branding a brand and marketing a brand that has to make sense. Are you getting ROI off your advertisement? Our DBC has been our massive driver, our engine of the company. And so thankfully that branding and that exposure and that advertising dollar that we’re spending continues to lift the high tide of the whole boat on other things that we’re doing and recognition in what we’re doing.

And then we have 52, 54, sorry, 54 years of lineage with Tommy and Chi, right? Just amazing, amazing lineage. Here’s two guys that have been trying to say cannabis should not be a situation where it’s banned, right? Cannabis is something that you can utilize, be functional in a lot of cases it’s necessary for people. And so they wanted to really try to get that message across. I hope that we are, but we do it in a fun way because they’re comedians and we want to echo their thought process, their creative process in our branding and our marketing and our products.

Jon Purow:

The podcast is proud to be sponsored by Ebos. If you’re in the cannabis business, that quality packaging isn’t just important. It’s essential. That’s where Ebos comes in, whether you’re just starting out or scaling up bottles offers proprietary, top of the line packaging products built for cannabis bottles is the market leader for a good reason. They’re experts in the field, six patents, five warehouse locations around the country, and a network of exceptional distributors. So get ebos and grow boldly. Yeah. The other thing that’s interesting about them is that I think I mentioned to you when we first spoke, my father showed me up in smoke when I was way too young, but you hit that age group demographic, then you have that seventies show with Tommy, and then you have what Chee and Nas Bridge is. So there’s another generation in between that gets familiar with them. And so now I’m almost curious a little bit, how do you reach the current youngest generation with that brand? Is that just purely in terms of leaning into marketing and social media a certain way? Who do you feel that you most cater to and how do you cater to the folks that might not necessarily immediately have that name recognition, that puts a smile on their face like it does for me, full disclosure.

Jonathan Black:

And John, that’s an awesome question, right? Because I think that so many people have been stuck in this faction of this is what they are. Well, Tanya played the Yakkin, Zootopia and Che was in Lion King, right? They were voices. So ultimately you continue on, so to speak. But I think when you look at the branding of it, Jack Daniels is no longer alive. Jim Bean has long since passed. A lot of these name brands that are out there, Evan Williams is gone. I’m just mentioning a few alcohol arms. There’s other ones, so and so forth. These people have long since passed. And the reason why the brands continue is because of great marketing effect and knowledge of consumer. When you look at a consumer buying something in front of the glass door, looking at their phone, not thinking they’re reaching for something that they know is a product in which they want, how do you get ’em there?

So yeah, I think it’s a lot of endless branding. We just did the Call of Duty with Tommy and Cheech. They have skins in the game. So again, there’s another reach of another audience. But one of our biggest surprises, John was on our Hemp Thrive beverage is women between the age of 25 and 50, where our biggest consumer and I had always heard, well, you’re not going to reach women. It’s an audience for this. It’s an audience for that. It’s not true. They saw the name, they believed that this would be a product they should try, and they tried it and they loved it on the hemp drive beverage side in mass retail. So seeing stuff like that just tells you Peach and Chang can really become the next Coca-Cola of the plant of this industry that’s emerging. If I don’t screw it up ultimately, or we don’t make bad decisions, we have a runway to do that because the reach is there. But yes, commonly when you and I talk, I think it’s hilarious. My mom knows him from up in Smoke. My mom recognizes him from there. I recognize she’s from Tin Cup, right? In seventies, as you said,

Jon Purow:

Great movie.

Jonathan Black:

And my daughters recognized him from the Yak, right? You, me talking to him,

Jon Purow:

We just watched that movie,

Jonathan Black:

The Yak daddy, the Yak Daddy, and or The Lion King. And so I think that you have multiple generations in my household that recognize them for different reasons, which is important. But I think consumers recognize these guys have been around for a long time. There’s consistency and they wouldn’t put their names on a bad product and the branding, they’re consistently seen. So it’s developing even further past the lineage of just a movie career or celebrity fame into a household name and brand. And it’s amazing the references to them. I was watching Billions and they said up in Smoke like Chi and Chong, they made a reference to it, and it’s like,

Jon Purow:

Great show.

Jonathan Black:

Yeah, great show has absolutely nothing to do with, I know, I know with

Jon Purow:

Cannabis, but it’s cultural cache, right? It’s cultural cache. And in a world where I feel like everyone should learn about logical fallacies and be reminded of them frequently, where a lot of endorsements are all about appeal to inappropriate authority. Why does a sports star have any basis for telling you what car to buy? The fact of the matter is when you have celebrities that are so associated with a specific type of product that comes with that understanding on the consumer side, that trust level of there’s quality here, and you combine that with product diversification to cater to different demographics like you said, and just having that little built in thing and then sticking the landing with a quality product that meets people where they are, that’s where you could really accomplish stuff.

Jonathan Black:

You’re a hundred percent right, but John, you bring up an important point. It is very tough in the world of soundbites in the world of things that you see going on. I literally saw Peter Theo, who’s, I love watching him and Steve Jobs whenever they talk or there’s a video online, I stop what I’m doing. I’m watching these guys, even if I’ve seen it or watched it again, because they’re just common sense to business practices is something that you would think would be well known, but is often missed because it’s just a common sense practice that they’re applying application. But he gave a talk, I think it was to the graduating class of Harvard or something. He gave a talk just recently talking about the clip of the Hawk Two girl that’s out there and how this is just insanity. And so we are in this competitive means. We do participate in stuff like that for advertisement and pushing to the brand, but it is a different world, which is nice to have people that have been for movies and TV because it can ascend into the TikTok side of things. That has really grown into how people understand and become accustomed with brands and things that are out there

Product wise. Yeah.

Jon Purow:

Can I ask you one time where you, when all was said and done with the business where you kind of just said to yourself, F Yeah, we really nailed the landing on something hard here, out of curiosity.

Jonathan Black:

Yeah. We did a Benny’s launch in Illinois. Benny’s is a large liquor store retailer in Benny’s, a lot like BevMo in California or seven 11 in this specific area. And we did a launch there and we brought the guys out and we just nailed it, went through pallets and pallets of drinks, and I was just blown away. We didn’t know, Brandon and I were very nervous going into that situation on how this would work out, how this activation would go. It was really our first big retail activation on B2B side, which is the thing we’re drastically trying to lift. We’d done it on the canvas side, it worked out and opening up the dispensary as and Massachusetts and New Mexico, and lines around the block and numbers are fine and things are great, but we hadn’t done it on the mass retailer audience spectrum in a liquor store, multiple service liquor store.

And we were just really concerned going into it. And when we were leaving, we gave each other a big hug, and we were just so excited that it had worked, and we always believed that it would, right? It wasn’t a disbelief going into the situation by any stretch, but you get anxiety and you’re nervous about how will this go? How will people respond? People were camping out in line to meet the guys. Obviously it was fantastic. But then the sales throughout the whole retail store cycle, not just the store we’re in, but just overall the mass audience and the activation was just incredible. And we did a lot of work. Our CMO, Brooke did a lot of work on that. Pillar did a lot of work on that. Ben Mason with Pillar and our COO Jay Bueno did just an amazing job putting this all together. And it worked. And it was a sigh of relief, honestly, John, because I didn’t know. I did not know that we were going to,

Jon Purow:

That’s the fear of the unknown when you’re sticking your neck out there and stuff, and those are the ones where you say, heck yeah, right. We stuck the landing on that. I got it. So now we were talking, I mean, we’ve been starting to talk about already and alluding to it how you folks are in the hemp industry and stuff. So I am just curious to know, when we were pre-gaming a little bit, we were talking about some of the most interesting things in the industry, and you were alluding to some of these ideas of hemp and state licensed cannabis and also cannabis and alcohol. So what are some of the most interesting things that you’re noticing in your unique position in the industry with respect to those dichotomies, those classes?

Jonathan Black:

Yeah. Yeah, no, great question. Yeah, we were kind of going around about this a little bit before, but one of the big things I’ve noticed is that there’s this idea that there’s a war between hemp and cannabis or ultimately alcohol and cannabis or at this divide. And cannabis is the headwind against alcohol for the slumping sails or hemp is the headwind against cannabis for its slumping sails. And I just think it’s completely ridiculous based on the numbers that when these seeds get planted, ultimately people hear it enough where they get emotionally attached to it and then they start believing it, and they start using emotions instead of facts to justify their position. And it doesn’t exist. I mean, if you look at, take California for a second, we’re working right now to set up 40 brands both on the Canvas side and total 40 brands, but brands from the cannabis side and Brandon from Hemp side, which we are on both in California, to come to a meeting and work on legislation for California for the governor who just executed emergency order, which we feel was misplaced, but we want to work with the governor.

We want to work with all politicians on this. We don’t get upset because they didn’t see it our way. We just have to handle it in a manner and mechanism that we’re given. But I think when you look at this, I don’t think that by the numbers, I believe it’s like 6.5% of dispensary sales in California or beverages. And ultimately of those beverages, less than a fourth of a point are under 10 milligrams. So we are not having a low dose hump drive drink in BevMo or Total Wines is not affecting their business. In fact, it’s opening the door to a compliance, a taxation methodology that we want cannabis to follow through. We want our cannabis products. We have a chia lot of those 50 milligrams in California that we

Jon Purow:

Love,

Jonathan Black:

And we want that drink to be eventually on the shelf, you would have a beer and you have liquor. There’s different proofs, there’s different amounts that people drink of it. There’s different

Jon Purow:

Consumers. Exactly.

Jonathan Black:

And so to think that one size fits all or we’re preventing them is absolutely ridiculous. And then when you look at the cannabis and alcohol side, well, first of all, some of the alcohol players IE, the distributors, the retailers, even the production mechanisms, and we use some of those producers that make beer have come over to this site already. We’re working together. And to say there’s this divide because alcohol sales or something is just ridiculous during covid, alcohol sales blossomed, and now you’re coming off of that, you’re going to go downwards.

And that’s just the fact of the matter. It doesn’t have anything to do with it. Someone that wants cannabis, wants cannabis, someone that wants alcohol, wants alcohol. It’s nots, not a competitor. It’s not like I can walk in today to, again, a seven 11 and oh, should I buy beer or should I buy a blunt? That’s not happening. I’m specifically going to a dispensary or I’m specifically going to seven 11 to buy alcohol, so to speak. So not one and the same thing. And so this gets a little bit disturbing because these seeds are being sprinkled out there and people are ingesting this. And it’s not actually situated in any kind of factual numbers that I can see other than the fact that one’s going down and one’s going up. But it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily related to each other, the expansion,

Jon Purow:

Correlation, and causation.

Jonathan Black:

Yeah.

Jon Purow:

Yeah. I mean it just don’t get confused about the two. By the way. Can I just say I am a little bit worried that you might come for my podcast hosting job with my pop puns because you kept on saying planting the seed, right? Ingesting, I mean, you just naturally pun, sir. So I mean, I tip my cap on that, but I honestly think that one of the most interesting statistics I’ve heard is that statistic that you said in terms of how strong the beverages in the state license market are, right? Versus how many are low dose. And that just speaks to when we’re talking about product diversification before to cater to different demographics. I always like to say the cannae versus the canna curious. So what that’s implying is that the cannae with the higher tolerance are the ones who are buying the beverages in the state licensed market.

And frankly, for the good of the industry, we don’t want necessarily higher dose things. On the hemp side, there is a model here, potentially we don’t want higher dose things because as people saw with Delta eight and stuff, when people are interacting and when the consumers, this is old hat to us, we speak the vocabulary, we have the tolerance, but the vast majority of consumers don’t know about the different cannabinoids. And it’s just you’re trying to educate people in a time when their attention spans are smaller and smaller, that you want low dose there, frankly, just because it guarantees that more people have a positive experience the first time they do something

Jonathan Black:

Right. I think that’s ultimately important. When you look at the hemp category versus looking at the cannabis category, you have two totally different consumers in my mind, someone like Joey Marin, Che’s son, who’s our chief product officer, is not going to go out and buy a bunch of our drinks because it’s not going to do anything for him. On the hemp side, he will take down a chilada, maybe two. The guy has incredible endurance, can tell you exactly what’s in it, what flavors he has. He’s a connoisseur. And I think both markets are exist. I mean, do people drink beer and wine? Yes, they do, but there’s a preference there. If someone has a wine cellar, they generally don’t have a bunch of beers in their refrigerator too. People are going to make their selective choices, and I think consumers should have those options. I have seen that the influx in a mass market of hemp drive drinks will lead people ultimately to canvas sales. We’ve seen it. We’ve activated people from our hemp side to our canvas side. And ultimately that was the step that was missing because when we came out, we had this strong CBD presence and we had this cannabis presence, and we had nothing in between. To get someone to go from a CBD product to a cannabis product was a lot further of a task from a hemp product or cannabis product and back and forth. And there’s states in which, Texas, Florida, in places North Carolina, where hemp is the only optionality to a consumer.

And ultimately our idea as a company is we want to get products into every consumer’s hands no matter where they are. And so the challenges with that are how do you get a cannabis product into someone’s hands in North Carolina short of having them buy it, smoke it, and consume it on a reservation that doesn’t exist for you, right?

Jon Purow:

You’re talking about a recent story,

Jonathan Black:

Right? So ultimately, when we look at stuff like this, we’re trying to figure out how do we play the cards that were dealt on the legislative side and hemp cannabis. Ultimately, at some point, I feel there will be a complete immersion of the two. They will work together. And so hemp did something a little bit different. They got the farm bill passed, ultimately under that farm bill, they have federal protection to sell these products across the United States, and now they have to deal with the states, but they have the federal side, whereas cannabis went after the states and don’t have the federal protections. And so it’s a whole different legislative beast on both sides that you’re dealing with constantly, that we’re constantly looking at and dealing with. And then alcohol ultimately is the crown jewel. It’s how you get taxation and you get mass production and how you get this to go.

But I think the thing that a lot of people miss out on is simply this. It is impossible to scale a cannabis business inside of state lines because those are your only consumers inside that state, right? If you’re doing mass production for the whole United States as a cannabis producer, you can hit price points that other people can’t hit, and you would kill a black market that exists. The black market thrives on an opportunity. Same with the hemp side, same thing with the hemp side. So I’ve never heard of a bootlegger bust. I guess there’s that show on discovery, but generally there’s not bootleggers out there because you can’t make a beer cheaper than Budweiser does. It’s impossible for me to do that. Even with the taxation regulation, the three tier system, the compliance that exists, you can’t beat ’em on price because of

Jon Purow:

Scale.

Jonathan Black:

This needs to happen with hemp and cannabis. We need to find a way to scale it so that we can kill the black market and people can benefit from the taxation and benefit from something they want to use. Consumers aren’t going to go away. There’s people smoking cannabis today in North Carolina doing it illegally, right? It’s happening. So why would this state not want to regulate and tax, and by tax, I mean not Overregulate and not overtax, which we’ve seen in California, right? They’ve really decimated that market by just a misunderstanding of what cannabis is and what it isn’t, but would give them an ability to deal across the board and make that taxable revenue that they’re after.

Jon Purow:

No, I think I’m a big proponent, obviously, of cannabis beverages having been the secretary of the Cannabis Beverage Association, but you made something click in my head there that the way that you laid it out is perfect because it’s, you want the economies of scale. You can’t get them on a state by state basis. The thing where there’s the best economies of scale, frankly, are beverages when done right by big beverage makers. And so if you could put that product at a good price point, yeah, the taxation structures in the different states make it very, very difficult to compete with the black market. I mean, sorry, I don’t call it the black market, the illicit market to compete with the illicit market, but that’s not the problem right now in hemp. And then at the same time, we’re getting to a point where the two things could kind of fuse the state license market and hemp can fuse because hemp, look, we expect some type of something to happen in the next farm bill or in the standalone legislation, potentially in terms of not making it quite the wild, wild west of weed on the hemp side.

And we’re going to hit schedule three in a loosening of restrictions, most likely on the state license side, and make that a little bit more federally friendly. Obviously the two 80 E benefit. And so I think that for those reasons, thinking in that framework that they are going to merge, some of those things click in my head that we’re heading in that direction already. So I mean, that might lead into a solid other, I mean, you already kind of, to certain extent maybe answered this in respect, but what are some future trends that you anticipate overall? And like I said, if that’s your main trend, we’ve already got a good start, but if there’s any other trends that you’re noticing that you find interesting in the world of the state license cannabis or hemp, what do you think they are and how are you preparing for them without giving away any trade secrets?

Jonathan Black:

Yeah. Well, I don’t need to, Tilray just tipped their hand. Tilray came in and bought a bunch of distribution, a bunch of production on the alcohol side. Now they’re launching their hemp drinks that are coming out, and eventually their cannabis drinks will come too. I think you’re going to see it merging between these industries as time ticks on just because it makes sense, right? We’ve met with the teamsters in the unions in regards to this multiple times because they’re getting laid off. They’re having a hard time getting wages. When you have a deflating market, here comes the answer. So people see it and they’re looking at it and they’re trying to understand it because the regulations and the state lines and things make things tough. But I think the Cannabis Beverage Alliance Association is a fantastic association. I think there’s a bunch of great associations out there, like the U-S-H-R-T has changed over. So I

Jon Purow:

Think

Jonathan Black:

That Jonathan Miller has really made it an opportunity to change his spot, so to speak, in that organization for the better. I think HBA and Chris Lachner have done a great job. Diana, who we talked about has done a great job. And I think the inward fighting of this really just we’ve tried ultimately to get these groups to merge together, to come together, work together, both on the cannabis side, the hemp side, and everywhere else, because they need to work together to find a pathway forward because it will merge together at some point. And so it’s very tough when we’re looking at situations like this, and you have someone that wants to do this and someone wants to do that, and they don’t want to do this, and that product shouldn’t be here. I think you have to come in with room and say, everything’s on the table, let’s discuss it. And that’s what we’re set out to do in California on November 15th in Sacramento.

Very excited to do that with Karen from Kiva. Very great. We’ve been able to set aside our differences. And our first conversation, I got to tell you, I never thought we’d be able to work together, but she was very upset with me. I was very upset with the situation. I don’t know if she was upset with me as much as the situation, but those lines of communication, we’ve been able to put down those swords and tip my cap to her to put down those swords and come to the table. And so I think more of this is going to go on. I think that you and Diana and Mike Ramirez and people in your organization are fundamental to that change. I think that

Jon Purow:

Former organization, for me, former, unfortunately I do it. I had to. Yeah, that was, it wasn’t palace intrigue. It was just hopping from one firm to another. Yeah. Yeah. No, so no, I get That’s all. I always mean the time has flown by. Right? And so I think I’m have to move on to the last question that I like to think, right? JB Jonathan, you are putting on the hat, the wizard hat, stylized like a J, right? You are going to play either tous, smoker, dus, whichever one you prefer. I still haven’t decided that recently on a LinkedIn poll, Tous crushed Smoker dus. Now make any prediction that you want, sir, about other, you’ve made the biggest prediction there is already about the merging of this, but on a macro, micro level call the future of some facet of the industry on the legislative side with the farm bill or anything or anything. Your imagination is the only limit to your answer to this question.

Jonathan Black:

Yeah, that’s a tough one. You really brought it there. Yeah. Look, I think ultimately when you look out there and what’s going on, you have so many different channels of selling so many different products with so much different legislation. I think that there’s going to be a way, a path forward with Schedule three. I think that you saw a pact that was being discussed between multiple West Coast states when it comes to cannabis.

Here’s where I think this goes. I think cannabis will ultimately become like malts not subsidized by the government. Malt runs at $20 a pound. I think cannabis will get to that scenario. I think cannabis will ultimately play into both the hemp side and the alcohol space in some derivative form or another. And I think compliance and taxation will follow as these things open up. I think hemp is positioned to lead the way for cannabis, and I think cannabis has to join the fight with hemp to allow that to happen so that they can coattail on in. But the compliance structure that’s set up in the three tier system that exists from alcohol is something that’s going to have to ultimately be implemented across the hemp and cannabis spectrum for it to work.

And I think that Amazon is going to be a key player in this. Obviously, Tilray will be a key player in this, and then your big retailers are going to be a key player in this. And I think the more that you look for that opportunity to go, the better off you are. You have to deal with the cards you’re dealt right now and distribution channels and retailers that you have, and what products you can’t actually sell. And then you got to build upon that, right? As you build consumer confidence, as you build legislative confidence in your ability that this is not a black market or something that should be shunned, but something that consumers are preferring and want and they’re a safe, compliant and taxable way to do it, I think it makes a lot of sense. So my prediction ultimately is that you’re going to see cannabis, the poundage drop, the real players are going to step forward.

And it’s been an ultimate mess. You had some OGs mixed with some investment bankers, and I’ve never understood how they ever worked together, but somehow they did to an extent. And some beautiful things have been built from those oddball relationships. And I think you’re going to see them become very expansive into the hemp and alcohol categories as this continues on in those systematic approaches. And I think it’s going to be amazing. And I do think that consumers are used to consuming a beverage, and there hasn’t been a functional beverage in this country since caffeine and alcohol, and now you got one. And so I think that there’s going to be a way in which this develops and rolls into a mass audience, and you’re going to have another fight what you saw on the craft beer side, and there’s going to be additional fights, and we can all fight it out later, but for right now, it needs to be something that people work together and stay on the same page with.

Jon Purow:

Yeah. Yeah. No, and it’s like a hopeful note too. So I feel like I’m glad that we’re ending with that in a state license market that could be very, very difficult at times. Never a dull moment in the dope game, always having to bob and weave. I love ending on a hopeful note like that. So I just want to thank you again for taking the time to join me before I stop the recording here.

Jonathan Black:

Yeah, absolutely, John, anytime, man. It was a pleasure to be here with you.

Jon Purow:

Yep. All right.

End

California Judge Allows Filing of Class Action Lawsuit Against Cannabis Greenhouse Over Odor

3/10/2025

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A California Superior Court judge last week ruled that neighbors within a one-mile radius of a cannabis greenhouse operation in the Carpinteria Valley, can collectively seek damages for the “sewer-like” odor of cannabis wafting onto their properties, the Santa Barbara Independent reports. Judge Thomas Anderle’s ruling in favor of Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis will allow a class action lawsuit against greenhouse operator Valley Crest Farms to proceed.  

The ruling certifies the “class” or “community of interest” in the case as property owners within a one-mile radius of Valley Crest. To be eligible, they must have purchased their homes before January 19, 2016, and to claim damages, they must be able to show how the cannabis cultivation operation has affected their property values and the “enjoyment of their property.” 

In court documents outlined by the Independent, the property owners seek relief from what they describe as the “awful smells and noxious odors and chemicals that they are being assaulted with on a daily basis in their homes.” The plaintiffs allege that the cannabis odor has lowered their property values, driven away their tenants, reduced their business incomes, and interfered with “the quiet use and enjoyment of their property.” There may be as many as 100 homes within the 1-mile radius.  

The ruling marks the first time a judge in California has certified a class action suit related to cannabis odor. Robert Curtis, an attorney for the coalition, told the Independent that it represents a “landmark legal victory” that “will send shockwaves throughout” the state’s cannabis industry. 

Curtis said the plaintiffs primarily want the greenhouses to be equipped with carbon filtration systems, or “scrubbers,” an odor-control technology that has proven to get rid of odors before they can emit through the greenhouse roof. 

End

Kentucky Senate Approves Bill to Regulate Hemp-Derived THC Beverages

3/10/2025

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Kentucky lawmakers last week abandoned a plan to ban hemp-derived THC-infused drinks in the state and, instead, amended the bill to cap THC in infused beverages at 5%, WDRB reports. The bill was approved by the Senate and moves next to the House. 

The bill classifies THC-infused drinks like alcohol and puts enforcement in the of Alcoholic Beverage Control.  

State Sen. Julie Raque Adams (R) proposed the initial ban, noting that due to the 2018 federal Farm Bill “there was a disconnect” between state law – which does not permit adult-use cannabis use – and the “federal loophole” legalizing hemp-derived THC products. 

“The adults don’t know what it does to them, so we can’t expect a kid to know what those effects are going to be. Just really needed to rein in how these are proliferating across our state so that we do it in a really safe and meaningful way.” — Adams to WDRB 

Currently, there is a grace period for retailers to sell off inventory that wouldn’t meet the proposed regulations without penalty. 

The bill passed the chamber 29-6 and was sent to the House Licensing, Occupations, & Administrative Regulations Committee.  

End

Workers in Utah Ratify State’s First Cannabis Industry Union Contract

3/10/2025

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Workers at West Bountiful, Utah-based WholesomeCo last week ratified their union contract with United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 99, becoming the first cannabis industry workers in Utah to do so. Workers had voted to unionize in November 2023 by a 21-1 vote.   

In a statement, UFCW Local 99 President Jim McLaughlin called the contract “an important milestone not just for WholesomeCo employees, but for all Utah cannabis workers.” 

“With the ratification of this historic contract, WholesomeCo will continue to be a great place to work while helping raise the standard of living for employees industry-wide.” — McLaughlin in a press release 

The agreement includes guaranteed wage increases over three years; company-provided insurance coverage for medical, dental, and vision; paid bereavement and parental leave; paid time off and paid holidays; paid meal breaks; and a ratification bonus. 

The contract covers delivery fulfillment agents, demand inventory agents, inventory compliance agents, pharmacy fulfillment agents, pharmacy agents, and retail display agents at WholesomeCo’s West Bountiful facility.

Shaylee Robinson, a delivery fulfillment agent, in a statement, noted that “Forming a union wasn’t easy, but being able to have strong workplace protections has made everything worth it.”

End

Texas Senate Bill Would Expand Medical Cannabis Program

3/10/2025

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A proposal in the Texas Senate seeks to expand access and offerings under the state’s Compassionate Use Program (CUP), a limited medical cannabis program, KVUE reports.

One of the main changes proposed under Senate Bill 1505 would approve new formats for medical cannabis consumption, including the use of aerosol or vapor as a means of administration. Additionally, the bill proposes measuring doses of THC by milligrams instead of by weight, which will also allow for additional delivery methods.

Nico Richardson, CEO of licensed medical cannabis provider Texas Original, said he supports the expansions outlined in SB 1505:

“Senate Bill 1505 proposes crucial improvements to the Compassionate Use Program that will benefit patients throughout the state. We are grateful to Senator Charles Perry for his meaningful amendments. These changes will make the program more accessible and bring relief to the patients who rely on it for their medical care.” — Richardson, in a press release

Texas has legalized low-dose medical cannabis products for state-registered patients with muscle spasticity conditions, neuropathy, PTSD, cancer, epilepsy, and a wide range of neurodegenerative disorders.

Meanwhile, a poll last month found that more than 60% of Texas residents support legalizing adult-use cannabis, and support was even higher for cannabis decriminalization (69%) and comprehensive medical legalization (79%).

Last year, a report by the Texas Department of Public Safety found the state’s medical cannabis program is inadequate and fails to provide “statewide access” for qualifying patients, which is required under state law.

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Alabama Court Overturns Order Blocking Medical Cannabis Licenses

3/10/2025

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Alabama’s medical cannabis program could finally see forward progress after the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals on Friday overturned a temporary restraining order that has blocked the state’s cannabis licensing process for over a year, AL.com reports.

Alabama lawmakers passed the medical cannabis program in 2021. However, when the state awarded its first licenses in 2023, the process was halted and ultimately invalidated after several cannabis companies claimed the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC) had violated the state’s open meetings law.

AMCC Director John McMillan said the agency is “hopeful that this decision will remove the obstacles that have prevented the Commission from completing the licensing process and doing the work the law charged it to do.”

“On behalf of the many long-suffering patients in Alabama who have waited far too long for access to the benefits of medical cannabis products, we are pleased with today’s decision from the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals.” — McMillan, in a press release

When it launches, the Alabama medical cannabis program will only be available to patients with a doctor’s prescription, and only for patients with certain conditions such as cancer, epilepsy, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic or intractable pain, and other serious conditions. Patients will have access to consumables like gummies, tablets, tinctures, gels and other topicals, transdermal patches, and inhalers — but cannabis-infused foods, flower products, and other products administered by smoking or vaping will not be allowed under the program’s rules.

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Ohio House Proposal Would Set THC Limits But Leave Cannabis Home Grows Untouched

3/07/2025

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A proposal in the Ohio House of Representatives seeks to restrict the state’s voter-passed cannabis legalization program, News 5 Cleveland reports.

Introduced Thursday by Rep. Brian Stewart (R), the legislation is an alternative to a recently-passed Senate bill that was criticized for seeking to override voters, who overwhelmingly approved the state’s adult-use cannabis program.

Like the Senate proposal, House Bill 160 also seeks to install maximum THC limits for cannabis concentrate products and would cap the number of dispensaries in the state at 350. The bill would not affect the state’s home grow laws or cannabis possession limits, however, which was a particularly unpopular aspect of the Senate proposal. The House bill is also less restrictive in regards to cannabis consumption, while the Senate bill seeks to prohibit public cannabis consumption outright.

“That bill respects the will of the voters, while also acknowledging that by passing initiated statute, backers and supporters of Issues 2 understood and accepted that marijuana law would remain subject to certain reasonable reforms by the Ohio Legislature.” — Stewart, via News 5 Cleveland

The bill would also prohibit advertising and packaging that could be considered appealing to children, and would redirect cannabis tax revenue toward the state’s general fund.

Meanwhile, licensed cannabis dispensaries in Ohio sold $255 million in cannabis products during the program’s first six months, and the state currently collects a 10% excise tax on the industry, as was approved by voters.

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Idaho House Passes Bill Asking Voters to Rescind Their Right to Pass Cannabis Reforms

3/07/2025

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The Idaho House of Representatives passed a proposal Wednesday to send a ballot proposal to voters that would amend the state Constitution so that “only the Legislature” could reform the state’s cannabis laws, the Idaho Capital Sun reports. The proposal effectively asks voters to surrender their power to enact cannabis legalization or decriminalization laws, and any other type of drug reforms, via citizen-led ballot initiatives.

The bill’s sponsor Rep. Bruce Skaug (R) cited concerns for the “virtue and sobriety” of Idahoans.

“It’s time for Idahoans to proactively decide the state’s fate relative to marijuana, psychoactive substances and narcotics. I’m asking that we let our state go on the offense.” — Skaug, via the Idaho Capital Sun

If approved by the Senate, the constitutional amendment would appear on state ballots during the 2026 election and would require a majority of voters to vote yes to be approved.

Meanwhile, Idaho activists behind the “Decriminalize Cannabis Now” ballot initiative are gathering signatures to qualify for the 2026 ballot. If the campaign succeeds — and if the Senate approves the bill — voters would consider proposals to legalize personal cannabis possession and rescind their right to pass such cannabis reforms on the same ballot, the report said

“State lawmakers are well aware that their ‘reefer madness’ views are out of step with most Idahoans,” Paul Armentano, the deputy director of federal cannabis advocacy group NORML, said in a statement.

“That is why they are seeking to remove voters from the equation. Whether or not one personally supports or opposes cannabis legalization, these overtly undemocratic tactics ought to be a cause of deep concern.”

Idaho is one of the only U.S states without any state-level cannabis reforms. Earlier this year, the governor signed a bill to add a mandatory $300 fine to any cannabis possession charges.

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Grow America Builders, LLC Completes Construction of New Flowery Cannabis Dispensary on Upper West Side, NYC

3/06/2025

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New York, NY – Grow America Builders, LLC, a leading national cannabis design-build construction firm, proudly announces the completion of the design and construction of the latest Flowery cannabis dispensary in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Having managed the design or construction of over 100 cannabis facilities nationwide, this marks Grow America’s sixth project in New York City.

This new location is the 11th Flowery storefront overall and their fifth in New York, with more locations planned in the very near future.

Located at 2465 Broadway, The Flowery’s latest NYC dispensary opened in mid-February, offering over 3,000 square feet of space. This includes a consumer experience area of more than 1,000 square feet, featuring four point-of-sale locations to ensure a swift and seamless consumer experience that they’re known for.

Exterior photo of The Flowery

The construction kicked off in October, starting with a full-scale interior demolition of the former SoulCycle site. By late January, the dispensary received its certificate of occupancy and state approval. The design embraces The Flowery’s brand identity with a spacious, inviting sales floor, sleek fixtures, polished flooring, custom tile wall coverings, and millwork displays, complemented by vibrant design elements that honor the rich cannabis culture of New York City.

Interior of The Flowery

“Collaborating with The Flowery has been fantastic,” said David Fettner, Principal at Grow America Builders. “With their proven brand and concept, this locationpromises an exceptional retail experience for consumers in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As more legal dispensaries emerge in New York, we understand that operators have options in design and build partners, and we are honored that The Flowery trusted us with this significant project.”

About Grow America Builders

Grow America Builders stands out as a national design and construction firm specializing exclusively in the cannabis industry, having developed cultivation facilities, extraction labs, and dispensaries across nearly every region in the continental United States. Principals David Fettner and Mike Kaulentis bring over two decades of expertise in cannabis construction and design.

For further information about Grow America Builders or to connect with principals David Fettner or Mike Kaulentis, please visit www.growamericabuilders.com.

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California Seized $534M in Illegal Cannabis Last Year

3/05/2025

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California’s Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force (UCETF) seized $534 million worth of illegal cannabis in the state last year, bringing the total seized by the state to about $2.8 billion since 2019. The UCETF, created by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), is led by the state Department of Cannabis Control.  

“We will continue to target illegal cannabis operations and cut off the illicit revenue streams of transnational criminal organizations who prey on workers, our environment, and kids. Enforcement officials have been on the frontlines – with local, state and federal partners – to bolster our legal cannabis market.” — Newsom in a press release 

In 2024, enforcement teams served 425 search warrants focusing on illicit cultivation and unlicensed retail sales. The UCETF served 155 warrants targeting unlawful indoor cultivators, seizing nearly 163,000 pounds of cannabis totaling about $269 million, destroying about 288,900 plants, and uncovering 61 firearms. In all, 28 arrests were made in connection to illegal indoor cannabis cultivation. 

The enforcement teams served 143 warrants related to unlawful outdoor cannabis grows, which resulted in the seizure of 122,673 pounds of cannabis totaling about $198.3 million, the eradication of 190,812 plants, with 30 firearms seized and 57 arrests. 

The UCETF served 87 warrants related to unlicensed retail operations, seizing 8,821 pounds of cannabis totaling about $17.3 million, and destroying 1,275 plants. The warrants led to the seizure of 22 firearms and 28 arrests. 

In a statement, Department of Cannabis Control Director Nicole Elliott said the efforts “highlight California’s continued focus on maintaining the integrity of the legal market, supporting licensed operators, and protecting consumers and communities from the harms associated with unregulated cannabis activities.”  

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Report: Six State Markets to Contribute More Than 75% of Cannabis Sales Growth Over Next Three Years

3/05/2025

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Six state markets are set to contribute more than 75% of U.S. cannabis sales growth over the next three years, according to data from cannabis wholesale platform LeafLink. Those states include Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio – which already have adult-use cannabis markets – and Minnesota, which is expected to come online this year.

According to LeafLink data, Illinois’ cannabis market is expected to reach $2.8 billion in 2027, driven by “high unit prices, and strong retail density in key cities across the state.” LeafLink also expects about 140 new social equity licenses to come online over the next six to 12 months.

New Jersey’s adult-use cannabis market is expected to total $2 billion by 2027, according to LeakLink, with more than 1,500 new licenses planned to be issued by the middle of next year across the supply chain. LeafLink notes that the licenses will be “highly fragmented” including 270 new cultivation licenses, more than 200 manufacturers, 600-plus dispensaries, and more than 400 integrated microbusinesses which will all be independent, non-vertical licenses. 

In New York, where LeafLink notes two to three retail dispensaries are opening weekly in the state, sales are expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2027. According to LeafLink data, retail sales in the state grew from about $20 million monthly at the beginning of 2024 to about $110 million in January 2025. 

Retail cannabis sales in Maryland could total $2.1 billion by 2027, according to LeafLink, with the state currently in the process of issuing 925 new licenses across the supply chain. Those licenses include 300 retail licenses, 175 cultivators, 200 processors, 200 delivery-only microbusinesses, and 50 consumption lounges with caps on license ownership. 

While adult-use sales have yet to launch in Minnesota, LeafLink expects the market to total $800 million by 2027, with the state planning to allow at least one store per 12,000 residents which would equal 512 dispensaries statewide.  

LeafLink estimates that Ohio’s market will total $2 billion in 2027, noting that monthly sales in the state doubled throughout the year and that the continued issuance of licenses over the next several years would ultimately triple retail cannabis access in the state.     

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Nebraska Legislative Committee Considering Two Bills to Establish Medical Cannabis Regulations

3/05/2025

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Bills seeking to establish the voter-approved medical cannabis program in Nebraska are making their way through the legislature as the state’s General Affairs Committee on Monday heard testimony on two proposals to regulate, tax, and establish licensure for medical cannabis.   

LB651 would provide the regulatory framework for medical cannabis businesses, including cultivators, dispensaries, product manufacturers, testing facilities, and vertically integrated businesses. LB677 would also provide industry regulations – adding an additional license for transporters – and includes a 4% tax on medical cannabis sales. 

Under the proposals, physicians, osteopathic physicians, physician assistants or nurse practitioners would be authorized to issue a written recommendation for up to five ounces of medical cannabis for individuals with qualifying medical conditions. Individuals under age 18 would need approval from a legal parent or guardian with authority to make health care decisions. After receiving approval from a health care provider, both proposals would require individuals to apply for a registry card to identify them as a qualified patient or registered caregiver. 

Both proposals would prohibit the use or possession of cannabis on school grounds, at childcare facilities or home daycares, in jails, adult or juvenile correctional facilities or youth rehabilitation and treatment centers, and while operating a vehicle. Schools would have authority to establish regulations that allow for students to use non-smoked or vaporized medical cannabis in certain areas. 

The committee took no immediate action on either of the proposals. 

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