TALLAHASSEE, Nov. 29, 2021 – PRESS RELEASE – Trulieve Cannabis Corp., the largest multistate operator (MSO) in the United States, announced the publication of its first Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report. The report contains standard disclosures from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Standards, The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) as well as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The Report highlights ESG achievements to date and serves as a foundation for demonstrating how the company's ESG approach, strategies and commitments are embedded within its core business.

"Since Trulieve was founded, our patients, customers and employees have been at the heart of everything we do,” CEO Kim Rivers said. “We believe in the power of cannabis for all and take great pride in providing access to innovative products for our customers, building engagement in the communities where we work and live, advocating for our industry, and ensuring a positive social approach to social justice and equality.

"While this is our first report, these principles and initiatives have been core to our business since its beginning. Our high standards of ethics and governance are integrated into the way we do business every day. We recognize that what we do from an environmental, social and governance perspective is important to our stakeholders, and we are proud of our commitment to transparency and responsibility as the first U.S. MSO to issue an ESG report."

Rivers added, "Cannabis is a generational opportunity. We know there's still work to do as we advance our sustainability journey, and we are committed to communicating our progress, holding ourselves accountable and being good corporate stewards to ensure the cannabis industry is safe, inclusive, equitable and sustainable for generations to come."

Key takeaways from the ESG report include:

• Conducted our inaugural materiality assessment with an ESG consultant to identify and prioritize key non-financial topics for our business and stakeholders
• Formed a cross-functional ESG Steering Committee to collaboratively gather and validate baseline information and plan future initiatives
• Established ESG targets for 2022 with key activities of reducing our carbon footprint, broadening our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) activities, and establishing a board committee
• Reviewed Trulieve's environmental sustainability, approach to community engagement and social responsibility, and corporate governance protocols
• Discussed DEI initiatives across our company and within our communities
• Provided case studies to illustrate the report’s theme: The Trulieve Way

To download the full report, please visit the company's ESG webpage: trulieve.com/esg-dei-initiatives

CHICAGO, Illinois, November 25, 2021 – PRESS RELEASE – Cresco Labs, a vertically integrated multistate operator and a wholesaler of branded cannabis products, announced the closing of its previously announced acquisition of Bay, LLC Cure Pennsylvania (Cure Penn).

Transaction Highlights

• Three operational dispensaries in Lancaster, Phoenixville and Philadelphia
• Cure Penn's dispensary locations are incremental and complementary to Cresco Labs' five existing Sunnyside dispensaries in Pennsylvania
• A retail platform that outperforms the average revenues per-store in Pennsylvania, to be further improved through Cresco Labs' Sunnyside retail model

"Our focus heading into 2022 is on tailoring our strategy to the dynamics of each state to maintain a dominant market position and increase profitability," said Charlie Bachtell, Cresco Labs CEO and co-founder. "Between the acquisition of Cure Penn and the pending acquisition of Laurel Harvest, we are adding four new operational stores, licenses for five incremental stores, and 52 thousand square feet of indoor cultivation space in Pennsylvania.

"The moves we're making in this state to increase our retail footprint and add cultivation put us in the best position to remain the number one wholesaler in the current framework and continue to win when adult-use is ultimately introduced," Bachtell added. "Another example of our focus on strategic breadth, depth and execution as the path to success today and as this industry evolves."

The company expects to transition all stores in Pennsylvania to Sunnyside by the end of Q1 2022.

In the months since delta-8 THC has exploded into popularity, debate over its legality and how to regulate it has pervaded regulators, law enforcement, and the hemp and cannabis industries. While the cannabinoid is naturally occurring in cannabis, many in the hemp industry have begun to convert it from CBD. It has provided a lucrative avenue for hemp producers and processors to sell CBD product that has otherwise lost much of its value over the course of two years, but its psychoactive effects have others questioning in which market it belongs—if any at all.

The main question at hand: Should delta-8 be regulated as hemp or in the state-legal cannabis market? 

A recent Cannabis Business Times/Hemp Grower survey of nearly 300 respondents working in the hemp and cannabis industries demonstrates just how controversial this question is. 

When asked whether delta-8 should be produced and sold in the hemp marketplace, nearly half of respondents said yes. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of respondents said delta-8 should be produced and sold in the state-legal cannabis marketplace. (Respondents could select the hemp market, cannabis market, both or neither.)

The nearly even split among responses is indicative of the conflicting attitudes in both the hemp and cannabis industries surrounding delta-8.

 

How to Categorize Delta-8

Out of 295 respondents to the CBT/HG survey, 66 work directly in the cannabis industry (either growing, manufacturing or selling), and 196 work directly in the hemp industry. (The rest of respondents selected “other,” with responses ranging from prospective business owners and consultants to bankers and journalists.)

When asked whether delta-8 should be produced and sold in the hemp marketplace:

• 51% of respondents said yes;
• 35% of respondents said no;
• 8% said they aren’t sure;
• 6% said under certain circumstances.

Meanwhile, when asked whether delta-8 should be produced and sold in the cannabis marketplace:

• 59% of respondents said yes;
• 23% of respondents said no;
• 12% said they aren’t sure;
• 6% said under certain circumstances.

Responses yielded similar results when broken down by those who work in the cannabis industry and those who work in the hemp industry.

 

How Should Delta-8 Be Regulated?

Respondents offered a plethora of answers when asked: “What, if any, regulations would you like to see addressing delta-8 THC production and/or sale in the hemp and/or cannabis industries?”

The most common response, in summary: No additional regulations are needed.

“There is a place for everything, and the cannabis industry is starting to get greedy and push heavy regulations to the hemp industry that should not exist,” one respondent wrote.

“We have enough nonsense regulations,” another commented, summing up the viewpoint of several who argue against additional regulations for the hemp industry in particular, where delta-8 is most frequently produced and sold.

The second-most popular answer was that delta-8 should be regulated like state-legal cannabis or, more specifically, delta-9 THC.

“Delta-8 is outside the spirit of the Farm Bill, and [it] gives the hemp industry a black eye,” one person noted.

“Any cannabis or hemp product that can produce intoxicating effects should be treated, regulated, restricted (age) and taxed as such,” another wrote.

“It’s psychoactive, so it should be regulated like delta-9. It creates unnecessary competition for smokable flower, whether it’s CBDV, CBG, CBD. Better for small farmers to regulate separately. They would still be able to sell biomass to THC-regulated markets, which seem to be growing,” commented another.

Other popular responses included implementing testing, production and purity standards for finished products to ensure consistent products and safety among consumers. 

One survey respondent wrote: “This is a critical time for the hemp industry. Standards for extraction and manufacturing [are] critical. Ensuring we are setting those standards to ensure they are not out of reach for small businesses is also critical. This country is built on the backs of small business. I would point to the beer industry as an example: They have manufacturing standards that are achievable by Budweiser and microbreweries alike. Ice cream manufacturers, both Breyers Ice Cream and Cold Stone Creamery, are required to follow the same basic standards even though they are very different business models.”

 

Final Thoughts

Whichever side of the coin respondents fall on, it’s clear many have strong feelings about the current status of delta-8 as a largely unregulated substance produced in the hemp industry. (However, a growing number of states are beginning to regulate it.)

While delta-8 does occur naturally in small amounts in cannabis, some take issue with the fact that most (if not all) product on the market is currently produced synthetically.

“The residual solvents used to produce it and left in the product consumers are ingesting should be enough to create enforcement … [and] stop the production and sale of it immediately!” one survey respondent commented.

“The manipulation of the molecular structure of one product to morph it into another should not be dismissed and ignored. This product is untested in the general cannabis community in the United States and across the world. It should have as much, if not more, oversight than marijuana,” noted another.

Several suggested that this debate over the cannabinoid—and even the market for the cannabinoid itself—only exists because cannabis is still illegal at a federal level.

“Legalize it all at the federal level and this won’t be a conversation,” one person wrote.

“Seems like delta-8 only exists really because delta-9 [THC] is illegal. If delta-9 was legal, [there’d] be no need to synthesize delta-8. We’d all just extract delta-9,” commented another person.

“The delta-8 craze is nothing more than a loophole around antiquated laws regarding marijuana. People want to get high, and delta-8 is ‘not illegal’ even though it should be,” another respondent noted. “Legalize marijuana in all 50 states and put a stop to this delta-8 nonsense. Let people use the plant the way God made it.”

Editor’s note: Written responses were lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

The South Dakota Supreme Court ruled that the voice of its people, who voted in favor of legalizing adult-use cannabis by a 54.2% majority in the November 2020 election, was not enough to influence public policy.

Keloland Media Group

The five-justice court issued a final decision Nov. 24, 2021, that upheld Circuit Judge Christina Klinger’s February ruling that voter-approved Amendment A violated the state’s single-subject rule in Article XXIII of the South Dakota Constitution and therefore was an unconstitutional ballot initiative.

The case stems from a lawsuit filed less than a month following the election by Pennington County Sherriff Kevin Thom and South Dakota Highway Patrol Col. Rick Miller. Although a spokesperson said Republican Gov. Kristi Noem did not ask Miller or Thom to bring forth the lawsuit, two months later, on Jan. 8, 2021, Noem issued an executive order, asserting that Amendment A was unconstitutional, and launched a taxpayer-funded lawsuit challenging the ballot measure.  

Noem, who opposed legalization leading up to the 2020 election, nominated Klinger to the state’s Sixth Circuit Court in early 2019—roughly two years before Klinger struck down Amendment A.

The majority opinion in Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision was penned by Chief Justice Steven Jensen in concurrence with Justices Janine Kern and Patricia DeVaney, while Justice Mark Salter concurred specially, writing his own opinion, and Justice Scott Myren concurred in part and dissented in part.

The five justices heard arguments on Amendment A back on April 28. Their final opinions come nearly seven months later.

“This Court long ago emphasized the significance of the constitutional requirement ensuring voters are afforded an opportunity to vote separately on each separate subject contained in a proposed amendment,” Jensen said in the majority opinion.

He added, “It is clear that Amendment A contains provisions embracing at least three separate subjects, each with distinct objects or purposes. Those three separate subjects are: (1) the development of a comprehensive plan for the legalization and regulation of marijuana for all individuals at least 21 years of age; (2) a mandate that the Legislature adopt laws ensuring a discrete group of qualifying persons, without regard to age, have access to medical marijuana; and (3) a mandate that the Legislature regulate the cultivation, processing and sale of hemp.”

In the courtroom seven months ago, the plaintiffs argued that Amendment A has five subjects, as it appeared on the ballot: legalizing cannabis, regulating cannabis, taxing cannabis, requiring the South Dakota Legislature to pass laws regarding hemp and ensuring access to medical cannabis.

Meanwhile, the defendants, specifically Robins Kaplan LLP attorney Brendan Johnson, who represented South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws (SDBML), the group behind Amendment A, argued the measure contains one subject—cannabis—to which all provisions are essentially related.

While the Supreme Court’s majority opinion recognized that Amendment A was not in violation of state law simply because it included multiple provisions, Jensen said “a violation occurs when the proposed amendment contains more than one subject, with different objects or purposes, that are not dependent upon or connected with each other.”

SDBML campaign director Matthew Schweich, who also serves as the deputy director of reform organization Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s final decision:

SDBML | southdakotamarijuana.org

“We believe that this ruling from the South Dakota Supreme Court is extremely flawed. The court has rejected common sense and instead used a far-fetched legal theory to overturn a law passed by over 225,000 South Dakota voters based on no logical or evidentiary support. The ruling states that Amendment A comprised three subjects—recreational marijuana, medical marijuana, and hemp legalization—and that South Dakotans could not tell what they were voting on when voting for Amendment A.

“It’s a legal stretch and one that relies on the disrespectful assumption that South Dakota voters were intellectually incapable of understanding the initiative.”

Also on the November 2020 ballot was a separate measure to legalize medical cannabis, Initiated Measure 26, which passed with a 69.9% majority.

While Salter concurred specially—agreeing with the majority court’s conclusion that Amendment A violated the single-subject rule—he wrote a separate opinion to emphasize the “substantive nature” of that rule.

A single-subject rule attempts to mitigate the political bargaining scheme of combining multiple measures to achieve majority support, or “logrolling,” in a tactic where joining unpopular measures with more popular ones can result in pushing through policy that otherwise wouldn’t pass on its own, Salter said.

“I am not as convinced as the other members of the Court’s majority that a violation of Article XXIII renders the entire amendment void in all instances,” he said. “In several of our previous decisions, we have held that the Legislature’s violation of a nearly identical constitutional single-subject rule for statutes contained in Article III was not fatal.”

Later in his opinion, Salter said, “I would, therefore, leave for another day the question of whether a violation of Article XXIII’s single-subject rule renders a constitutional amendment void in all cases. I otherwise join the Court’s opinion.”

South Dakota Supreme Court

While Myren concurred in part, his dissenting opinion pointed out that there was no evidence of voter confusion over Amendment A.

He also dissented from the majority’s decision that Amendment A violates Article XXIII.

“I believe that the propositions in constitutional Amendment A are ‘incidental to and necessarily connected with’ the object of providing a comprehensive plan for all phases of legalization, regulation, use, production and sale of marijuana and related substances,” he said. “Therefore, I dissent from the majority’s decision that Amendment A violates [the single-subject rule] and is void in its entirety.”

In his belief that voters fully understood what was before them on the ballot, reformist Schweich pointed to the 54% voter approval for adult-use Amendment A compared to the 70% approval for medical cannabis Initiated Measure 26.

“If voters believed Amendment A was a medical marijuana-only initiative, there would not have been a 16-point gap in the election results,” he said. “Medical marijuana and hemp were mentioned in just three sentences in Amendment A. The rest of the initiative addressed recreational marijuana. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that recreational marijuana, medical marijuana and hemp are all versions of the same plant: cannabis.”

Anticipating the possibility of the Supreme Court siding with Klinger and Noem in its ruling, Schweich and his SDBML team have been gathering signatures throughout the state in an effort to place another adult-use legalization measure on the 2022 ballot.

Any Given Thursday: South Dakota Supreme Court’s Indecision on Adult-Use Cannabis

While SDBML missed a Nov. 8, 2021, deadline to submit roughly 17,000 valid signatures to qualify for the 2022 ballot, Schweich and company will extend their efforts for the statutory ballot initiative and try to submit signatures by the May 2022 extended deadline instead.

But waiting nearly seven months on the Supreme Court left SDBML with uncertainties in the interim, Schweich said.

“The fact that the South Dakota Supreme Court took nearly seven months to issue a ruling on an election-related lawsuit is extremely problematic,” he said. “This indefensible delay undermined the public’s faith in South Dakota’s elections, its system of government and its judiciary. The court owes the people of South Dakota an explanation.”

Furthermore, Schweich said the timing of Noem’s Jan. 8, 2021, executive order, nearly two months after Miller and Thom filed the stemming lawsuit, was mysteriously timed. The executive order contradicted a statement from Noem spokesperson Ian Fury, who said on Nov. 23, 2020, that “Gov. Noem did not ask Col. Miller or Sheriff Thom to bring the lawsuit.”

The inconsistency, Schweich said, has never been explained, and he believes Noem owes the public an explanation.

“We should know whether the executive order issued in January was truthful,” he said.

Regardless, SDBML’s push to legalize adult-use cannabis in 2022 will resume.

“We are as energized as ever to continue our work,” Schweich said. “We will not stop until cannabis is legalized in South Dakota.”