This week, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed multiple “clean slate” bills into law that will automatically expunge criminal records for those convicted of certain cannabis-related offenses. Elsewhere, in Illinois, the state announced that the first eight months of adult-use cannabis sales have generated more than $100 million in tax revenue.

Here, we’ve rounded up the 10 headlines you need to know before this week is over.

• Federal: A multi-disciplinary team of seven North American universities and federal laboratories, led by Dr. Jeb Fields at the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, is seeking input from growers and growing media manufacturers/suppliers across the continent, representing multiple sectors and demographics, to identify needed innovations and constraints when producing specialty crops with soilless substrates. The United States Department of Agriculture Specialty Crops Research Initiative awarded the researchers a planning grant, which the group plans to use to reimagine and redefine soilless substrate science to better meet the expanding range of crops and productions systems that are transitioning from traditional field soils into soilless substrates. Read more
• Colorado: The USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture program has granted Colorado State University Pueblo $275,000 to develop its Industrial Hemp Education, Agriculture and Research (InHEAR) program. CSU Pueblo started offering a Bachelor of Science in Cannabis Biology and Chemistry degree this fall, and the grant will allow the school to expand this degree to include hemp agriculture beginning in the fall of 2021. Read more
• Massachusetts: A judge has sided with Cambridge, Mass., in the latest ruling in a lawsuit over the city’s cannabis ordinance, which bars existing medical cannabis operators from receiving adult-use cannabis licenses for two years in order to prioritize social equity applicants. Revolutionary Clinics, a licensed medical cannabis dispensary in Cambridge, sued the city over the two-year licensing delay, and while a judge sided with the company in January, Associate Justice Diana Maldonado has now ruled in favor of Cambridge. Read more
• Michigan: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed multiple “clean slate” bills into law this week that will automatically expunge criminal records for those convicted of certain cannabis-related offenses. The new law will automatically clear the records of those convicted of cannabis-related offenses that would not have been considered a crime after Dec. 6, 2018, when Michigan legalized adult-use cannabis, although it does not apply to felony convictions that carried a sentence of 10 years or more. Read more
• Missouri: The state is inching closer to launching its first medical cannabis sales as EKG Labs, the state’s first licensed testing facility, is testing cannabis for BeLeaf Medical, the state’s first licensed cultivator. BeLeaf co-founder John Curtis told St. Louis Public Radio that while the initial batch submitted to EKG is not large enough to stock dispensary shelves, he expects to send a second batch for testing and have product ready for sale at BeLeaf’s store within the next couple of weeks. Read more
• Mississippi: Gov. Tate Reeves has signed legislation that allows the state’s patients to access FDA-approved cannabis medications. The move comes weeks before voters head to the polls to decide on two competing ballot measures that would legalize medical cannabis in the state. Read more
• New Mexico: Ultra Health, a New Mexico cannabis company, has successfully filed a Writ of Mandamus against the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) asking the court to rescind an NMDOH mandate that added additional requirements for reciprocal patients to participate in the New Mexico Medical Cannabis Program. Santa Fe District Court Judge Matthew Wilson prepared the Writ and signed it on Oct. 13, invalidating the NMDOH mandate and Emergency Rule that attempted to disallow qualified reciprocal participants from accessing New Mexico’s Medical Cannabis Program. Read more
• Illinois: The first eight months of adult-use cannabis sales in Illinois have generated more than $100 million in tax revenue. Total adult-use sales have reached more than $431 million since launching in January, reaching a new monthly record of nearly $68 million in September. Read more
• Washington, D.C.: D.C. councilmembers have introduced a bill that would allow returning citizens to work in the medical cannabis industry. The legislation would repeal a rule included in the Legalization of Marijuana for Medical Treatment Initiative of 1999 that prevents anyone with a felony conviction or misdemeanor cannabis offense from working at a medical cannabis cultivation center or dispensary. Read more
• International: Colombia’s legislature is discussing several initiatives that seek to regulate production and consumption of cannabis for recreational purposes among adults, and the Congress of Colombia has advanced two bills that would regulate adult-use cannabis. On Sept. 16, the first committee of the Lower House approved the first debate with a narrow vote of 18-17, allowing the first bill to move forward to the plenary of the Lower House. Separately, a group of 38 lawmakers of the opposition and the center-right parties led by Sens. Gustavo Bolivar and Luis Fernando Velasco submitted a second congressional bill that aims to regulate marijuana production and consumption. Read more

Multistate cannabis operator Cresco Labs is committed to being a responsible player in the rapidly growing industry, and has now set out to help other companies build brands the right way through the release of its Responsible Advertising and Marketing Standards (RAMS).

The advertising and marketing code, which was made public Oct. 8, includes a set of guiding principles to ensure that Cresco markets and promotes its brands and products responsibly. The standards include guidance on commercial communications to help prevent underage appeal and ensure companies make appropriate claims about cannabis’s benefits. The code also offers best practices for consumer-facing promotional events and merchandising.

Here, Cresco CCO Greg Butler and SVP of Brand Marketing Cory Rothschild share why the company developed and published these standards, as well as how they will ultimately benefit the industry as it continues to grow.

Melissa Schiller: Why did Cresco develop these standards? What was the company’s overall goal in releasing these to the industry?

Photos courtesy of Cresco Labs

Greg Butler: The reason why we wanted to publish this is, as we look to the end of this year and into next year, what we expect to see in the U.S. cannabis market is an increase in investment across all companies in building their brands. There are a couple key trends driving that. One is competition that continues to grow, so everyone is fighting to grow their brand with customers. The second is companies are strengthening their financial positions. They’re able to invest more in brands. And then the third is we’re also seeing more opportunities for cannabis brands to invest in marketing, so there are more ways they can spend money. With that, there are a lot of tailwinds that are driving toward more spend for brands in the space.

As we looked at it, as we’re competitive and we expect everyone to be competitive, we wanted to create some guidelines that set a series of best practices to ensure that we’re building brands the right way and that it’s always in service of what’s best for consumers.

Cory Rothschild: We obviously operate under different laws and regulations in every state that we compete in. Foundationally, we do believe that there are some standards that shouldn’t change or vary depending on where you’re talking about cannabis. Even in certain states that have more relaxed laws, there are certain things when it comes to conversations around promoting responsible consumption or avoiding underage-appealing imagery. Those don’t change, and we must commit to those as an industry, not even just as a company, if we’re going to build a category that not only reaches its potential, but does what is best for consumers along the way.

MS: What do Cresco’s Responsible Advertising and Marketing Standards entail? What are some key best practices that are outlined in these standards?

CR: If you look at our guidelines, in some ways, it’s just some things that shouldn’t even be up for debate, from [the fact that] you should never advertise to a minor to how [to] display pictures of people and images in your ads to the claims that you make, and then how do you run events to ensure we’re doing everything in our ability to operate in a way in which a young consumer wouldn’t see our marketing? So, the gambit of our code reaches everything from media through to experience.

MS: What was the overall process like for developing these standards?

CR: It started with developing our own internal standards and adhering to those in all the work that we do on an ongoing basis. Our company is founded on being professional and helping to normalize the industry, and what that [means] is holding ourselves to standards that are above what is being asked of us. So, we developed this set of norms to what we felt was appropriate and to what we believed was the right way to operate our business.

We did look to other codes and responsible use practices that exist in the broader CPG space, whether that’s in alcohol or pharmaceuticals, to look to how we could set our own industry standards above and beyond the regulations that are imposed on us currently to make sure that we are proactively building the right category.

MS: How will these standards help prevent underage consumption?

Cresco SVP of Brand Marketing Cory Rothschild

CR: I would hope that these standards are overwhelmingly a no-brainer for most people. We hope that people nod as they read them because they seem reasonable and responsible. So, to point to a few—one is that when we show individuals in our advertising, those people should be over the age of 21, and that should be made clear in the ways in which they’re shown. This is something that’s commonly practiced across other CPG categories where there are age restrictions around usage, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be doing the same. There are examples within our industry where there are underage individuals being shown or at least seemingly underage individuals being shown in advertising that wouldn’t be appropriate.

The other piece is showing imagery that would be somehow juvenile, whether that’s a logo, an endorsement, [or] some sort of imagery or dress that connotates use or young culture. That’s not appropriate to connect to cannabis when you’re building and making advertising. That’s something that we believe is common sense, but it’s worth us committing to as a group because we know that this is a product that can have an appeal to underage individuals if frequently shown in advertising.

MS: How will these standards help Cresco and other cannabis advertisers make appropriate claims about cannabis’s benefits?

GB: One of the things that’s difficult in an industry like cannabis is you don’t have a lot of FCC guidelines or health and safety guidelines of what product claims you can or cannot make. There isn’t a lot of oversight for brands that are making claims. As you think of an industry that’s brand new with consumers, you don’t want to allow brands to make misleading statements that might cause confusion or even misuse of products. So, in a world where you’re not governed by bodies that ensure you’re using clinical trials, we want to encourage everyone to be responsible on how they make or allude to product claims associated with product.

MS: How do the standards help establish best practices for promotional events and merchandising?

CR: I think the part that is unclear at the local level is, how should companies interact with people who are under 21 with product? Of course, if you’re hosting an event in California that has a license to sell cannabis, that’s a 21-and-over event by definition and is obviously associated with ID checking and all kinds of age gating, but that’s not the case when you’re putting up a booth at a community fair or a booth at an arts festival. These are all things [where] anyone can have a booth or show up, and you have to make judgement calls around whether or not you’d like to participate in those events. Then, when individuals at the event want to approach your booth and have a conversation with your company, how do you make sure you’re having appropriate conversations with appropriate individuals?

A lot of the code is trying to fill in some of those gray spaces that we’ve run into as a company on a daily basis as we try to do different events in different states. These are meant to be a complement to existing regulation and law as opposed to either rewriting or stating the obvious.

An example of Cresco's advertising for its Liquid Live Resin

MS: How will these standards be distributed, or how do you hope they will be adopted by the industry?

GB: Our hope by publishing them is that it’s somewhat of a call to action. We hope that everyone looks at their own business and maybe finetunes and creates their own [standards]. While we’re all building our brands, we all want to do it the right way, so we’ll make [our standards] publicly available on our website for anyone who wants to read [them], and our only real objective on this is that others read, understand and adapt to it or their own version.

CR: Just to build on that, we’ve gotten a great response from other businesses that are interested in partnering, and we’re just beginning to have some of those conversations. My hope is that this becomes bigger than just Cresco Labs, as Greg mentioned, and that it pushes us to work together as an industry to build what’s right for our category. We [want to] continue to open more and more opportunities with partners in the media space, vendors [and] agencies so that more people are able to participate in cannabis and we can have greater and better marketing overall.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.

New Jersey voters will decide whether to legalize adult-use cannabis this fall, and with just over two weeks until Election Day, NJ CAN 2020 is ramping up its campaign efforts to support the referendum, enlisting the help of Gov. Phil Murphy and Sen. Nicholas Scutari.

Murphy and Scutari, who have long supported legalization in the state, joined NJ CAN 2020 for a live panel discussion Oct. 8 on what a “Yes” vote means for New Jersey (see below video).

“Gov. Murphy has been an outspoken proponent for this since he’s been elected and prior to being elected, and he’s been full-throated behind this effort to get this ballot question passed,” Bill Caruso, an attorney with Archer & Greiner and a member of NJ CAN 2020, told Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary. “A million people have already voted in New Jersey. Having the governor come out when he came out, after vote-by-mail ballots arrived in New Jersey, is important."

NJ CAN 2020 was formed by the state’s cannabis advocates to support the adult-use legalization ballot initiative, and includes members of New Jersey United for Marijuana Reform, which comprises the ACLU of New Jersey, Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, Latino Action Network, American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp, Law Enforcement Action Partnership and the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, as well as other industry partners such as the NJ CannaBusiness Association, political strategists and other industry leaders.

RELATED: NJ CAN 2020 Aims to Advance the Social Justice Conversation Ahead of New Jersey’s Cannabis Legalization Vote This Fall: Legalization Watch

Polling conducted by the campaign has been favorable, Caruso said, so the main focus has been reminding voters that the cannabis referendum is appearing on the ballot.

Many voters are voting by mail, he said, and the adult-use legalization question is on the back side of the mail-in ballot, which has sparked NJ CAN 2020’s “Turn the Page” campaign to remind voters to flip their ballots over to cast their vote on legalization.

“Our focus right now is visibility,” Caruso said. “It’s not so much winning hearts and minds right now because we feel like the polling’s there [and] the public opinion is overwhelmingly supportive of this, so it’s really just reminding people when they’re filling out their ballot [that] there are three public questions, legal marijuana being one of them.”

While NJ CAN 2020 plans to disband after the election, Caruso hopes the spirit of the campaign can live on as the state legislature drafts New Jersey’s adult-use cannabis law.

“There’s been a really positive, beneficial, cordial relationship between our advocacy partners and our industry partners,” he said. “I expect that to continue. It preceded NJ CAN 2020, it absolutely coexisted during, and I foresee that going on beyond this, as well.”

Scutari expects lawmakers to introduce new adult-use legislation that will be picked up immediately following the election, should voters approve legalization, Caruso said.

The Jake Honig Compassionate Use Medical Cannabis Act, which passed in 2019 to expand New Jersey’s existing medical cannabis program, created the Cannabis Regulatory Commission to oversee not only the medical program, but also an adult-use industry, should one materialize.

“I think what we’ve learned from other states is to have some nimbleness to the process,” Caruso said. “Having a regulatory body that’s able to meet the demands of the patients, the customer base and the industry makes sense.”

Caruso would also like the state’s adult-use cannabis law to give municipalities control over the industry within their borders.

“As much as I’d love to have it easier to open up retail establishments, … making sure we have a balance [ensures] we can get something done,” he said. “Upholding the ability for municipalities to set their own rules to some extent or decide whether they want to opt in or opt out is important to this.”

The legislature must also determine how adult-use cannabis will be taxed, as well as whether the law will include a home grow provision, Caruso added.

“There does seem to be a large and growing movement in the patient population for patient-centered home grow,” he said. “That was actually in the original 2009 draft legislation when medical marijuana passed in New Jersey, but then was stripped out. But I would not be shocked to see some effort for a limited patient home grow on the medical side—that might make it into the bill.”

Overall, though, Caruso just wants to finally get adult-use legalization across the finish line in New Jersey.

“I’d just love to get adult-use legalization done with a good foundation, and this is going to be a law that’s going to morph over time, both on the regulatory and statutory side,” he said. “We’ve been fighting for this for about five years here. I’m ready to be done with legalizing marijuana in New Jersey, and I’m looking forward to retooling and refining that law in the years and decades to come.”

If legalization passes next month, Caruso expects adult-use sales to launch in 2021, using the existing medical cannabis industry as a foundation.

“Most of the conversations … have been, if [the] municipality that your retail is located in is OK with it and you can certify that you have enough supply to satisfy your patient population, you’re going to be able to start selling adult-use,” he said. “I get the sense that we could work through a very quick regulatory structure here to get this done so that by third quarter or fourth quarter 2021, you’re seeing adult-use sales in New Jersey.”

And legalization in New Jersey could be a catalyst for cannabis policy reform in other states in the region, Caruso said, adding that 2021 will likely be a busy year for legislative efforts, both at the state and federal level.

“Once … Jersey goes, I think you’re going to see a domino effect here in the region, but I also think we’re going to see a lot this year on the federal side,” he said. “I suspect this will be an important year for catch-up work related to cannabis."

BOSTON (Oct. 15, 2020)— PRESS RELEASE—Resource Innovation Institute (RII), in partnership with American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, are nearing completion of a comprehensive project to support Massachusetts cannabis cultivators with peer-reviewed resources to help them address the subjects featured in the first energy regulations placed on the energy-intensive industry.

The two non-profit organizations worked with two government agencies and eight energy efficiency program administrators to develop and deliver three projects:

1. Best practices guides – Energy Efficiency Best Practices for Massachusetts Marijuana Cultivators, the first state-level guide assembling regionally-specific advice on designing and operating efficient cultivation facilities, which pairs with RII’s LED Lighting for Cannabis Cultivation and HVAC for Cannabis Cultivation Best Practices Guides

2. Cultivation workshops – Efficient Yields workshop series, featuring experts who contributed to, and content from, the best practices guides

3. Simplified energy and water reporting – The Cannabis PowerScore benchmarking platform was upgraded to enable cultivators to comply with Cannabis Control Commission rules on providing annual resource consumption

“The state’s lighting requirements are not easy to comply with and force a cascade of changes to long-held cultivation practices,” said Mike Zartarian of Boston-based Zartarian Engineering, co-chair of RII’s Lighting Working Group and contributor to the best practices guides and workshops. “Without training on how to effectively use LED lighting, cultivators can struggle to adapt. This set of resources supported by Massachusetts and its energy efficiency providers offers a good model of how other states could approach this industry.”

“As indoor agriculture subject matter experts, RII and ACEEE made it so easy for the state’s energy efficiency providers to support these heavy-consuming customers,” said National Grid’s David Gibbons, coordinator of the statewide Mass Save energy efficiency program. “I wish there were organizations like these to partner with in other sectors.”

“Our goal is to be a leading producer of quality and sustainable cannabis,” said Kevin O’Reilly, chief operating officer of Triple M, one of Massachusetts’s licensed adult use cultivators. “We learned how to continuously track and improve our performance from both the workshops and the PowerScore, and we were honored to be featured as a case study in the best practices guide."