Capjah | Adobe Stock
This week, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation planned to award 75 new adult-use dispensary licenses, but will now wait until the governor’s disaster proclamation expires. Elsewhere, Canopy Growth announced 200 additional layoffs in Canada, the U.S. and the UK in the Canadian LP’s latest phase of scaling back its operations.
Here, we’ve rounded up the 10 headlines you need to know before this week is over.
- Federal: Multistate cannabis operator Cresco Labs announced this week that it has reached a mutual agreement to terminate its acquisition of assets from Tryke Companies, LLC. “Our acquisition of Tryke has been impacted by regulatory delays, a decline in capital markets, and now COVID-19, which brought additional risk to this transaction,” CEO and Co-Founder Charlie Bachtell said in a public statement. “Given these events, we feel the resources previously targeted for this transaction are better invested in our existing markets, where we have high visibility and certainty of return on capital.” Read more
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent warning letters to two CBD companies to stop marketing CBD as an opioid addiction treatment. “The opioid crisis continues to be a serious problem in the United States, and we will continue to crack down on companies that attempt to benefit from selling products with unfounded treatment claims,” FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy said in a prepared statement. Read more
- New Jersey: Voters will get to decide whether to legalize adult-use cannabis in the Garden State this November, and a new poll conducted by Monmouth University indicates that legalization has strong support. Sixty-one percent of roughly 700 registered voters who participated in the poll said they would vote in favor of legalization, while 34% said they would vote against it. Read more
- California: The state’s cannabis growers spend an average of $136 per pound of dried cannabis flower on testing costs, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found. In a new study, researchers with the public Californian university found that testing costs accounts for approximately 10 percent of the reported average wholesale price for cannabis in the state. Read more
- California officials have announced that a sales tax extension and a $50,000 bridge loan are available to small business owners working in the cannabis industry. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the 90-day extension into law last month, giving small business owners until late July to file and pay their first-quarter sales taxes, and on top of that, small businesses may keep up to $50,000 of their sales tax payments for a year, effectively using the cash as a no-interest bridge loan between now and next summer. Read more
- Maine: The Portland City Council voted this week to allow the city to issue temporary cannabis testing lab licenses in an effort to ensure a quick launch of Maine’s adult-use cannabis market after the COVID-19 pandemic. The unanimous vote allows prospective testing labs to apply for a temporary local license, which would then allow the facility to pursue a final state license. Read more
- Colorado: Denver has established a working group to issue recommendations on the city’s cannabis policies and licensing process. In an April 27 memo, the city’s Department of Excise and Licenses announced the Marijuana Licensing Work Group (MLWG), a 24-member advisory board made up of industry and community stakeholders who will “review, discuss, and make recommendations on policy direction and possible marijuana licensing laws, rules and regulations.” Read more
- Massachusetts: An appeals court has sided with Cambridge in a lawsuit over the city’s cannabis licensing moratorium. Revolutionary Clinics, a licensed medical cannabis dispensary that has been operational since 2018, sued Cambridge last year over a city ordinance that allows only economic empowerment applicants to receive adult-use dispensary licenses for the first two-years of the licensing process in an attempt to ensure those disproportionately impacted by prohibition have access to the industry. Read more
- Illinois: Regulators announced this week that they will delay issuing new adult-use cannabis dispensary licenses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation planned to award 75 new adult-use dispensary licenses May 1, but will now wait until the governor’s disaster proclamation expires. Read more
- Canada: Canopy Growth has announced 200 more layoffs in Canada, the U.S. and the UK in the Canadian LP’s latest phase of scaling back its operations. “Although difficult, the decisions that have been made over the last few months are to allow Canopy Growth to remain focused on the areas where we are winning and ensure that we are delivering the highest quality products to our consumers in every market where we operate,” CEO David Klein told Yahoo Finance Canada. Read more