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Recent Blog Posts

• More Changes to Maine’s Marijuana Program Are on the Table on February 10 Earlier this week, the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee in Maine’s legislature considered a series of bills related to Maine’s marijuana program. I discussed one of those in this blog post. Now, there are three more bills up for a public hearing on February 10: An Act to Impose Further Restrictions on Where Marijuana May Be Smoked An Act to Improve Compliance with Department of... More
• Maine’s Legislature Confronts the Unintended Consequences of Required Marijuana Testing, Before Those Consequences Even Happen The Maine Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs will consider a host of marijuana-related bills next Monday, January 27. Check all five of them out here. The one I want to focus on is LD 1545, An Act Regarding the Testing of Adult Use Marijuana and Marijuana Products because this bill tries to address what has been a serious problem in most states launching... More
• Portland Considers Giving Some Preference to Minority Applicants for Marijuana Retail Licenses The City of Portland is considering giving preference to minority applicants when distributing retail marijuana licenses. This came up at the City Council’s last committee meeting on the draft ordinance, and city staff cautioned that this could be difficult to administer. After this conversation, I thought it would be worth looking briefly at how this has played out in other jurisdictions.&nbsp... More
• Maine’s Hemp Policies Remain Turbulent as the Legislature Reconvenes The legislature is reconvening on hemp issues this coming Thursday, January 9. The Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry is considering a simple resolve "Directing the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry to Submit to the United States Secretary of Agriculture a Plan for Continued Implementation of the Maine Industrial Hemp Program." This resolve is self-explanatory... More
• Can We Use Commercial Cannabis to Address Historical Inequities? Here in Portland, a number of City Councilors have been adamant that Portland’s adult use program should benefit minority communities. There is a current proposal to give historically disadvantaged groups some level of preference when applying for licenses. This mirrors a common sentiment nationwide that the adult use industry should benefit those communities historically disproportionately... More
• Bills to Watch in 2020 NH Legislative Session While the text of bills slowly make their way out of the Office of Legislative Services for the 2020 legislative session in New Hampshire, there are at least a couple cannabis-related bills of interest to keep tabs on.  The first bill is HB 1386, sponsored by Rep. Wendy Thomas (D – Hillsborough), which would prohibit employers from retaliating against an employee solely because the... More
• Feds Take Steps to Increase Hemp Producers’ Access to Capital The Department of Treasury released new guidance yesterday that makes it much easier for banks to serve hemp producers. This comes on the heels of the USDA interim rules governing hemp nationwide.  Basically, the new guidance says that banks no longer need to file ‘suspicious activity reports’ with Treasury for hemp producers since the crop is now largely legal under federal law.... More
• Class Action Lawsuit Brought Against CBD Company for Deceptive Advertising Just a week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated that it could not give CBD a “generally recognized as safe” designation, a proposed class action has been filed against a CBD company in California. The complaint alleges that Infinite Product Co.’s CBD products are misleadingly labeled and illegal to sell because they use CBD as an additive to food and topical cream products... More
• Tomorrow’s City Council Meeting on Portland’s Ordinance Ok, so it's actually a meeting of the HHS and economic development subcommittees but, either way, it’s a necessary and important step to finalizing Portland’s ordinance and launching adult use in Maine’s largest city. The subcommittees will be taking public comment, so in terms of how many hours of comments we should expect to sit through, we’ll see if the craze around the cannabis industry or... More
• State Adopts New Restrictive Policy on CBD Sales That Is, at Least in Effect, Quite Similar to the Old Policy The Maine Department of Agriculture has begun its next phase restricting sales of CBD in the state. Readers will recall that, over the summer, the State took the position that CBD sold in Maine had to be derived from hemp grown in Maine. The reality, of course, is that only a small portion of CBD sold in Maine has its origins in Maine and that policy expired in September. Now, the State is... More
• Do the Proposed USDA Hemp Rules Threaten Our CBD Industry? We’re hearing concerns from some farmers and CBD manufacturers that the proposed USDA hemp rules, released earlier this week, could make it much more difficult to provide high-quality CBD products in the U.S. The concern, as I can best articulate it since I’m not a farmer, is that full-spectrum CBD is largely available in plants that have a longer growth cycle, but these plants may also have THC... More
• USDA Hemp Rules Nearly Finalized We haven’t seen a draft of the rules yet, but the latest news is that the White House has signed off on the proposed rules and they’ll be released any week now. Once the rules are released, a public comment period will begin. The USDA is still claiming that final rules will take effect before the end of 2019.  The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry (which houses... More
• California Regulators Issue Cannabis Banking Guidance That’s Actually Useful On October 2, 2019, the California Department of Business Oversight issued some really helpful guidance aimed at California banks and credit unions that are currently or are planning to bank marijuana-related businesses (MRBs). The guidance document consists of an extensive questionnaire that is used by California state bank examiners when they audit a bank or credit union’s MRB compliance... More
• House Passes the SAFE Banking Act On September 25, 2019, the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the SAFE Banking Act by a vote of 321 in favor and 103 opposed. As we’ve previously posted, the Act would prohibit federal bank regulators from penalizing financial institutions that provide services to state-legal cannabis businesses and will result in greater access to financial services for the cannabis... More
• Maine Legislature to Address Vaping Devices and THC As readers may have seen, a list of the bills that the Maine Legislature may be discussing this winter has been released. I’m going to focus on the bills related to vaping for this post, since there are a lot of them. These bills are obviously a response to a string of vaping-related illnesses and deaths around the country in recent months, including several in Maine. It’s been reported that... More