The Senate Banking Committee will hold its first hearing on the challenges facing cannabis and banking. Jaret Seiberg, managing director at Cowen, joins “Squawk Box” to discuss.
Here are the challenges the cannabis industry faces in accessing the US banking system from CNBC.
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried ran on a platform of what she called ‘the three W’s’: weapons, water and weed. Within months of her swearing in, it’s that last W that’s already generating a buzz around the state.
The Florida legislature passed a smokable medical marijuana bill that was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and state lawmakers are broadly expected to pass a law that would allow Florida to create an industrial hemp program for the first time.
Fried says the creation of a hemp program will lead to an “industrial revolution” in the state that can help bring relief to struggling farmers by offering access to a new cash crop, and in the process bring younger blood into an aging agricultural sector. She estimates the overall impact of the newly created hemp industry could stand to generate “20 to 30 billion” in annual revenue for the state.
SAN FRANCISCO — David Dancer is a 48-year-old marketing executive who has worked for big brands like Charles Schwab and Teleflora. A year ago, he got a call from a recruiter for a different kind of company: MedMen, a cannabis retailer that has been called “the Apple Store of weed.” The opening was for a chief marketing officer. He took it.
One of Mr. Dancer’s early projects was a slick two-minute video by the director Spike Jonze that begins with an anecdote about George Washington as a hemp grower, a staple of dorm-room conversation. It concludes with a suburban couple coming home with a bright red bag of legally purchased pot, symbolizing “the new normal” — an ending that, like his own career twist, seemed improbable not long ago.
That booming paraphernalia market, however, would also prove to be decriminalization’s undoing. By 1978, rates of adolescent marijuana use had skyrocketed, with 1 in 9 high school seniors smoking pot every day and children as young as 13 reporting that the drug was “easy to get.” This angered a growing number of parents, who saw kid-oriented paraphernalia as a “gateway” to drug use. The grassroots parent movement, which began in 1976 and came to its height of influence during the Reagan administration, worked to overturn state decriminalization laws and reaffirm the federal government’s anti-marijuana stance. Once decriminalization was overturned, the paraphernalia companies that had sprouted across the country folded as quickly as they had formed.
This previous experiment with decriminalization shows exactly how shaky the current legalization efforts in the United States might actually be. Despite widespread support for legalization (including from all current 2020 candidates for the presidential Democratic nomination), an unregulated and hyper-commercialized marijuana marketplace was unpopular enough to overturn lenient drug laws 40 years ago, and could potentially do so again today.
If you don’t live in one of the 11 states where recreational marijuana use is legal, the thought of going to a marijuana dispensary might seem intimidating. But buying marijuana at a dispensary is really no more nerve-wracking that going to a high-end coffee shop with super knowledgeable baristas — if have the humility to ask enough questions, you’ll have a positive experience.
Thanks in part to CBD’s mainstream appeal for treating health conditions such as anxiety or chronic pain, talking about cannabis use is becoming more normalized. But it’s okay if there are still some things that you don’t totally understand. Cannabis is complicated, highly scientific stuff, even when it comes to
While the roll-out of hemp regulations in the wake of the 2018 Farm Bill is continuing in fits and starts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture did open the door to hemp seed imports.
Jessica Wasserman, a partner in Greenspoon Marder’s cannabis law practice, tells Cannabis Business Times that it’s a welcome development for U.S. farmers eager to get to work. “The farmers have been pushing for this, definitely, because they need more seed,” she says. “Canada has been active longer than the U.S. and has good seed stock that the farm community very much wanted.”
Hemp seed may be imported from Canada with the following accompaniments: a phytosanitary certification from Canada’s national plant protection organization (“to verify the origin of the seed and confirm that no plant pests are detected”) and a Federal Seed Analysis Certificate for hemp seeds grown in Canada.
For the first time ever, congressional democrats included a panel at their policy retreat that was focused entirely on cannabis reform.
Last Thursday morning was the panel at the House Democrats’ gathering, with cannabis advocates sharing their point of view on why reform is not only a necessity in this day and age, but also how a new system should be implemented. It was titled “From the War on Drugs to Restorative Justice: Ensuring Racial and Social Equity in the Cannabis Movement,” and was quite busy despite an early, 7:45 am start time.
Overall, conversations weren’t centered on whether to end prohibition or not – which seemed to go without saying as an already accepted conclusion – but rather how to shape the legal industry moving forward. Also discussed was the need to repair past harms caused by the ongoing “war on drugs”. There was a great deal of significance put on the racial injustices of prohibition.
TORONTO — Medical cannabis users in Alberta can now get their therapeutic pot from Shoppers Drug Mart, with the retail giant opening its second online platform Tuesday in the western province as it pursues the growing market.
The launch follows the January debut of Medical Cannabis by Shoppers Drug Mart in Ontario, where the company says uptake “has been strong.”
As in Ontario, the Alberta platform touts “expert advice and counsel from trusted health-care professionals,” including tips on the purported health properties of various strains, proper dosages and titration techniques.
New Jersey workers can’t be fired if they flunk a drug test because they are medical marijuana patients, a state appeals court has ruled.
The case is likely to reverberate in workplaces for years to come because a state appeals court says medical marijuana patients — as long as they are not under the influence at work — are protected by the state Law Against Discrimination.
Americans with cancer are more likely to use marijuana and prescription opioids than those without cancer, and the use of medical marijuana by this group is on the rise, new research shows.
Pain is common among cancer patients, but many do not get adequate pain relief, the researchers noted.
The new study looked at more than 800 adults with cancer who took part in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2005 and 2014. The patients were compared with about 1,650 adults without cancer.