Search Results: marijuana business (1434)

New marijuana business licenses reserved for low-income demographics are set to launch in Colorado in 2020, but questions remain about who should receive these licenses and how they should be regulated.

Created by Senate Bill 224, a 2019 law that overhauls the state’s medical and recreational marijuana regulations, the new licenses are intended to add more diversity to Colorado’s cannabis space while providing opportunity to entrepreneurs who don’t have traditional training or funding outlets. Also known as micro licenses, the new permits would require the new businesses to use the facilities of established pot companies as they research and create their own cannabis products.

Over 100 cannabis businesses and organizations just sent a letter to Congressional leaders calling for federal legalization of the plant, but their request didn’t stop there. The letter also urged federal funding be used to diversify the cannabis industry, as well as administer retroactive justice for old pot convictions and help communities impacted the most by the war on drugs.

Cannabis is still far from legal in the eyes of the federal government, but Congress has been more open-minded lately. The House of Representatives has advanced legislation that would explicitly allow banks and financial institutions to serve medical and recreational cannabis businesses in states where they are legal, and the Senate just held a hearing on the same bill.

Cannabis continues to gain influence, not only in new business ventures, but in college education, too. Just take a peak inside professor Paul Seaborn’s Business of Marijuana course, where students at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver took part in a potrepreneur pitch competition June 4.

Five teams of undergraduate and graduate DU students proposed new business ideas to a panel of cannabis industry judges comprised of Julie Berliner, founder and CEO of edible company Sweet Grass Kitchen, Mark Grindeland, CEO and co-founder of Coda Signature edibles and Carter Davidson, an executive at Vangst recruiting and staffing.

Amid questions about whether marijuana ads make kids more likely to use pot, the National Association of Cannabis Businesses has created proposed labeling and marketing guidelines. The deadline for feedback on this “National Advertising Standard,” on view below, is today, June 8. But an expert from Colorado, where sponsoring highways is among the only promotional platforms open to marijuana businesses, worries that some of the limits it puts in place are overly severe.

“There’s a very fine line to walk,” says Taylor West, senior communications director at COHNNABIS, a cannabis marketing agency. “You want to demonstrate that you are very committed to responsible practices, but you also need to be careful not to be almost punitive to the industry in an attempt to demonstrate that responsibility.”

At this writing, thirty states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of marijuana, be it recreational, medical or both, with Colorado having been in the latter category for more than four years. Nonetheless, Facebook and Instagram continue to make it difficult for cannabis businesses to advertise and promote themselves on the platforms. The scenario causes frustration within the industry even as it forces marketers to come up with clever ways to get around restrictions.

Update: After the publication of this post, Scott Pack provided us with additional information that’s intended to show he did nothing to defraud the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against him and acted in a manner that was completely legal and ethical. See it below, following our previous coverage.

Original post: Attorney Matthew Buck has filed a lawsuit in what he calls “the largest fraud case in the history of Colorado’s marijuana industry.” This contention is rejected by Scott Pack, the entrepreneur at the center of it.

No criminal charges have been pressed against Pack at this writing. But in the complaint, on view below, Buck’s clients, Pierre and Christophe Raygot, claim to have been bilked out of $500,000 by Pack and Rudy Saenz, the latter of whom was among sixteen people indicted last month in what prosecutors describe as a massive operation that grew marijuana for distribution outside Colorado. And Buck maintains that seventeen additional investors were also taken by Pack and Saenz; he estimates the total losses at more than $5.3 million.

“We’ve never seen anything close to this” in the Colorado cannabis business, Buck says. “I’ve never seen investments this great fail, let alone fraud on this scale. And our law firm” — Corry & Associates — “has been doing this for seventeen years,” since the approval, in the year 2000, of Amendment 20, which legalized medical marijuana in the state.

GoToVan via Flickr31

Canadian weed?

It’s supposed to be pretty good.

But Arizona medical marijuana?

Super profitable.

Ask the people from a Toronto firm who recently announced the “acquisition” — with caveats and disclaimers — of two Mesa dispensaries.

The $27 million deal also includes one of the state’s biggest cannabis-extracts brands and an option to control a cultivation and wholesale business in Nevada, where voters legalized recreational marijuana in November.

Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson on stage together in 2015.

Mama, we’re not in Muskogee anymore. Country legend Merle Haggard is throwing his hat into the marijuana market from beyond the grave.

Haggard died on April 6, 2016, on what would have been his 79th birthday. Before his death, however, he had joined forces with the Colorado Weed Co. in 2015 to develop connoisseur-grade marijuana strains. Now, after his death, his daughter Jenessa Haggard-Bennett and her husband, Brian Bennett, are working with the Colorado Weed Co. to follow through on one of her father’s last business endeavors.

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