California

The borough’s planning board approved its first cannabis company by a 7-1 vote Monday night, which will allow a warehouse and nursery to operate, but no retail store.

The business, a warehouse to cultivate cannabis, is a partnership with Susan Duckworth of Rumson and Alexander Federico, the director of operations at Full Spectrum Biotech in California.

According to Federico, the warehouse will not be a marijuana dispensary, but facilitate bulk wholesale where manufacturers or dispensaries would then modify the plant and sell it to customers.

California regulators have begun a new push to standardize cannabis testing with the aim of eliminating inconsistencies among the state’s 41 operational marijuana labs.

Advocates say the effort – mandated by a new state law – will improve quality and reliability while discouraging lab shopping and other practices that produce bogus test results.

California’s cannabis market is booming nearly five years after voters legalized recreational weed. But there’s a catch: the vast majority of pot sales are still underground.

Rather than make cannabis a Main Street fixture, California’s strict regulations have led most industry operators to close shop, flee the state or sell in the state’s illegal market that approaches $8 billion annually, twice the volume of legal sales.

I’m a child of the ‘60s. Back in the day, scoring weed meant finding a dealer, convincing him you weren’t a narc and listening to lies about the potency of his product. Then you handed over $10 and got a baggie partly filled with something that looked like oregano with lots of seeds.

Ten states that have legalized the use of marijuana for recreational purposes collected almost $2.7 billion in taxes on pot products last year as sales surged and more regulatory structures came online.

A new report from the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group, estimates that states have collected a total of $7.9 billion in tax revenue since the first states — Washington and Colorado — began allowing recreational pot sales in 2014.

The California-based company raised approximately $5 million in a funding round that includes NBA power agent Rich Paul.

National Basketball Association stars John Wall and Carmelo Anthony are new investors in a cannabis company.

The pair helped California-based LEUNE raise roughly $5 million in a round that includes NBA agent Rich Paul, entertainer La La Anthony, music manager Anthony Saleh (whose clients include Future and Nas) and venture capital firm Casa Verde Capital.

The illicit pot shop where Kelvin worked wasn’t an outlier: In fact, the majority of shops in LA are unlicensed. In the entire city, only 184 pot shops, less than 1 in 5, are licensed. Many Angelenos have no idea that the place they buy their cannabis—or in Kelvin’s case, report to work—might be operating outside the law. This gray-market section of the industry established itself over more than a decade, between about 2005 and 2018, when local politicians were reluctant to regulate an industry that was breaking federal law.

Cannabis advertising giant Weedmaps hopes to boost its revenue over the next three years by a whopping 175% – and investors are wagering the California-based company can deliver on that goal.

Since announcing its acquisition of Weedmaps on Dec. 10, Silver Spike Acquisition Corp. has seen its shares more than double, resulting in a Weedmaps valuation at 21 times sales and 98 times EBITDA for 2020.

The Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development said the California Community Reinvestment Grants (CalCRG) program is meant to give eligible health departments and community-based nonprofit organizations resources to support “job placement, mental health treatment, substance use disorder treatment, system navigation services, legal services to address barriers to reentry, and linkages to medical care for communities disproportionately affected by past federal and state drug policies, also known as the War on Drugs (WoD).”

Pennsylvania pushes on

In June, Florida-based Jushi Holdings said its stores in the Philadelphia area were damaged to the tune of six-figure losses.

“It was a substantial hit, and there was significant damage,” said the company’s vice president of retail, Blythe Huestis.

The store in Northern Liberty reopened July 13 and the Center City store Aug. 1.

Huestis said the reopening process involved the owners reinforcing security, in particular its doors.

“It’s really difficult to have a store closed temporarily,” she said.