Rhode Island

Two cannabis manufacturing licenses may be issued to Sweetspot Manufacturing LLC and Wiseco NJ LLC.

Warren, Rhode Island-based Sweetspot has a dispensary in Voorhees, Camden County.

Clifton, Passaic County-based Wiseco NJ is a grassroots, Black-women owned cannabis operator, according to its website.

The third cannabis license, which is for retail, may be issued to Bud Bazaar LLC.

Nova Farms, the Northeast’s largest privately owned, vertically integrated cannabis operator, will open its flagship retail cannabis dispensary in Woodbury on May 19th. The new cannabis dispensary will be the state’s first non-conversion exclusively recreational adult-use dispensary.

A report from a patient advocacy group found the future of medical cannabis in the states is hazy unless costs are decreased, product safety standards are improved, and civil rights are strengthened for patients and prescribers.

Americans for Safe Access issued its annual State of the States report on Thursday. The organization, a nonprofit, has put out the document to advocates and state policymakers since 2014, as a tool to “assess and improve medical cannabis programs.”

Today, more than two-in-three Americans support marijuana legalization, including 49 percent of respondents who self-identify as “conservative,” according to Gallup’s 2020 polling. Even in a historically conservative state like Texas, nearly two-in-three respondents, 64 percent, supported legalizing and taxing marijuana in the 2021 Raise Your Hand Texas Foundation Poll.

In the span of eight short years, the number of states in the U.S. allowing adult-use marijuana has gone from zero to fifteen. Most of these efforts have happened via state-wide ballot initiatives.

Voters approved a slew of marijuana legalization initiatives during November’s election—in states around the country and across the political spectrum—but activists aren’t slowing down. They expect that 2021 will see another surge of reform in state legislatures.

A marijuana industry group sent letters to seven governors in the Northeast on Thursday, imploring them to push for cannabis legalization to aid in economic recovery amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The National Association of Cannabis Businesses (NACB) said a regionally coordinated legalization strategy would help generate much-needed tax revenue from legal marijuana sales.

When it comes to state legalization – whether it’s medical or adult-use – there is either effort on the legislative front or at the ballot box (or in cases like New Jersey, the battle moves from one arena to the other).

The idea is that there would be uniform standards for market regulation, including:

• Licensing.
• Taxation.
• Minority participation.
• Small-business participation.
• THC potency.

But how realistic is it that the Northeast could, in effect, become a regional bloc that legalizes adult-use marijuana with a unified regulatory framework?

Marijuana policy experts predicted that this year would be a "real game-changer" in terms of cannabis reform at both the state and federal level. But halfway through 2019, the movement has had less progress than hoped.

"The reality is that public policy change rarely works that way. Slow and steady tends to be how change like this happens," John Hudak, deputy director at the Brookings Center for Effective Public Management, told Newsweek.

Acreage Holdings has licenses in 17 states, of which 12 are operational, while the company has licenses to process in 12 states, seven of which are now in operation. The company has licenses to operate 68 retail dispensaries in 12 states, of which 21 are currently operational in 10 states. The Botanist is its retail concept designed to appeal to both adult use and medicinal consumers.