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Transcription
WE NOTE THAT THE FOLLOWING TRANSCRIPT WAS CREATED BY A ROBOT THAT MAY NOT HAVE APPRECIATED THE FINE POINTS AND NAMES SPOKEN BY JON, SO PLEASE FORGIVE ANY TYPOS, OR BIAS IN FAVOR OF OUR FUTURE ROBOT OVERLORDS:
Hello, my buds and welcome the November 1st, 2021 episode of Cannabis Last Week.
In our highlight story, this week support for legalization and Pennsylvania hits an all time high. Unintended. And in our golden nuggets, we have the curious case of the car. Caravaning from Kansas city through Kansas, to Colorado carrying cannabis cash.
And the second golden nugget hop latent viral. That’s all I’m telling you for now on behalf of global cannabis times. I welcome you. I’m your host, John Pirro. And now, before we get down to business, I need to make my standard. Disclaimer, when I not Batman, I practice cannabis in IP law at the law firms. So I need to note that any views expressed during this podcast are my own views and not those, those Uber Lawler.
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So for example, if I said that as a New York Yankees fan and therefore a hater of the Boston red Sox, I would find it highly amusing to periodically intersperse words in a podcast pronounced in a Boston accent. And that I think that that would be hilarious. That’d be my own view and not that of my law firms.
Stay tuned. All right. And always, if you have any feedback, please send it to jp@globalcannabistimes.com unless you’re a Boston red Sox fan. In which case, I don’t want to hear what you have to say. All right. Onto the news.
HIGHLIGHTS
So in our highlight story, For the first time Pennsylvania’s hit 60% support for legalization in a recent poll done by Franklin and Marshall college.
This is the highest they’ve ever had in any poll. And it’s crazy because since 2006, the support for it has tripled back then it was only around 22%. Now this is good to see some movement here in Pennsylvania, because we were also seeing some stuff in the legislature. Earlier this month, there was a much anticipated bi-partisan bill introduced in the Senate.
And also this month, someone else a representative announced his intent to file a bipartisan bill as well. And so we are seeing movement in Pennsylvania, which is very, very exciting, but keep in mind, 60% for legalization is actually still relatively low by comparison to states like Louisiana that had 70% support, which reminds me of the quote about Pennsylvania from.
Political analyst, James Carville, who said that Pennsylvania was Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that the wave of legalization in the Northeast will shift over to Pennsylvania. Cause that would be a large state to turn. As we know, I always say, look at the electoral college votes and Pennsylvania has a lot and has a large population.
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The medical program there is large. And so that would be a big domino to fall if it happened.
GOLDEN NUGGETS
Moving over to our golden nugget stories for the week. The curious case that I refer to, and yes, you may have guessed that I enjoy alliteration as much as I love puns. So here are the facts of this case, which is very interesting.
I’m going to go into these in detail. So, and I’m a CA yeah, that was the first Boston accent. So, and I’m at Chi get stopped in may for an unspecified traffic violation in Kansas. Which has no medical marijuana program, it should be noted. So the driver tells the Kappa, I’m sorry. The driver tells the Dickinson county, Kansas Sheriff’s deputy that she was going to Kansas city to pick up cash for medical marijuana, businesses to take it back to the bank in Colorado, that banks for them.
So now the. Car, the armor car drives into Missouri and makes us pickups and while it was doing so it happened to be being surveilled by the DEA, a federal agency, which has video of it doing these pickups. Then when the driver returns through Kansas, To get to Colorado. The same deputy from the Dickinson county Sheriff’s office is waiting and pulls over the Ahmed car and then decides to seize all of the money and side.
And after they tested it and approximately $166,000, they found surprise, surprise that there was residue of marijuana on it. And so what ends up happening is the us attorney, which is a federal office, not a state office, brings charges to do a civil forfeiture of these funds to keep them. And so this story is very, very interesting for a number of reasons.
One thing is. How the hell did the da get involved in this second question, is, is this a one-off story that only relates to Kansas? And the other thought is all the more reason to pass the safe banking act. If this is going to happen. And the other thing I have to say is if you’re in the industry and you’re one of these situations where you use a bank outside of state, which frankly it appears from reading about this is frankly the only choice that they had, because it’s very, very difficult to obtain banking in Missouri.
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Because the banks there, apparently not only don’t service cannabis businesses, but they sometimes don’t service service providers of cannabis businesses. But if you have any option, probably a good idea to avoid situations like this and bank in your own state, if at all possible to avoid. Now I want to go back and talk about a deep cut golden nugget from over a month ago, because I think that this was interesting.
And quite frankly, this was a slow news week, which may have something to, with everyone recovering from MJ, biz con and MJ unpacked. So let’s talk about hop, latent virus, a nasty bug. Now this nasty bug. Apparently it does something to nice, healthy Canada’s plants that creates or gutters if you will, and not Boston accent speak.
So the sparingly fusses up the plants, so they will have weak stems. They will have low tricombs and research has really kind of did a deep dive in order to identify this by doing genetic testing because they noticed this issue is there. And so what ends up happening? It was dark heart nursery. One of the players that identified this conducted 200,000 tissue tests over the course of three years, more than a hundred facilities in California.
And what they found out was that 90% of these facilities tested positive for hap Layton viroids, which I just also sounds like an STD. You never, ever want to get. So apparently 90% of the places tested, tested positive for this. And they’re estimating just as a little rule of thumb, kind of estimate that sometimes the yields caused by this and the lower yield caused by hoplite and viral.
I can reach up to 30% of these debts. And so the estimates could be just based on the total sales, you know, up to 4 billion in losses each year caused by this. And even say that that estimate is wrong by a figure magnitude. This could potentially be a problem that costs the industry, hundreds of millions of dollars.
And so I think that some attention should be paid to this. And apparently though the nice thing is. If you obey good sanitation practices by not using say the same pruning sheers, when you’re going from a mother plant to other plans and you clean the sheers, there are ways to very quickly reduce the instance of this hoplite and viroids from say 40% of your plants to next to none. But I feel like that’s a very important story that was not getting unnecessarily. A lot of coverage
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FEDERAL NEWS
Now in federal news, actually, it was a pretty slow.
STATE NEWS
So we’re going to move over to state news and Louisiana. This week, Louisiana has decided to zag and legalized Delta eight, where a vast majority of states have zigged and made Delta eight explicitly illegal.
The only other state that I’m aware of that zagged along with Louisiana is Florida. And so Louisiana. And an email announced changes saying that it was okay for Delta eight, THC to be put into food. And this apparently followed a state law that created a new category known as quote unquote consumable, hemp defined as quote unquote, any product derived from industrial hemp that contains any cannabinoids and is intended for consumption or topical use.
And so Delta eight soldiers on Louisiana moving over Connecticut. Here’s an interesting. The attorney general of Connecticut sent a letter to seven businesses in Massachusetts asking them to remove their billboards for their cannabis businesses from a long Connecticut highways, because they violate Connecticut’s legalization law.
But we have to note that the letter was an ask, not a demand. And so some of the businesses already released statements saying not going to happen, but I think it’s an interesting story to take note because we saw recently in California. That governor Gavin Newsome decided to ban billboards and California highways for cannabis companies.
Now moving over to New York in a nice little development, New York residents do not need to fear losing their jobs due to recreational marijuana use anymore. In most instances, because the New York department of labor confirmed that employers now cannot test their employees for the presence of cannabis.
In most instances, now they’re still allowed to penalize workers for being impaired in the. But the threshold to prove impairment has been raised that you can’t just say that someone smells like weed now and that’s sufficient evidence on its own. So that’s a nice little positive development. Moving over to Florida.
A judge has now ruled in favor of Leafly and so online orders can start back up again. So you don’t need to worry that your Bubby ans 80 can get their marijuana delivered to them. Again, they don’t need to go to the hassle. They don’t have to go to the slap of go into this. All right, moving on to Mississippi, it seemed like we may actually have some progress.
Again, as I’ve mentioned in prior episodes, governor Tate re promised a special session, uh, and hasn’t happened yet, but it seems a progress has been made between the governor and the legislature. On a bill that’s trying to restore the Willem Mississippi voters who approved the ballot measure for medical marijuana, but which was then subsequently shot down by the Supreme court.
Um, a, um, how I say it’s bullshit technicality. And so now there’s progress being made and the new revised bill would allow larger cultivation facilities. It would restructure the excise tax on medical marijuana. Products. And so that is hopefully going to move forward to a special session called that the governor, if they could finalize the compromise at some point soon, moving on to Montana regulators in Montana last week.
And announced some of the proposed rules for the state’s coming recreational cells. Now the sales are supposed to start at the beginning of the next year. And so they are going to be constantly trying to issue the regulations in order to meet that very, very rapidly impending date.
SOCIAL EQUITY NEWS
In social equity news.
The U S cannabis council hosted several black marijuana entrepreneurs at an event, which was called the unsafe banking and cannabis, the real life impact on public safety and social equity. So what this event was, was a bunch of black marijuana business owners. Arguing that not having the safe banking act past hurts their businesses.
And so, you know, to provide a little context, you know, Senator Cory Booker has specifically said that he will not pass a banking act because it’s considered a boon for the large-scale MSOE and that it would hurt, you know, minority owned businesses and small businesses. But this event essentially was a bunch of black businessmen.
You know, who own businesses and the industry saying, no, this is a problem for us not being able to bank. It creates unsafe effects and they want safe banking act to open up and that’ll be easier to, you know, do certain things in the industry that they need. In fact, one of the speakers even said that the lack of banking access for cannabis businesses was creating a red lining effect that was allowing MSOC the industry to overcome financial hurdles and smaller companies did not have the same capacity, but I took note, it was a very, very interesting event because it was kind of almost a counter-argument to points that Cory Booker a pivotal Senator has been making.
GREEN NEW DEALS
Now moving over to business or green new deal.
Relatively slow week, but in one story, hydro farm holdings group enter an agreement to acquire Illinois based innovative growers equipment for 58 million. They cannabis cultivation, equipment makers, fifth acquisition in 2021. Now also stem holdings doing business as driven by stem is buying high country supply.
Also known as the Colorado harvest company. Which has two delivery permits, three retail dispensary’s and two cultivation facilities that the purchase price was not disclosed.
SCIENCE & MEDICAL NEWS
We also had a slow week in science and medical news.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
But an international, a couple of developments first off in Italy. A bunch of activists announced that they added received 630,000 signatures for a referendum to legalize the personal cultivation of marijuana and psychoactive plants and fungi like psilocybin mushrooms, and turn those signatures in which now there’s going to be going through multiple steps before they hopefully qualify the measure to go in front of the nation voters in early 20, 20.
And in Switzerland, there’s a little bit of movement on legalization as well. According to Switzerland’s government agency in charge of public health, welfare cannabis are no longer be banned. And so instead it should be regulated. So the national council now has to kind of create a framework to study.
And so they’re going to be conducting studies and hopefully that will be one step on the path towards legalization. Now, unfortunately we have to circle back to Costa Rica because in last week’s edition, I said, oh, we’re ready. We’re going to be legalized. It passed Congress that apparently not so much.
Cause I’m deputies instead found a way to take the bill to the constitutional chamber, the Supreme court. And so we’ll not be able to go to a final vote yet. These are what I like to call marijuana betters. They know.
MISCELLANEOUS NEWS
And our miscellaneous news, there are two interesting studies that came out this week relating to teenage use of marijuana.
So the first one, when I saw the headline, I thought it was pretty concerning, uh, someone who clearly isn’t there for the industry, but the headline essentially said, teenage use of vaping increases significant.
I’m like, huh? Well, that doesn’t seem good. But then it came up the same week as a massive study that said that teenage use of marijuana as declined.
And so what happened there was in the first headline when you actually read it, it’s that teenage use of vaping products increased, meaning that they were doing less smoking of flour or other items. And the second study. I have very, very large one done by the national survey on drug use and health, which followed a lot of kids for a number of years, found that the amount of marijuana that teenager using is decreasing, including in states that have legalized it.
And so that whole idea. That prohibitionists, that marijuana, no better. Has it been saying that teenage use is going to go up? If you legalize has been de skunked, it does not appear to be true.
CELEBRITY CAMEOS
And moving over to a couple of quick celebrity cameos, Mike Tyson’s first foray into the industry apparently did not work out as planned.
And so he is launching a second line of products called. Tyson 2.0 when asked for comment soda Popinski said nothing also. And celebrity cameos. We have fashion icon and hip hop legend, little Kim entering the industry with a partnership with the California pop brand. Super bad ink. Great movie. Love the name of the country.
And then also Columbia care and pit bull announced the launch of N TUPE a new line of high quality, full spectrum CBD products and end TUPE in case you’re curious, stands for negative to positive. And I am positive that that is the last story of the week. And just in case, you’re curious what the first alphabetical animal is.
It’s the back. Uh, I enjoy that one. All right. Well, that’s all I got. So let me sign off by saying, Stay grassy my buds, and I’ll see you next week.
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