MjLink Cannabis Business News and Press
LEAMINGTON, ON, May 6, 2020 /CNW/ - PRESS RELEASE - Aphria Inc. has announced that its subsidiary, ASG Pharma Ltd. (ASG), has received its European Union Good Manufacturing Practices (EU GMP) certification from the Malta Medicines Authority (MMA) in respect of production of cannabis for medicinal and research purposes.
Following receipt of its first medical cannabis import license for analytical testing and research in 2018 and the subsequent ASG facility upgrade, the certification provides Aphria with the ability to ship finished dried flower and finished oil for medicinal and research use in permitted jurisdictions throughout the European Union.
"We are pleased to receive EU GMP certification for ASG in Malta, our third facility to achieve this milestone, which really speaks to the company's commitment to quality," said Irwin D. Simon, Chief Executive Officer. "We remain excited about growth opportunities as this increases our ability to serve, and further strengthens Aphria's leadership, in the European Union."
ASG is a high-capacity EU GMP-certified lab that is well-positioned to become a cornerstone for testing and research and development of medical cannabis in Europe. In addition, ASG will provide additional capacity for importing, processing, packaging and distribution of the company's EU-GMP certified cannabis products in Europe.
The company also announced the liquidation of its C$39 million Promissory Note from GA Opportunities Corp. for proceeds of approximately C$26 million.
]]>TORONTO, May 04, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PRESS RELEASE -- Aleafia Health Inc.’s wholly owned subsidiary Emblem Cannabis Corp. has secured a Health Canada License Amendment for its Paris facility’s 30,000-square-foot Phase II expansion, entirely dedicated to the extraction, production, packaging and distribution of finished cannabis products.
“The Phase II expansion, our crown jewel, permits an exponential increase in our ability to produce and sell high-margin cannabis health and wellness products in the medical, adult-use and international markets,” said Aleafia Health CEO Geoffrey Benic. “The Paris facility’s state-of-the-art expansion, purpose built to meet EU-GMP standards, creates a unique competitive advantage with significant barriers to entry. Coupled with our ultra-low-cost outdoor cultivation, it sets us apart in the cannabis industry. This means greater breadth of formats, greater scale and automation, and ultimately higher margins as we utilize cannabis grown outdoors through our integrated production ecosystem.
“This breakthrough also accelerates our Cannabis 2.0 strategy and will allow us to produce new differentiated product formats. We have been preparing for months and have ordered equipment, completed formulations and have built up a large inventory of cannabis extracts to be used as input material for new formats for immediate use in the new facility. Now it’s time for execution.”
The Paris facility license amendment, granted on May 1, 2020, authorizes cannabis production in the entire expanded building. The company expects to commence production and packaging operations at the Phase II expansion in the next two weeks.
Production Ecosystem
The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation announced May 4 that adult-use cannabis sales surpassed $37 million in April, according to a press release.
The state’s dispensaries sold 818,954 items for total sales of $37,260,497.89.
Illinois residents purchased $29,735,650.41 worth of cannabis, while out-of-state visitors spent $7,524,847 on cannabis products.
The sales figures do not include taxes collected, according to the press release.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker deemed medical and adult-use cannabis dispensaries as essential businesses in his March 20 executive order in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
California-based MedMen has temporarily closed the majority of its Florida dispensary locations for undisclosed reasons, according to a Florida Politics report.
The company shuttered five of the its eight retail locations in the state as of May 3, the news outlet reported, including the dispensaries in Jacksonville Beach, Key West, Orlando, Sarasota and Tallahassee.
MedMen’s dispensaries in Pensacola, St. Petersburg and West Palm Beach are still open, Florida Politics reported.
“MedMen Sarasota is temporarily closed effective Sunday May 3rd. Thank you for your patience and support, please check back for updates on MedMen.com,” a closure notice on the company’s website says.
MedMen plans to open six additional dispensary locations throughout the state in Deerfield Beach, Fort Lauderdale, downtown and Southside Jacksonville, Miami Beach, and Orlando, according to its website.
Ethos Cannabis, a Pennsylvania-based multistate cannabis operator with operations and investment interests in Massachusetts, Florida and Arizona, announced May 5 that it has signed definitive agreements to acquire the rights to 4Front Ventures’ dispensary locations in Pennsylvania and Maryland, which currently operate under the Mission brand.
Under the agreements, Ethos is acquiring the rights to one operational dispensary in Allentown, Pa., and management agreements for four operational dispensaries in Rockville, Glenmont, Catonsville and Hampden, Md. The dispensary license in Pennsylvania also allows the company to open two additional dispensary locations in the state, and all storefronts will be rebranded from Mission to Ethos.
RELATED: Mission Creates Consistency Across Multiple Dispensary Locations
The acquisition furthers Ethos’ goal of developing a strong presence in the Mid-Atlantic, East Coast and Midwest cannabis markets, according to President and CFO David Clapper.
“One of our main focuses is here in the Mid-Atlantic region, here in the Northeast,” Clapper told Cannabis Business Times. “We’re already located in Philadelphia [and] we already have a vertically integrated permit here in Pennsylvania. … The ability to open additional dispensaries right here in Pennsylvania is really strategic for us. … That’s what really attracted us to the acquisition.”
Cannabis businesses across the country have experienced different economic realities since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Some dispensaries and brands have seen record sales numbers, while customer traffic has significantly decreased for others.
For Apeks Supercritical and Delta Separations, cannabis processing equipment manufacturers that were acquired by Gibraltar Industries in February, business has slowed down. But they’ve expanded their manufacturing beyond extraction and distillation machinery to serve their communities and improve team morale during a difficult time.
Ohio has officially secured the testing equipment it needs to tell the difference between marijuana and hemp.
Up until recently, most of Ohio’s crime labs, if not all, could only detect the presence of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), but not the concentration. The concentration is key in determining whether the cannabis in question is hemp or marijuana, which would be anything containing more than 0.3% THC.
The lack of testing equipment exposed a major loophole in the state’s law enforcement capabilities. Since Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 57 in July of 2019, which decriminalized hemp and legalized licensed hemp cultivation in Ohio, prosecutors across the state were told to either delay low-level marijuana possession cases for months or not pursue them at all.
Now, the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation has the equipment it needs to carry out quantitative analysis on cannabis, according to News 5 Cleveland. Attorney General Dave Yost said that now that the equipment is ready, local departments can start sending samples to the lab.
The loophole resulted in hundreds of marijuana seizures across the state that were not pursued with citations or charges, News 5 reports, including when a police officer pulled over Browns Running Back Kareem Hunt and “suspected the NFL player had marijuana.” The officer didn’t file charges.
In the time that cannabis has been in a sort of purgatory in the state, some municipalities have changed local laws to remove marijuana charges for lower levels of possession. In January, the city of Cleveland removed all penalties for having less than 200 grams of marijuana.
California regulators have released proposed rules for the OCal Program, a statewide certification program focused on comparable-to-organic standards for cannabis.
Managed by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), the OCal Program will allow cannabis products that meet consistent, uniform standards comparable to the National Organic Program to bear an OCal seal.
CDFA is required by state law to establish an organic certification program for cannabis by Jan. 1, 2021.
Public comment on the proposed regulations will be accepted through July 7, 2020. Comments may be submitted via email to [email protected] or by mail to:
The New Zealand government published legislation May 1 to legalize adult-use cannabis, according to a Cannabis Wire report.
New Zealanders will vote on the proposal this September, the news outlet reported.
The country launched its medical cannabis program last month, according to Cannabis Wire, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised a vote on adult-use legalization when elected in 2017.
The Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill would broadly legalize cannabis use and sales for adults 20 and older, and would allow adults to grow two plants or up to four total plants per household for personal use, Cannabis Wire reported. The legislation would legalize the possession of up to 14 grams of dried cannabis, according to the news outlet, which equates to 70 grams of fresh cannabis, 14 cannabis seeds, 210 grams of edibles, 980 grams of liquids or 3.5 grams of concentrates.
Those under the age of 20 who are convicted of cannabis possession will not face criminal charges, but will instead receive an education session, social or health service, or a fine, according to Cannabis Wire.
A recently released 2018 memo from the OLC advises the DEA to “change its current practices and the policy it announced in 2016 to comply with the Single Convention.”
The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, an international treaty on scheduled narcotics, requires signatory countries to impose stringent controls on the cultivation, manufacture, and distribution of narcotic drugs, including cannabis. One such control is that governments interested in cannabis research “establish ‘a single government agency’ to oversee marijuana growers and generally to monopolize the wholesale trade in the marijuana crop.” By licensing cultivation to the National Institution on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi, and by never taking sole ownership of the research cannabis produced at the National Center, the DEA is in violation of international law.
The main issue is that the Single Convention has never been strictly observed by the U.S. government. There’s no basis for an argument that legalization and regulation of cannabis would flout the treaty, because federal policy has not been in compliance in the first place, says Omar Figueroa, a cannabis attorney based in California.
“The monopoly granted to the University of Mississippi is not compliant and not required by international law.”
The OLC, which provides legal advice to the President and all executive branch agencies, wrote the memo on June 6, 2018, but it only was released to the public on April 29, 2020, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought forth by the Scottsdale Research Institute in March demanding documents that would help explain the slow rollout of the federal government's cannabis research program’s expansion.
While the memo does not explain why there have been no new licensed research groups since the DEA reopened its application process in 2016, it provides context to the draft rules that the DEA proposed in March.
Some recently laid-off workers in Illinois had been expecting a decision on their adult-use dispensary license application on May 1. Now, they’ll have to wait a while longer, since Illinois regulators announced April 29 the decision to delay awarding 75 licenses because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ambrose Jackson, CEO of social equity applicant Parkway Dispensary, said his team of 12—some of whom lost their jobs during the pandemic—are eager to start building their company. The state’s decision comes as Illinois adult-use cannabis sales have well exceeded $100 million since Jan. 1, when adult-use retailers who had already been operating as medical providers and are majority white, began selling to Illinois residents and out-of-state consumers.
“As a minority myself, we're used to getting the short end of the stick, so there is nothing that's surprising about what's going on,” Jackson said. “I think the unique thing is that there seems to be perhaps a little bit of an olive branch. And from taking that stance, I think it's important that you’re a local advocate for the things that are not going right and the things that you can see as still working against the better interest and may not actually even be fair at all.”
Through its social equity program, the state may eventually award up to 20% of individual dispensary license application points to eligible social equity applicants. And existing operators in the state have aided applicants; for instance, Cresco Labs offered resources to Parkway through its Social Equity & Educational Development program, which Jackson said was a “positive experience.”
Jackson said he feels state officials are offering some reconciliation for the disproportionate number of marijuana-related arrests and incarcerations in minority communities. At the same time, he hopes officials at the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which will issue the licenses, looks at who those applicants are and makes sure they didn’t add someone to their team just to take advantage of extra points.
Additional steps in Chicago
Parkway plans to begin cannabis retail sales via a shop in Bronzeville, an African-American Chicago neighborhood with a high poverty rate.
This week, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation planned to award 75 new adult-use dispensary licenses, but will now wait until the governor’s disaster proclamation expires. Elsewhere, Canopy Growth announced 200 additional layoffs in Canada, the U.S. and the UK in the Canadian LP’s latest phase of scaling back its operations.
Here, we’ve rounded up the 10 headlines you need to know before this week is over.
Federal: Multistate cannabis operator Cresco Labs announced this week that it has reached a mutual agreement to terminate its acquisition of assets from Tryke Companies, LLC. “Our acquisition of Tryke has been impacted by regulatory delays, a decline in capital markets, and now COVID-19, which brought additional risk to this transaction,” CEO and Co-Founder Charlie Bachtell said in a public statement. “Given these events, we feel the resources previously targeted for this transaction are better invested in our existing markets, where we have high visibility and certainty of return on capital.” Read moreThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent warning letters to two CBD companies to stop marketing CBD as an opioid addiction treatment. “The opioid crisis continues to be a serious problem in the United States, and we will continue to crack down on companies that attempt to benefit from selling products with unfounded treatment claims,” FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy said in a prepared statement. Read moreNew Jersey: Voters will get to decide whether to legalize adult-use cannabis in the Garden State this November, and a new poll conducted by Monmouth University indicates that legalization has strong support. Sixty-one percent of roughly 700 registered voters who participated in the poll said they would vote in favor of legalization, while 34% said they would vote against it. Read moreCalifornia: The state’s cannabis growers spend an average of $136 per pound of dried cannabis flower on testing costs, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found. In a new study, researchers with the public Californian university found that testing costs accounts for approximately 10 percent of the reported average wholesale price for cannabis in the state. Read moreCalifornia officials have announced that a sales tax extension and a $50,000 bridge loan are available to small business owners working in the cannabis industry. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the 90-day extension into law last month, giving small business owners until late July to file and pay their first-quarter sales taxes, and on top of that, small businesses may keep up to $50,000 of their sales tax payments for a year, effectively using the cash as a no-interest bridge loan between now and next summer. Read moreMaine: The Portland City Council voted this week to allow the city to issue temporary cannabis testing lab licenses in an effort to ensure a quick launch of Maine’s adult-use cannabis market after the COVID-19 pandemic. The unanimous vote allows prospective testing labs to apply for a temporary local license, which would then allow the facility to pursue a final state license. Read moreColorado: Denver has established a working group to issue recommendations on the city’s cannabis policies and licensing process. In an April 27 memo, the city’s Department of Excise and Licenses announced the Marijuana Licensing Work Group (MLWG), a 24-member advisory board made up of industry and community stakeholders who will “review, discuss, and make recommendations on policy direction and possible marijuana licensing laws, rules and regulations.” Read moreMassachusetts: An appeals court has sided with Cambridge in a lawsuit over the city’s cannabis licensing moratorium. Revolutionary Clinics, a licensed medical cannabis dispensary that has been operational since 2018, sued Cambridge last year over a city ordinance that allows only economic empowerment applicants to receive adult-use dispensary licenses for the first two-years of the licensing process in an attempt to ensure those disproportionately impacted by prohibition have access to the industry. Read moreIllinois: Regulators announced this week that they will delay issuing new adult-use cannabis dispensary licenses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation planned to award 75 new adult-use dispensary licenses May 1, but will now wait until the governor’s disaster proclamation expires. Read moreCanada: Canopy Growth has announced 200 more layoffs in Canada, the U.S. and the UK in the Canadian LP’s latest phase of scaling back its operations. “Although difficult, the decisions that have been made over the last few months are to allow Canopy Growth to remain focused on the areas where we are winning and ensure that we are delivering the highest quality products to our consumers in every market where we operate,” CEO David Klein told Yahoo Finance Canada. Read moreDNA Genetics, a global cannabis breeding brand based in California, has spent the past year working with Copperstate Farms in Arizona, honing chemovars that will soon be introduced to the state’s medical patient base.
Rez Khan, DNA’s vice president of global corporate development, says that the company’s licensing platform allows his team to provide proprietary genetics in return for a royalty on future sales.
Copperstate Farms, which owns retail storefronts under the Sol Flower brand, fit the bill for what DNA seeks in prospective partners. Khan says that his team scouts other companies for their market penetration in a given state, conducting a business analysis on the management team and an operational analysis on the cultivation team and the facility itself. It’s part of a broad quality assurance and quality control protocol that DNA maintains in all partnerships.
“We want to make sure that we’re at least internally setting up SOPs that we can stand by for products that are going to hit the market, so they’re not grown with stuff that we would never [use to] grow in our own gardens,” Khan says.
DNA co-founders Don Morris and Aaron Yarkoni traveled to Snowflake, Ariz., with three of their top cultivation experts to work in Copperstate’s 40-acre greenhouse.
Morris and Yarkoni oversaw the genetics selection from seed. Rather than starting with clones, this process allowed the DNA and Copperstate teams to stretch out a bit and really hone the phenotypes that would be most optimal for the genetics they were working with.
Canopy Growth has announced 200 more layoffs in Canada, the U.S. and the UK in the Canadian LP’s latest phase of scaling back its operations, according to a Yahoo Finance Canada report.
“Although difficult, the decisions that have been made over the last few months are to allow Canopy Growth to remain focused on the areas where we are winning and ensure that we are delivering the highest quality products to our consumers in every market where we operate,” CEO David Klein told the news outlet.
In early March, Canopy announced a “production optimization plan,” which included the closure of two greenhouse facilities in Canada and the elimination of roughly 500 employees.
“Although difficult, [the] decision was made in order to align Canopy Growth’s supply with consumer demand and improve production efficiencies over time,” Klein told Cannabis Business Times at that time.
The company cited the slow rollout of Canada’s adult-use cannabis market and the timing of outdoor cultivation licensing as primary reasons behind its restructuring.
Now, experts say these market conditions might exacerbate a phenomenon that was already taking off in the cannabis industry prior to the coronavirus outbreak: vulture investing.
Vulture investment funds—investors that target “distressed assets” (companies that are near/at insolvency)—have been taking more interest in the cannabis industry, according to Hilary Bricken, attorney at Harris Bricken. These investors are “wheeler-dealer” types, she says, and take on more risk in exchange for a much larger stake in the company (in equity deals) or massive interest rates (in debt deals). They also generally attach more conditions to their investments, including taking ownership of the assets should the company continue to struggle (or, worse yet, after the company finds success).
“Their whole model is to go after these businesses that are hurting,” Bricken tells Cannabis Business Times, “and here in California, that is not going to be difficult to find because the industry was already suffering before coronavirus.”
Since January, she has seen a handful of new equity funds pop up that are targeted toward distressed assets. In a March 4 interview with CBT, Joe Caltabiano, former president of Cresco Labs, stated his interest in working with distressed assets after resigning from the company he helped launch. He has since launched an equity fund called “JSC Fund” which targets distressed assets.
Since January, Bricken says, “very aggressive vulture investors and funds based around only debt buy-ups [have] come to me not for representation—they already have attorneys—but asking ‘Do you have deals? Do you have deals that you can bring to us? Do you know anyone that’s dying or hurting?’
“There has been an uptick, it’s not rampant, but it’s starting to become the finance vehicle of the year, and it’s probably not going to stop in the wake of the pandemic,” she adds.
Tax relief is hard to come by in the cannabis industry, to say nothing of broader financial assistance at all. In California, however, State Treasure Fiona Ma tells CBT that a sales tax extension and a $50,000 bridge loan are available to small business owners working in the cannabis industry.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the 90-day extension into law last month, giving small business owners until late July to file and pay their first-quarter sales taxes. At the state level, cannabis sales tax comes in at 7.25%.
On top of that, Ma says that small businesses may keep up to $50,000 of their sales tax payments for a year, effectively using the cash as a no-interest bridge loan between now and next summer. The $50,000 would need to be paid back in installments by June 30, 2021. This bridge loan is available to businesses will less than $5 million in annual revenue.
Ma is clear: This isn’t part of the typical tax refund process. It’s a separate plan that business owners must opt into with the state’s taxing authority.
For more information on how to sign up for this bridge loan program, visit the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration’s website.
“This is pretty much the only relief besides the 90-day extension and payment requirement for our federal and California income tax returns,” Ma says. “But for California, unlike the federal government with 280E, California cannabis businesses can deduct their ordinary business expenses—not just cost of goods sold.”
Illinois regulators announced April 29 that they will delay issuing new adult-use cannabis dispensary licenses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation planned to award 75 new adult-use dispensary licenses May 1, but will now wait until the governor’s disaster proclamations expires, the news outlet reported. Gov. J.B. Pritzker is expected to sign a new order in the coming days to extend the proclamation through May 30, according to the Chicago Tribune.
More than 700 applicants, including many social equity applicants, applied for the 75 available licenses, the news outlet reported. Applications were due Jan. 1, and the licensing round aimed to provide new business operators access to Illinois’ adult-use industry, according to the Chicago Tribune. (Only existing cannabis businesses were able to serve the state’s adult-use market when it launched Jan. 1.)
Once the new licenses are issued, licensees will have 180 days to secure a location for their dispensaries, the news outlet reported, and the state must then inspect the facility before giving the retailers final approval to open.
Illinois has also extended the deadline for cannabis infuser, craft grower and transporter licenses to April 30 due to the pandemic, with plans to award the licenses by July 1.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent warning letters to two companies operating in the CBD space for violating the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), according to a news release from the agency.
The FDA said in the release that it sent a warning letter to BIOTA Biosciences, LLC “for marketing and distributing injectable CBD products as well as an injectable curcumin product.” The company claimed that its products could be used as an alternative to opioids and also marketed its products “for serious diseases,” according to the FDA.
The agency also issued a warning letter to Homero Corp, doing business as Natures CBD Oil Distribution, “for marketing and distributing CBD products as a treatment to opioid addiction as well as other diseases.”
“The opioid crisis continues to be a serious problem in the United States, and we will continue to crack down on companies that attempt to benefit from selling products with unfounded treatment claims,” said FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy in a prepared statement. “CBD has not been shown to treat opioid addiction.”
The FDA has approved only one CBD product, Epidiolex, and has not evaluated the efficacy, dosage, side effects nor safety concerns relating to any unapproved CBD products, according to the release.
The companies have 15 days to respond to the FDA with a statement of how they will address the violations.
Denver-based Medicine Man Technologies announced last week that the company was rebranding itself as Schwazze to bring the business in line with its new vision and strategic focus following a very busy bout of growth last year.
When Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed HB19-1090 into law last year, allowing cannabis licensees to be owned by publicly traded companies, Schwazze started building out its cannabis supply chain through a series of strategic acquisitions.
The company kicked off 2019 with an agreement in January to acquire MedPharm Holdings LLC, an intellectual property development and holding company focused on cannabis research and product development, and days later announced plans to acquire Medicine Man Denver, which operates an indoor cultivation facility and four dispensaries in Colorado.
In June, Schwazze announced its acquisition of outdoor cultivator Los Sueños Farms, as well as Purplebees, an infused products manufacturer and dispensary. The following month, the company unveiled plans to acquire Dabble Extracts, a Colorado-based cannabis concentrate company.
LOS ALAMOS, NM, April 29, 2020 / - PRESS RELEASE - Trait Biosciences Inc., a biotechnology research organization providing innovative technology to the hemp and cannabis industry, has announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office has allowed the company protection for its Trait Amplified technology that increases trichome production and up-regulates the production of cannabinoids.
This is the newest of more than 90 patents held, applied for or licensed to Trait within cannabinoid research. Specifically, the patent notes that:
