MjLink Cannabis Business News and Press

SOLON, Ohio, Jan. 16, 2020 -- PRESS RELEASE -- CBG Biotech, a manufacturer of solvent removal and recycling systems, has introduced the new CannaTrue EPD Cold Ethanol Extraction System for high-purity extraction of cannabis and hemp oil.

The CannaTrue EPD System is composed of three modules, Extraction, Purification and Distillation, and is designed to process and purify essential oils and capture desired cannabinoids from cannabis and hemp. The EPD System extracts biomass (including flower, stem and processed material) then purifies and distills to yield a crude full spectrum distillate using high-purity ethanol. The system then distills the ethanol, enabling it to be recovered for future extractions, separating the ethanol from the concentrates.

Using the EPD System, cannabis and hemp labs can achieve stronger yield while using safer ethanol with 80-90% recovery. The system operates in a closed loop, offers real-time and remote monitoring, cycle tunability, and can process multiple batches of biomass per day.

Eric Lloyd, CBG’s production lead explains, “The EPD System learns from every wash how to be more efficient by adapting to the user’s environment and process settings. Each of the three modules are interconnected thereby, providing higher throughput and shorter processing times.”

The CannaTrue EPD System is fully automated and features all-metal construction with dual-wall 304 stainless steel processing tanks.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is renewing her push to legalize adult-use cannabis this year, and has officially added the issue to the state’s 2020 legislative agenda, according to a local KRQE report.

Grisham announced in March 2019 that she would like to tackle cannabis legalization in this year’s 30-day legislative session, after a legalization proposal stalled in the Senate last year.

Last year’s legislation did pick up a great deal of momentum, however; the New Mexico House passed the measure in early March by a narrow margin of 36-24, and the bill even cleared a Senate panel before its ultimate demise.

A decriminalization measure that reduced penalties for the possession of small amounts of cannabis passed the legislature last year and was signed into law last spring, and Grisham recruited health, legal and fiscal policy experts last summer to serve on a committee tasked with providing recommendations on legalization.

The governor-appointed work group of 22 policy leaders submitted its recommendations to state officials in October, and New Mexico Rep. Javier Martinez (D-Albuquerque) announced earlier this month that he would pre-file an adult-use cannabis legalization bill that incorporates these recommendations.

The vote signals the first successful unionization attempt in Illinois—and just one case in a growing history across the U.S. cannabis industry.

At Cresco Labs’ cannabis cultivation facility in Joliet, Ill., employees voted 58-37 in favor of joining United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 881 on Jan. 14. The 95 employees’ collective decision marks the first time that Illinois cannabis workers have engaged a union.

The UFCW has led a Cannabis Workers Rising campaign since 2010, which has gone on to represent more than 10,000 cannabis industry employees in the U.S., according to the union’s website.

“This victory is the workers’,” Zach Koutsky, the legislative and political director for UFCW Local 881, told the Chicago Sun-Times. While the Joliet facility employs 130 workers, only those 95 were eligible to cast a vote under the labor agreements stitched into Illinois’ adult-use cannabis law. (Those agreements are part of the state’s requirements in awarding business licenses.)

“Throughout this process, we have respected, supported and protected the rights of our employees to make this important decision through an independent secret ballot election,” Cresco Labs CEO Charlie Bachtell wrote in a public statement. “We look forward to continuing to provide all of our employees a fair package of employee wages, health and retirement benefits and an environment that is a great place to work.”

Koutsky went on to tell the newspaper that salary compensation and health benefits were future negotiating targets. In a long Rolling Stone feature on UFCW’s attempts to unionize workers throughout the U.S. cannabis industry, the organization’s top brass claims that these processes help legitimize the landscape as it comes into a sense of standardized compliance and begins to compete with more established industries (like consumer packaged goods and certain beverage segments). The UFCW has also helped to galvanize the National Labor Relations Board into recognizing cannabis as a legal space where workers and employers interact regularly.  

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As cannabis legalization continues to sweep the nation—and the world—those already immersed in traditional greenhouse agriculture may consider converting their facilities to support this new crop. However, growing cannabis or hemp might require more adjustments to existing operations than initially anticipated, and comes with its own unique crop needs, growing conditions and regulations.

Dr. Nadia Sabeh, president and founder of Dr. Greenhouse Inc., an agricultural and mechanical engineering firm that specializes in the design of HVAC systems for indoor plant environments, has dedicated her career to helping farmers control their environments to grow crops indoors, in greenhouses and in locations that would otherwise make it impossible or impractical to do so. Here, she shares advice on how to successfully make the switch from growing traditional crops to cannabis or hemp in a greenhouse environment.

Cannabis Business Times: What are some things that greenhouse growers should take into consideration when deciding whether to expand their operations into cannabis or hemp?

Nadia Sabeh: I think one of the main considerations is, what were you growing before? [Can] the setup and the design of that greenhouse serve cannabis or hemp? If you were growing vining crops before that were tall and required maybe a similar climate management system and lighting requirements, such as tomatoes, and wanted to convert that greenhouse to grow cannabis or hemp, a lot of the environmental requirements are similar to both of those crops. You need a certain temperature and humidity to have high quality and high yield for that crop. So, the conversion from tomatoes to cannabis is pretty simple, and you don’t have to make a bunch of major changes.

Now, if in that greenhouse, you were growing orchids or even lettuce, the setup is going to be very different. You might not have needed supplemental lighting. The plants might have liked it more humid. The growing system might be very different. Lettuce might have been grown in deep water culture and in rafts, and now you want to rip all that up so you can put benches down for cannabis. So, I think one of the biggest considerations is what was grown before, and is it an easy conversion to grow this new plant, cannabis or hemp?

In addition to that, I know a lot of people in California have purchased old ornamental greenhouses that had wood frames and old plastic coverings, and I think what a lot of growers discovered—too late maybe—[is that] a wood structure is a lot more susceptible to rot, mold and rain. If you’re converting that greenhouse from a crop that didn’t need a lot of light, you might want to replace that [plastic cover with a] cover that’s more transparent to the PAR spectrum that the hemp or cannabis plant will enjoy more.

One of the great problems facing hemp growers in early 2020 is the lack of processing facilities around the U.S., a supply chain bottleneck that puts farmers without a clear marketplace for their product at a distinct disadvantage. Whether you’re working in Virginia or elsewhere, the supply chain needs a boost.

To get things moving in Halifax County—a southern, inland stretch of land that shares a border with North Carolina—the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission approved a $250,000 grant on Tuesday, Jan. 7, to bring a hemp processing business to the area. The enterprise is code-named “Project Phoenix.”

Halifax County Industrial Development Authority Executive Director Brian Brown could not offer a comment, saying only that this remained an unannounced economic development project. But according to news reports from the area, the IDA will adapt a local building to be leased to a private hemp processing company. Further incentive packages continue to be negotiated. 

In the interim, the news brings a tentative sigh of relief to a corner of Virginia dominated by agricultural businesses. Virginia farmers were licensed to grow 135 acres of hemp in 2018, but interest in the crop quickly picked up. In 2019, farmers were licensed to grow 11,000 acres. Project Phoenix is seen as a way of galvanizing that interest in the coming years—and offering something of a landing pad to the regional supply chain. According to the Danville Register and Bee, the Project Phoenix facility “is projected to purchase and process upward of $50 million worth of hemp from Virginia farmers within the first three years.”

Reporter Caleb Ayers points out that the grant application specifically cites “68 hemp producers at an average of 15 acres apiece” as a figure for what to expect from Project Phoenix when it gets up and running.

That capacity for taking on new contracts will give farmers a better shot at finding a buyer for their product. Many Virginia hemp growers (and hemp growers working in other states) ended the 2019 season without a contract on which to pin their harvested biomass.

When George Sadler, president of Platinum, a California-based cannabis product manufacturer that distributes products in both California and Michigan, started receiving messages on social media from its Michigan customers about vape cartridges not meeting their expectations, he suspected that counterfeits of the company’s products were being sold at unauthorized retailers, and he immediately started looking for ways to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters.

“We started receiving stuff on social media saying, ‘Hey, I bought this cartridge [and] it doesn’t taste right. This isn’t a Platinum vape. What are you guys doing?’” Sadler told Cannabis Dispensary. “We … started to look around and started asking questions [like], ‘Where did you purchase this product?’ Then we realized, they were purchasing from stores that were not licensed and we had not done any distribution to. We had flown out there, and we started hitting these stores.”

Sadler’s main concern was consumer health. Generally, when cannabis products are counterfeited, untested product is produced on the illicit market and placed in an established cannabis brand’s packaging, which is duplicated and sold on illicit websites.

“You can actually go [online], type in ‘Platinum vapes,’ the packaging comes up, and you can purchase that packaging,” Sadler said. “Then it’s just a matter of getting some cheap, untested oil. … They don’t care what’s in it. They just fill it and know there’s a demand for it, and the stores that are not licensed have no issues with carrying that because it’s a selling point in their stores.”

These untested, counterfeit products, which could contain pesticides or other negative residuals, then end up in unknowing customers’ hands, which could be damaging for their health, as well as the brand’s reputation.

An audit of the Minnesota Health Department’s controls and compliance has revealed several ways that the state’s medical cannabis program is not being correctly monitored, according to a Duluth News Tribune report.

The Office of the Legislative Auditor, the state’s legislative watchdog, examined the program’s operations from July 2016 through December 2018, the news outlet reported, and found the following issues:

Failure to verify new patients’ doctors were licensed and in good standing;Poor record-keeping for parent and guardian eligibility for the program;Problems with oversight of patient fees collected by the state;Inadequate oversight of cannabis manufacturers, including failure to adequately track and test the drug prior to sale; andToo few controls to detect loss of medical cannabis by the manufacturer.

The audit did not include an evaluation of Minnesota’s two licensed medical cannabis operators, LeafLine Labs and Minnesota Medical Solutions, the Duluth News Tribune reported.

Department of Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm submitted a response to the audit, indicating that health officials agree with the findings and that they have made efforts throughout the past year to improve their oversight of the program, and that further improvements may require legislative action, according to the news outlet.

Minnesota lawmakers approved a medical cannabis law in 2014, and the program now has roughly 17,000 patients, according to the Duluth News Tribune.

Florida Sen. Jeff Brandes (R-Pinellas County) filed legislation Jan. 13 that would legalize adult-use cannabis in the state, according to a local NBC2 report.

The move comes after two political action committees suspended their efforts to get legalization initiatives on the state’s 2020 ballot.

The groups are now looking toward 2022 ballot initiatives, NBC2 reported, but Brandes hopes to legalize cannabis legislatively before then.

“We think the better place to have that conversation is through the legislative process and so in order to be able to do that you need a piece of legislation,” he told the news outlet.

Brandes’ bill aims to incorporate small businesses in an adult-use industry in the state, according to NBC2, and the legislation also includes expungement provisions for those convicted of simple cannabis possession.

After last year’s failed attempt at cannabis legalization in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is renewing his push for policy reform in 2020.

The Democrat vowed to legalize adult-use cannabis this year in his Jan. 8 State of the State Address. The announcement was met with applause from state lawmakers, who tried and failed to pass the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act last summer, according to a Patch.com report.

Cuomo said during his address that it is an ethical imperative to legalize the cannabis in the state, according to the news outlet, and said he hopes to work with Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to coordinate policy reform efforts. Cuomo also called for the State University of New York to form a cannabis and hemp research center, Patch.com reported.

“I think it’s a rehash of the momentum that picked up last year,” Joshua Horn, partner at Fox Rothschild, told Cannabis Business Times.

Cuomo first announced support for adult-use legalization in December 2018, when he called on the New York Legislature to pass legislation that would regulate and tax cannabis. He included a legalization plan in his 2019 state budget, but the proposal was ultimately removed.

Two trends—legal cannabis markets expanding and millennials drinking less—are converging, with major implications for both the cannabis and alcoholic beverage industries, and perhaps society more generally, if cannabis gradually supplants alcohol as the intoxicant of choice.

For several years, millennials and Gen Z adults in the U.S., Canada and Europe have been moderating how much and how often they drink, which has driven alcohol beverage brands to reinvent their offerings Global beer brands including Peroni, Heineken, Guinness, Budweiser and, perhaps most remarkably, Leffe, brewed by Belgian monks since 1240 (but now owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev), have responded by introducing low- or zero-alcohol beers. Diageo, maker of Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, Ketel One vodkas, Captain Morgan and other well-known spirits, recently acquired Seedlip, a line of non-alcoholic distilled spirits based on centuries-old recipes, for $300 million.

It is unclear how access to legal cannabis relates to declines in drinking by millennials, but there is evidence of a correlation. CDC data analyzed by the research firm Cowen showed binge drinking rates were 13 percent lower in states with legal cannabis compared to prohibition states, and that the rate of first-use of cannabis by adults increased as binge drinking declined. Based on that data, Cowen projected flat or slow growth for alcohol brands while increasing its projection of cannabis market size from $50 billion in 2026 to $75 billion in 2030.

It is worth noting cannabis-infused beverages are a relatively small slice of the $11.3 billion in U.S. cannabis sales in 2018. Fortune Business Insights estimated global sales of cannabis-infused beverages totaled $174 million in 2018. The continuing federal prohibition of cannabis has kept risk-averse global brands from investing in the U.S. market, which has left the market to regional brands such as Lagunitas’ cannabis-infused beverages in California.

The legalization of cannabis edibles in Canada, a nation that has long been home to some of the world’s largest and best-known brewers, drastically changed the prospects for infused beverages. Brewers that have already developed zero-alcohol alternatives to their traditional offerings are now preparing cannabis-infused versions of those products. Sales became legal in Canada in December and are expected to ramp up over the course of 2020.

The entrance of global beverage brands into cannabis, with their technical and marketing expertise and access to capital, may have far-reaching consequences. Developing a zero-alcohol, cannabis-infused beverage is not a simple project. Cannabis has a strong flavor that makes infusing wines, other than sangria and some sparkling wines, difficult. Beers, with their stronger flavors, mask the taste more easily. The established process for removing alcohol from beer, called “arrested fermentation,” adversely affects the taste and texture.

PRESS RELEASE - As a testament to its reach and impact on clients in this highly regulated industry, Fox Rothschild’s Cannabis Law Group has been named a 2019 “Practice Group of the Year” by Law360.

Helena, MT — PRESS RELEASE — New Approach Montana, a statewide campaign working to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana, has submitted two complementary 2020 ballot initiatives to the state government for review. The first is a statutory initiative that would legalize marijuana in Montana for adults aged 21 and over and establish a regulatory framework for cultivation and sales. The second is a constitutional amendment that would allow the legal minimum age for marijuana consumption to be 21.

“Montanans support legalizing marijuana and setting the minimum age at 21,” said Pepper Petersen, spokesperson for New Approach Montana. “Our initiatives will give voters the opportunity to approve those laws at the ballot box on Election Day. It’s time for Montana to stop wasting law enforcement resources that could be spent fighting more serious crime. We can shift marijuana out of the illicit market and into licensed, regulated, and tax-paying businesses. At the same time, we can create jobs and generate significant new revenue for the state.”

The initiatives were hand-delivered to the Secretary of State and the Legislative Services Division Jan. 13, starting a review process that will also involve the Attorney General and the Governor’s budget director.

New Approach Montana is sponsoring both initiatives, which were were drafted with the assistance of Montana voters, stakeholders and policy experts.

“These initiatives are the result of a collaborative and diligent drafting process,” said Petersen. “We held seven community listening sessions across the state and received input from hundreds of Montana voters. We’ve spoken with community, church and tribal leaders. Montana lawyers with experience in ballot initiative drafting and litigation have carefully vetted the details. We’ve received input from Montanans with expertise on our state’s existing medical marijuana program, civil rights and fiscal policy. We have covered every base.”

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation has announced that adult-use cannabis sales from Jan. 1 through Jan. 12 totaled nearly $20 million.

Dispensaries processed 495,385 transactions and raked in $19,709,345.10 during the first 12 days of adult-use cannabis sales, according to a local KHQA report.

The Illinois Department of Revenue expects to release figures on the total tax revenue generated by the end of February, when the first tax payments from dispensaries are due, according to the news outlet. Twenty-five percent of cannabis sales tax revenues will go to the state’s Restore, Reinvest and Renew (R3) program, which aims to address social equity in Illinois’ adult-use cannabis industry.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker kicked off legal adult-use sales in the state with a Dec. 31 announcement that he was pardoning more than 11,000 low-level cannabis convictions on the eve of legalization.

RELATED: Cannabis Industry, Chicago Alderman Respond to End of Prohibition in Illinois

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture issued its version of industrial hemp regulations at the start of the year, following federal guidance and generally tightening the rules on what was a robust 2019 season in the state.

Now, prospective hemp growers may apply for a license in Pennsylvania for just $150 (down from $3,000 just two years ago), but the supply chain has been tightened in its own way. Where farmers grew about 4,000 acres of hemp in 2019, much of that supply is languishing in storage warehouses, victim to an early boom in hemp production.

Farmers sitting on biomass from 2019 harvests may have an even more difficult time working with licensed processors now; the new rules in Pennsylvania will include THCA content in the 0.3% THC threshold. This means that hemp growers will have an even more onerous hurdle to jump when selling harvested material into the market.

Geoff Whaling, president of the Pennsylvania Industrial Hemp Council, says that this tension between available hemp biomass and supply-side regulations is something that all farmers should take into consideration this year. So much of the nascent hemp industry remains in flux, with CBD extraction guiding much of the early demand, that a cautious approach may be warranted from those itching to get into the space.

“We know what the challenges are for us at both the National Hemp Association and the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council,” he tells Hemp Grower. “We know that the supply chain is today's issue, which has allowed for the proliferation of CBD—CBD as a small, horticultural crop rather than a farm and field crop. We've always delivered the message of ‘slow and steady.’ Let's figure out what's going to work. Let's find out what varietals are best in what regions—not only in Pennsylvania, but across the United States.”

Pennsylvania jump-started its industrial hemp pilot program in 2016, and the focus on research has been clear from the beginning. Whaling says that heedful farmers may do well to take into account the research that’s been done for years in Canada, where hemp was legalize in 1998. Health Canada, the country’s regulatory agency, has published a list of approved cultivars. Now, regional and climatic differences may come into play for farmers interested in importing certified seeds of particular cultivars from Canada, but it’s that certification process, Whaling says, that may give U.S. farmers a reliable sense of consistent THC-content testing over a five-year period—consistent results under the 0.3% threshold. “That is kind of the cautious approach to it while we make these fixes,” he says.

NESS ZIONA, Israel and SAN DIEGO, USA – January 13th , 2020 – PRESS RELEASE – NRGene, a genomics solutions provider, is announcing a global contest today as part of a new product campaign.

Following 150 successful genomic projects performed to market leaders in the seed business and more than 10 successful genomic projects done in cannabis and hemp, NRGene has gained a broad understanding of how to best employ genomics for breeding new elite varieties. This know-how is crucial in order to meet the unique challenges the cannabis and hemp markets are facing in developing elite varieties that perfectly suit their medicinal, wellness or recreational purposes.

The company is now offering a full portfolio of genomic solutions that helps any cannabis company accelerate the development of new varieties through artificial intelligence-based breeding, including highly accurate genome mapping, diversity analysis and trait mapping. Access to such services allows growers and breeders to efficiently and precisely develop new cannabis varieties with desirable characteristics while significantly reducing costs and timelines.

During 2019, NRGene made great strides in the cannabis industry and expanded its customer base through deals with such market leaders as Cronos Group, Aurora, Oregon CBD, Pure Holding and more.

QuickGenetic – Data-Driven Decision Making for Superior Plants and Accelerated Breeding

Washington Rep. Drew MacEwen introduced legislation Jan. 7 that would authorize CBD as a legal ingredient in food products, according to an East Oregonian report.

H.B. 2296 not only conflicts with the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s warning to processors to not use CBD as an ingredient in products meant to be ingested by humans or animals, but also defies the FDA’s prohibition of CBD as a food ingredient on the federal level.

“We still have concerns about allowing CBD in food,” Chris McGann, a spokesman for the agriculture department, told East Oregonian. “A state-led effort to allow food ingredients not allowed by the FDA would be complicated to enforce and put processors and markets at risk.”

The Washington Legislature passed a bill last year to regulate hemp in response to the 2018 Farm Bill, East Oregonian reported, and while the legislation allows the hemp plant to be used as food, it also directs the state agriculture department to defer to federal a law in regulating hemp as a food ingredient.

MacEwen introduced a second bill, H.B. 2300, on Jan. 7 that would allow CBD-infused products to be sold by the state’s cannabis retailers, East Oregonian reported. Under current law, retailers can only sell cannabis products that contain at least 0.3% THC.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) has started the process of awarding medical cannabis manufacturing licenses to 86 facilities that will be able to manufacture cannabis-infused products such as edibles, tinctures and concentrates.

Applicants were notified via email whether their licenses have been approved or denied, according to a local KCTV report.

The 86 facilities awarded licenses are the top-scoring applicants that met all eligibility requirements set forth by the state’s medical cannabis program, the news outlet reported.

The final scores and rankings of the medical cannabis manufacturing license applicants have been posted on the department’s website. There were 373 total applicants for the 86 licenses.

Each applicant had to submit a nonrefundable application fee of $6,000, and the 373 applicants generated $2.23 million in total application fees, according to a News Tribune report.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget would consolidate the state’s three cannabis licensing authorities into one organization, “In an effort to improve access to licensing and simplify regulatory oversight of commercial cannabis activity,” according to a press release issued Jan. 10 by the California Bureau of Cannabis Control. 

That agency, along with the Department of Food and Agriculture and the Department of Public Health, is up for possible restructuring under this plan. Newsom’s proposal would pin the consolidation to a July 2021 deadline.

“Establishment of a standalone department with an enforcement arm will centralize and align critical areas to build a successful legal cannabis market, by creating a single point of contact for cannabis licensees and local governments,” Lori Ajax, chief of the Bureau of Cannabis Control, wrote Jan. 10. 

More information will be coming this spring.

“This next year is going to be very critical in seeing how quickly we can course-correct and how quickly we can start to see the impacts of these changes,” Josh Drayton, spokesman for the California Cannabis Industry Association, told the Orange County Register. “We have to see who survives.” 

For more than two years now, the story in California has been one of survival along razor-thin margins—both in terms of business balance sheets and economic access to the legal market. As of late 2019, the illicit market in California continued to outpace legal adult-use cannabis sales. 

Last week, South Dakota became the first state to place medical and adult-use cannabis legalization measures on the same ballot, a situation that has its challenges, as well as unique opportunities, according to Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) Deputy Director Matthew Schweich.

“It’s exciting that we’re able to make progress more quickly, and we did our research and we found that a majority of South Dakota voters support both medical marijuana and adult-use legalization,” Schweich told Cannabis Business Times. “We’ve done our homework and we’re confident that both can pass if we run an efficient campaign.”

South Dakota is currently one of three U.S. states that has no legal cannabis program on the books whatsoever.

The Secretary of State officially certified the adult-use legalization initiative, led by South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws, on Jan. 6, after the campaign submitted over 50,000 signatures.

The initiative, a constitutional amendment called Constitutional Amendment A, would legalize cannabis for adults 21 and older, establish a system for regulated sales and require the state legislature to enact a hemp cultivation law by 2022. The measure would also establish a 15% tax on cannabis sales and use a portion of the revenue to fund the state’s public school system.

This week, the Utah Department of Health announced the 10 companies that will ultimately be licensed to sell medical cannabis at 14 locations across the state beginning in March. Elsewhere, Illinois dispensaries grappled with supply issues in the state’s nascent adult-use market, with some retailers halting adult-use sales.

Here, we’ve rounded up the 10 headlines you need to know before this week is over.

Federal: The House Small Business Committee advanced the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (MORE) Act (H.R. 3884), making it the second House committee to advance the legislation, which would end federal cannabis prohibition. The House Judiciary Committee passed the bill Nov. 20 in a vote of 24 to 10. Read moreUtah: The Utah Department of Health announced the 10 companies that will ultimately be licensed to sell medical cannabis at 14 locations across the state beginning in March. The medical cannabis pharmacy licenses were divided among four geographic regions and will open in two phases, with eight retailers opening in March and the remaining six launching sales in July. Read moreIllinois: At least six Chicago cannabis dispensaries halted sales to adult-use customers Jan. 6 due to supply issues, while others placed limits on adult-use sales. Illinois saw nearly $3.2 million in adult-use cannabis sales Jan. 1, the first day of sales. Read moreMeanwhile, the Illinois Department of Agriculture has released the applications for Cannabis Infuser, Transporter and Craft Grower licenses. The department will begin accepting completed applications Feb. 14 and will award licenses by July 1. Read moreMassachusetts: The state drew $420 million in total cannabis sales in 2019, with adult-use sales only just beginning in November 2018. As of January, Massachusetts has more than 30 licensed adult-use cannabis retailers. Read moreSouth Dakota: South Dakota’s Secretary of State officially certified an adult-use legalization initiative for the 2020 ballot Jan. 6, and, in December, a separate medical cannabis ballot initiative was also certified. South Dakota will now be the first state in American history to vote on medical and adult-use cannabis legalization initiatives on the same ballot. Read moreFlorida: Rep. Shevrin Jones is backing a cannabis decriminalization bill that would reduce criminal penalties for the possession of 20 grams or less of cannabis and make first-time juvenile offenders eligible for civil citations or diversion programs. Under current law, the possession of 20 grams or less of cannabis is a first-degree misdemeanor, but many Florida cities and counties have granted law enforcement the option to issue a civil citation in these cases. Read moreNew Hampshire: The New Hampshire House passed legislation Jan. 8 that would add insomnia and opioid use disorder to the state’s list of qualifying conditions. The same day, the Senate voted against a more expansive bill that would have legalized medical cannabis for any condition that a medical provider determined could be helped by the substance. Read moreTennessee: Sen. Janice Bowling has reintroduced a bill this legislative session that would legalize medical cannabis in the state. Bowling introduced similar legislation last year, but the bill ultimately stalled in the legislature. Read moreMississippi: A medical cannabis initiative will appear on Mississippi’s 2020 ballot after Mississippians for Compassionate Care submitted more than the required number of signatures in September. The secretary of state’s office certified the signatures as Ballot Initiative 65, and the initiative was formally filed with the state legislature Jan. 7. Read more