The Cole Memo

In this episode, I feature an interview that I captured during the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference 2023. Following a session’s conclusion, I conducted an impromptu interview with Jon Levine to discuss comments that he made about the cannabis market in Illinois. Jon Levine is the Chief Executive Officer at Marimed Inc. I am re-releasing this interview alongside a new interview that I just taped with the CRO of MariMed. My apologies for the audio quality in this interview.

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The auto-generated transcript is available below.

this was recorded on September 27th at benzinga cannabis Capital conference 2023 after this panel I approached CEO of mared John LaVine for a short on thepot interview enjoy the [Music] episode I’m I’m standing here with John LaVine CEO of mared um one of the things you described about the Illinois cannabis Market uh that that you like about it and other investors like is uh the consistent pricing consistently High pricing what do you think can be attributed to that confidence I think because this Market has been very good about controlling the outputs into it so that there’s no over abundance of flow or products on the market at one time so the supply and demand is always there I think also Illinois being one of the older markets has a great line of different types of products in the market with good good manufacturers I think one of the first states that we’ve been in and this has been a great state I wish we’ve been able to manufacture here for much longer we started our Betty edtis originally with GTI that was many years ago but GTI it’s great coming out of the box with Betty’s Ed they were number one for three years running and we’re excited that we’re bringing back to Illinois Illinois is a growing Market still and I’m very excited that we’re here yeah so uh to put it in a bottle do you think it’s the uh limitations on licenses that allows kind of that that pricing to stay firm or yes I think that Illinois again their their cannabis group has done a great job of not overextending the amount of space that somebody can grow into or too many licenses I mean some of the other states that we deal with like Massachusetts there’s a couple people in the stat that have problems growing because the competition keeps growing every year because they’re not limited they’re unlimited Maryland they just limited it but they restricted the amount of space that somebody could have to what they had that day so this will be a better Market in Maryland Illinois has been consistent from day one limiting the numbers and I think that’s a great thing for the whole indust and as a business owner how do you think that stands up against like we accept the fact that most restaurants like 80% of restaurants go out of business within the first 5 years do you think that changes that Dynamic for this business oh 100% in Illinois you’re not seeing the people going out of business here because of the fact that they’ve limited the licenses that’s a positive for the state the state is doing a great job with the Illinois market and we’re very happy that we’re part of it and last question uh what do you think about the main enforcement mechanism being the criminal law in other words like if I did what some of these companies did I’m looking at criminal penalties instead of like a business fine you know like if I opened up a restaurant and did a liquor LIC I get like a fine citation I wouldn’t be looking at prison time what do you think about that enforcement mechanism with licensing first of all the licenses within the states As Long as You Follow the state guidelines it is a business license you will be penalized for breaking a piece of that license agreement so we’re not doing anything federally legal by transporting anything over state lines that’s the problem is you got this big federal government looking over your shoulder saying we’re going to put you in jail luckily they’ve been easing that St and it’s making this industry grow a lot better but I do feel that resched would really change all of that to an easier situation that yeah but again do you think the criminal law should be the enforcement mechanism is really my question no should be the business one right citation cool well hey thank you so much for your time I promise that keep it short thank you and uh we’ll see you around