In this episode of The Cole Memo, Cole Preston sits down with Zack Huffman, a journalist with roots in cannabis reporting, to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of cannabis regulation. They explore the impact of the 2018 Farm Bill, the controversy over hemp-derived THC products, and how states like Michigan and Missouri are cracking down on product inversion. Cole also gives a sneak peek into his upcoming mini-documentary, premiering in Chicagoland.
- Watch the episode on Patreon here
- Watch the episode on Youtube here
- Stream the episode on Soundcloud here
- Stream the episode on Spotify here
- Stream the episode on Apple Podcast here
- Stream the episode on X here
Links mentioned during show
- Connect with Zack on X
- MI Continues Crackdown on Imported Hemp Derivatives
- Missouri’s Cannabis Regulator Faces Audit Amid Product Inversion Crisis
- A pot mecca exploiting legal gray zones emerges along the New York-Canada border
The auto-generated transcript is available below.
hello and welcome on this episode of the coal memo I’ll be sitting down with Zach Huffman who you might recognize from grown in an outlet that we’ve collaborated with many times over the years folks if you’re in Chicago land I wanted to give you a heads up that my mini documentary will be premiering in Chicagoland very soon I’m displaying my screen right now if you can’t see my screen go to co memo.com minoc and from there you can buy tickets to see my mini documentary Premiere in Chicagoland once again that’ll be on September 18th the party starts at around 5:30 p.m. the show starts around 6:00 p.m. you can get your tickets at Cole memo.com minoc I’m displaying it on my screen right now it’ll be in Blue Island Illinois the tickets are on sale from the folks at High Focus Media so thank you so much to them for helping me to sell these tickets and before we get into the podcast with Zach I want to give you a sneak peek at the upcoming mini do here we go I’m about to share my screen and show you a sneak peek at the mini do before we talk to Zach Huffman beginning January 1st 20120 the recreational use of cannabis will be legal in the state of Illinois available to stream now my mini do dives into the history of Illinois legalization starting with January 1st what should we expect the biggest thing that we need people to understand understand is that January 1 in terms of the Criminal Justice System here in this state is the end of prohibition see how Illinois missed its chance at real cannabis reform with key failures including the fact that the program includes regulation on possession limits so people can still be arrested for a possession and I want to highlight that in its first year of legalized recreational marijuana in the state of Illinois they arrested three times as many black people for possession than any other race we’ve run into so much cannabis we’ve run out of places to put it I have represented people and taken their cases through the court system who got charged with more serious crimes only because the police said that they smelled cannabis and not because the police said you have illegal cannabis or not because you have too much cannabis or not because you’re high on cannabis but because I can smell it and that’s it attorney goes he understands that he can’t be smoking and his cannabis flower shouldn’t be open and I was like I’d like to say further record that I was not smoking and my flower was not open so uh that’s where we’re at right now in Illinois and I hope it changes start watching now at Co memo.com [Music] minock once again folks you can view that now at Co memo.com minid do I will display a few reviews really quick before we get into the podcast with Zack Huffman you can see that box Brown said that it’s a coherent straightforward look at the issues plaguing the Illinois cannabis industry and the befuddling nonsense that went into the creation of a law that works for almost no one defense attorney Evan Bruno said this is incredible a Punchy video like this is the way to get a message across in 2024 folks check it out at the memo.com minoc all right so I am back with Mr Zach Huffman Zach thank you for sitting down with me today yeah no thanks for having me yeah and I mentioned in the intro you know that people might recognize your name from your work at grown in or maybe even from other uh places that you’ve worked at in the past I wanted to give you the space though do you mind uh introducing yourself and telling folks uh maybe where they can find your work or connect with you online yeah no absolutely uh first of all as you can see there’s there’s my uh my Twitter account um so as you mentioned I uh spent some time writing for for grown-in back in at the end of I think 202 did that right yeah 2021 the uh grown in was expanding Beyond just covering you know Illinois and the Midwest they were trying to cover some new regions so they brought me on to be the New England reporter um and so I did that for about a year and a half and then you know grown and went in a different direction and so uh you know I started freelancing again from there uh most of what I’ve been uh most of my cannabis coverage I’ve been uh you know doing I guess since uh early 2023 was with a company called crb monitor crb is an acronym for a cannabis related business uh basically this company uh it’s a few years old but they only recently have launched this you know journalism wing of you know their whole operation mostly what they do is they maintain this large database of cannabis licenses across the country um so it’s it’s definitely a useful resource a lot of Bankers like to use that folks getting into investment ious about you know what they should uh be looking out for in terms of cannabis because it is kind of a riskier investment or investment than say you know your more traditional uh businesses yeah and I can throw a link in the uh description but it looks like it’s news. crbm monitor.com that is correct and uh you know I think one of the first things you’ll notice is we’re very license heavy in our you know naturally in our coverage um you know most recently I wrote about Montana then before that about Michigan which is what we’re talking about yeah yeah and I see you even wrote about Massachusetts recently I I do so you know Massachusetts up until about two months ago I lived in Massachusetts just outside of Boston so it’s kind of like kind of my own turf in terms of uh you know what I’m familiar with and what I cover and occasionally I will write for another publication called talking joints memo which is a lot of Massachusetts Cannabis News probably the the best Cannabis News Source in in the entire Bay State yeah what’s the guy behind that isn’t it like Eric or something no no uh Chris Fone he’s he’s got a long history of working with alt Weekley in the Boston area the Boston Phoenix dig Boston he founded an organization called the Boston Institute uh for nonprofit journalism along with Jason pramis and uh so they do a lot of good investigative work and I’ve I’ve worked with uh you know Chris off and on for easily a decade he and I go way back gotcha gotcha well very cool very cool to learn about um yeah how this kind of came to be and everything and I think I definitely I’ve I’ve personally I think I heard of crb monitor probably through you um but I’ll have to definitely keep them in my list of you know references because I can already just see at a glance there’s a lot of good information and like you said uh we came on today to talk about one of your recent stories and I just wanted to give you the floor I’m displaying it right now um let’s talk about it man where do you wanna where do you want to start with this one uh well I think this is uh the story kind of speaks to a larger issue that I think is going on uh within the Cannabis markets across across the country and part of this is a repercussion of the 2018 Farm Bill uh but starting with this story um you know just like a lot of the stories I do for crb just kind of starts with a single like incident report or something like that so in this case Michigan uh announced there like you know one of their press releases that they had filed a complaint against this producer one love labs for allegedly uh illegally importing hemp derived thca from the um it was actually from Oregon and uh actually I noticed when you clicked on that link so um if you if you had had an account to crb for our database which you know it’s kind of Premium access thing it would have pulled up one love labs like little profile and or license information oh again we you know it’s a it’s a big thing to kind of like make people aware of the data base that’s why I always link yeah yeah yeah no thank you for mentioning that I was gonna ask that but anyways you’re were saying that you know this kind of stemmed from allegations that uh Michigan a Michigan operator had received some thca yeah so so they receive some thca Crystal which is a isolate and essentially what’s going on with this practice is you know if you’re a producer in Michigan or a processor I should say if you’re a processor you know primarily what you’re doing is you’re receiving a biomass or uh you know flower bud you know whatever you want to call it from a cultivator if it’s not your own and then you’re going to take that you’re going to turn it into say a vape or an edible or whatever now the thing with you know Vapes are super popular uh so you know obviously that means you’re looking at distillates the thing with distillates and Mission michig is because is the prices have bottomed out so much that at this point it’s too expensive to it’s more expensive to make the distill it than that distillate is worth so you’re losing money wow and so the only way to be able to make this distill it and not you know lose the house is to I mean I don’t know if cheating is the right word but uh you basically you want filler of some sort and hemp derived thca is a lot cheaper then um say Delta 9 you know isolate right primarily because hemp producers don’t have the same they don’t have the same overhead they don’t have the same level regulation and because of the farm bill you can just import it from another state then you take that you mix it with some Delta 9 THC or or you process the thca uh through a carboxy which is did I pronounce that right well if you get the word you know whether or not did so carbox basically you’re using heat to transform the thca into Delta 9 yeah I think you only missed one syllable there decarbox silation decarbox yes thank you yep um yeah so that that converts I mean that’s another reason why thca flour which you can often find in states where they don’t have regulated markets um are basically like the same thing as if you get a pre-roll at a uh regulated store it’s it’s all thca I’m rolling up some right now yeah yeah I mean it’s all thca but once you light it up that flame into Delta 9 bingo bingo now the the issue with Michigan is the state is one of the few states that actually considers thca to be the same as THC when it’s determining whether or not you need a cannabis license right now for background and sorry if I just cut you off and you were about to say it but isn’t that what what you mean by that is that they do that decarb formula so even if you say it’s this percentage thca they run it through the decarb formula which is like the thca times 877 the conversion rate equals Delta 9 THC is that what they do or uh I don’t even think they do that much I don’t think they even worry about a conversion rate so okay basic you know you know they’re looking at that 0.3% threshold as to whether or not it you know counts as legal weed and and again that threshold comes from the 20 uh 18 farm bill right which as I’m sure a lot of a lot of you guys know essentially legalized hemp federally it removed hemp so long as that product has less than 0.3% in terms of total dry weight it removes that from the Controlled Substances Act and so that’s why you can now walk into you know liquor stores and find chich and Chong Seltzer with THC because the total the milligrams are low enough that it’s under that threshold yeah now to the point you started with um like you said I don’t know if we call it cheating or sourcing ingeniously or ingenu whatever um but to your point it’s like there’s been this abundance of Supply as a result of this 2018 farm bill and because as you said or as I think we’ve sort of established there really is no difference so what some people are doing is like hey let’s allegedly what some people are doing is like hey let’s grab this hemp from another state and let’s just put it in our cannabis product because it’s molecular molecularly the same right so yeah and and and some states you know will allow that or at least they haven’t figured out how to ban it yet that’s I think that’s that’s a big thing slowing down a lot of the the Banning or regulation of it it’s just you need some lawmakers who understand the science of it I mean and I study this and I barely do so yeah you know stuff uh and the other situation is you have markets like Oregon and Colorado and California that become so oversaturated with supplies or with Supply that the Growers you know the cultivators are kind of screwed they they have all this abundance of weed they can’t get rid of um some of them realize well wait a minute if I just grow this and say it’s hemp I don’t have to put it into you know metric or biot track and I can just call it hemp turn it into thca and I can ship it out out of the state right to your point if people want to do some Googling like one of the largest operators in California I don’t Maybe I’m Wrong on saying whe they’re one of the largest but let’s just say they’re very well known how about that uh glass house I was going to say glass house yeah yeah they’ve they’ve said into it yeah they could be transitioning so I think to your point because I think glass house is received allegations or at least like you just said not even to make it about a company California there’s been a lot of allegations about a surplus and product people backdooring it and now you can just say it’s hemp right and you can legally back it’s true it’s true and I will say with glass house Brands if if you’re at all familiar with Catalyst which is a brand of a chain of dispensaries in California and they and you know the head of that company Elliot Lewis if you’re familiar with him you know all about his beef with he’s the Whiteboard guy if anybody he’s the Whiteboard guy so he’s in front of the Whiteboard anyways yeah so you know he certainly has some claims about uh glass house but we’ll leave it at that yeah yeah but you know it’s like you know the kind of the point let’s setting those claims aside you know now it’s like if they do hemp if anybody leans into hemp again not just to make it about glass house they are able to they’re realizing they’re able to leverage um all the benefits of hemp I mean even big companies like Cur Lea uh I don’t even mean to say are doing it now they’re kind of relaunching their hemp program because they’ve been running a a hemp uh you know Marketplace for a while Wana one of the mo I would say one of the most well-known cannabis Brands like people that don’t even use cannabis Wana and they’re like oh those are the gummies right right they’re they’re doing hemp gummies now so yeah yeah you’ve got uh you know GT is is looking into like some licensing deals with hemp um cookies got into uh hemp uh steezy I think I’m pronouncing that there’s three eyes what am I supposed to do yeah yeah yeah I think you’re right that so no it’s more and more a lot of msos are kind of looking at hemp as an option and you know I I I went to a conference uh like a little over a year ago and there was a panel on marketing and so even Beyond we talk about you know over Supply and you know hemp um some companies or maybe this is you know them rationalizing they look at the hemp Market as a way to create you know to bring their brand outside of the you know 24 states that allow adult use right I mean you can find cookies all over Florida and that’s just a medical Market yeah yeah exactly exactly and you know like that’s that’s kind of where I think this is a SM move because I actually feel like a lot of people know cookies all over the United States that’s another one that’s become almost synonymous with cannabis like you see cookies and you don’t think you know Cookie Monster or anything you think cannabis brand um and I think they benefited off of the fact that I don’t know about you Zach it’s like it’s not like they did anything wrong the brand didn’t do anything wrong but you could go to like a local smoke shop and they’d be selling empty cookies bags for people to fill up so like they were benefiting off of their brand just being out all the time even if they weren’t doing it themselves you get what I’m saying yeah oh no they they totally were I mean that’s that’s a big part of the gray Market shops like what was going on uh New York City for a long time this is another thing I did for grown in actually I went to New York City and was like looking at all those before that news blew up and you would have all these shops with these nice myar bags with of like brand you recognize like Skittles or runs but all of those bags are just like knockoff bags like you can go on like Alibaba find a 10 count of myar bags that’s designed to look just like these known Brands and the only like clue is at the bottom of it where you know say runs would have an Instagram address so you can go to their site they have a a deliberately misspelled Instagram address like you’re gonna Factory right right yeah so you know just back to a point that you made earlier um Illinois is a state that has in the past allowed for hemp rived canabo to be used in extracted uh products so like Edibles Vapes but I know that something like that I think I read doesn’t really fly in Missouri so to your point there are seems like there are a patchwork just like with all these cannabis laws right there’s a patchwork of what you are and are not allowed to do um with the plant so yeah and you know part of it with with this farm bill that allows it there’s a little bit of um uh slack in that bill that allows State Regulators to kind of add their own rules on top as long as it’s not can’t remember uh if it sometimes that use as an argument as to whether or not a ban is legitimate but it seems like a rule like what Michigan has is specific enough that it doesn’t you know run a foul of any sort of court rulings yeah and just that it you know considers thca the same as THC and if you have you know even if it’s hemp derived it’s got to come from a licensed Michigan producer and it’s got to be tracked I mean those are the two big things got to come from in state it’s got to be in in the case of Michigan metric yeah yeah it’s super interesting to see that they seem to have not only solved this problem but in I just read headlines and I’m not trying to take us on too much of a tangent but that Michigan is like the number one cannabis Market in the nation right now um you know so not only have they seemingly solved this issue like you don’t hear about um hemp shops like you do here in Illinois or in Florida or or whatever like you don’t hear about that in Michigan because like you say it’s just not going on so not only have they solved that issue but they’ve solved the issue it seems like from a consumer perspective where there’s not a huge gray Market you know people are choosing to buy legal it’s kind of crazy to see what Michigan is doing you know yeah I mean anecdotally I’ve heard Michigan so you know what Michigan experienced as you know is they they kind of blew up a little too fast mhm and one thing one thing that kind of contributed to that is when it came to licensing and cultivation licensing Michigan allowed Growers to basically stack licenses so if if the biggest license you can get from Michigan is one that allows 10,000 square feet of canopy you could stack that so if I want more than 10,000 I’ll put five licenses on there now I can grow 50,000 at my warehouse and so when that started just the fly blew up and I mean you can track the prices and just kind of see that downward uh downward slope there um and so as producers try to find ways to make money you know not only were they cutting corners or looking for say hemp drived icelet or whatever to kind of Pat out their offerings some of them also um I have heard you know often distillate would go out the back door because that’s another tricky thing to track you know even if you’re doing it through metric there’s no exact formula for exactly how much distill it comes from say a pound of plant it just it varies yeah so you have a lot of Growers who are saying oh look I got really lucky this time yeah well it’s crazy to hear that disit is almost not even profitable to make in Michigan meanwhile I believe distate is going like and I don’t even know what the going rate is but people will say this as if it’s a shocking number they’ll say distl it’s going for like $10,000 a leader and I’m like wow that’s pretty expensive but I don’t have really a gauge I don’t usually buy distill it by the leader so I don’t know like I I know that’s that’s kind of one of the the tricky metrics there yeah yeah so but but I heard like comparatively to Michigan like I I believe it was like a thousand a liter 2,000 a liter maybe so that’s where you start to get and again I’m going off the top of my head folks you should Google those numbers to be sure um but um anyways yeah good background good uh kind of discussion on how other states do this so um just to round out you know this this story so um it sounds like according to the cra’s complaint they accepted a shipment of over 50,000 GRS of isolate um and it was from Oregon like you said and so what’s what has s what has happened since you know the CRA has brought forth these uh allegations like where where do we stand right now well as far as this particular case these uh so the complaints um if it’s in my story say if it I wonder if it was mid August when the complaint came out but basically once the complaint was filed that’s the first step for enforcement that Michigan does and at that point uh one love Labs had 21 days to request a uh hearing um typically there is a hearing anyway but basically that hearing will determine whether or not any disciplinary actions will be taken um so I I don’t know how far Michigan’s going to go with this particular uh processor um you know after their inspection so you know this all came back there there was this all started with with an inspection you know C inspectors came uh checked out the facility they found 10 buckets just full of this thca distillate which is supposed to be that 50,000 plus gram shipment they got um that sounds to me from the complaint like they had a lot of uh cooperation from the staff there so you know they got the invoice they saw it came from Oregon they got a COA kind of determined that there was at least enough THC or thca content to trigger the you know regulatory rule in Michigan um they sent they you know some of their counts included improper testing you know so everything has to be tested entered into metric all that stuff and apparently they had only started mixing their um uh they they produced some THC distillate inhouse so they mixed that in so they can and I guess they were going to process the thca I don’t know exactly what kind of process they were planning to use with this stuff but you know they’ only started us you know they’ only opened one of the 10 buckets and according to this they got samples from all 10 to get tested and then before those results came back they just shipped it all back to Oregon so I’m guessing they were like oh you busted us fine we’ll send it back yeah but I mean that’s that’s kind of where it’s standing I’m not sure um I’d have to double check see when the hearing was uh to see what happened but um you know this is something they’re they’re looking at they a few months before the CRA went to one love labs they found a similar situation at uh Sky laabs which is another Michigan processor where at that one there was a previous story that that we wrote one of my fellow reporters actually wrote it Maria brosen and she uh she yeah there it is um so in this case it came from Colorado and it had a a testing COA from California interesting and so to be sure I am understand in like roughly what the technique is usually employed is like these people like you say dist it’s so plentiful that it’s almost not even profitable to make it but there’s also like wiggle room because of these uh How seed to sale works so what they’re doing or what they may be doing is kind of taking advantage of that wiggle room adding some hemp in there because it’s like where did it come from and then all of a sudden they have more product and they didn’t have to pay as much to make it right is that it right I mean you don’t necessarily have to enter into metric uh how much profit you’re making off of this I mean maybe there’s enough data to like figure that out but you know basically it’s what it is is you’re you’re ostensibly claiming that this is a more expensive product than it is because you got cheap him yeah yeah your inputs were cheaper um this is interesting and you know one of the things that I’ve always said because again this is going on in Illinois you know some companies even listed like actually GTI if you look on the back of their Incredibles in Illinois I’ve posted this on my social media you’ll see the biotrack label and you’ll see on the ingredients right to the left of that biotrack label they list imp derived extract like and that they’re not alone uh many people do that in Illinois from what I understand like most infused Edibles if they’re not made with remediated products they’re made with hemp derived canids and so it’s like you know they’re not they’re not taking their premium nugs out of their canopy and using that for their Edibles like they’re it’s it’s actually you know and it’s important to add this context I think somebody that’s in cultivation science made a really interesting point because when you talk about this the way that I’m talking about it a lot of people can think like oh all that’s in Edibles is trash no that’s not what I’m actually saying I’m I’m just trying to be factual about it but what’s important to point out is like your tomato paste your tomato sauce your different like tomato based products I’m just using Tomatoes as an example this can actually be applied to most anything that we make products from but tomatoes are an easy example they’re not making those products using the beautiful tomatoes that are often on display for you that you buy for slicing in fact most of those products ketchup all that stuff are made using the ones that aren’t they don’t want to have on the Shelf so like again this isn’t some I just wanted to add that important context I don’t want to be like oh the devious cannabis people you know what I mean like they’re just doing probably something they learned from other Industries they’ve worked in you know it’s really no absolutely I mean and with the with with these you know canabo products whether they’re hemp drived or not you know like say the isolate um you’re making that by stripping away everything except the actual thca you’re getting rid of the Turpin you’re getting rid of the biomass and everything so even if it’s Shake you’re still getting down to that pure THC out of it maybe it takes more biomass than if you had a premium nug I don’t know but that’s a different different situation I feel like different different conversation I like to say even if it’s hemp too you know you said even if it’s Shake but even if it’s hemp you know if you derive that from the plant um obviously we can get into the Nuance of like when you derive CBD and then convert it to THC that’s different I’m talking about like right you know um but anyways that’s just a you know what what really comes out of all of this and I’m glad we like got into this part of it is like it’s interesting I think in this story that you wrote some of the batches that they cooked uh correct me if from I’m wrong here some of the batches that they prepared did fail testing um yeah so the first the first sample they made mixing their inhouse with this isolate still um failed for I believe solvin yeah yeah I’m and so one thing that I was wondering and I don’t know what the case was I I almost wonder if maybe uh this company maybe they had a bad batch of uh distillate that they made yeah they knew it couldn’t pass a test and so they thought well maybe if we dilute it we can get past this test yeah I mean that’s a possibility but I’m just speculating I have no idea if that’s what was going on but I mean that could be another scenario where a processor caners you know mixing something in yeah I get your point there um and you know Michigan’s not the only state that has this going on uh Missouri has been trying to deal with this as well they they have what they call an inversion problem it’s about to ask you about that and I I guess yeah to kind of ask you I want to give you more space on Missouri because I’ve actually heard about that from uh I think comic artist box Brown made a comic on that conversion case Prett sure he has yeah um so shout out to them check them out if you haven’t folks but uh I guess yeah asking kind of in with all states you know one of the things I’ve been asking people about this is like I mean as long as it passes what’s the issue like if it if it passes State Testing um that’s the interesting part of this conversation that I feel like we’re not having because it’s like I said it’s it is happening in um States like Illinois I’m I’m racking my brain right now I cannot think of other ones off the top of my head I think Oregon used to have something where you could do I could be wrong where you could do stuff with him but now maybe you can’t um but my point is like if these products can pass testing it’s like especially in the case of Illinois where we say we have the most stringent testing standards in the nation it’s like let them let him sell it if it if it passes right yeah yeah and when you’re dealing with something as pure as isolate um you know once you convert that thca to delta9 it’s almost impossible to tell the difference yeah so what’s so Missouri the the same thing’s happening and uh can you give me the highlights yeah so the the big uh news item from Missouri would be Delta extractions Delta extractions is a big company uh I believe they’re based in Missouri it’s it’s been a while since I wrote about it I think about a year but what was happening is you had this one company that was uh making all of the or not all but a ton of the isolate and distillate that was being used by other Missouri companies to make their finished products and then it turned out Delta extractions was getting a bunch of their material from uh Colorado and it was hemp and I don’t know if that was if that was that specific you know reason was why Missouri was cracking down on it but basically uh Missouri had a bunch of these huge recalls preceding them shutting down Delta extractions for basically importing this H dve product gotcha yeah people want about that when inversion became uh the term we were seeing because you know everything you hear about with new adult use markets is the problem is diversion right like we want to make sure that’s why we got to track it so now inversion means it’s coming in that’s so interesting that’s so interesting especially as some states literally have laws on the book for diversion when that becomes legal you know California and Oregon I believe both do um for export as they would call it um so yeah folks want to read that I’ll I’ll have this Linked In the show notes uh looks like your story from about 12 months ago the headline if you’re trying to Google it is Missouri’s cannabis regulator faces audit amid product inversion crisis and it’s on news. crbm monitor.com so well Zach um what’s that the other story that you said you recently wrote I know that we had just planned to talk about hemp but if you um if you want to talk talk about your recent story it’s about Minnesota oh yeah um this is kind of a very standard type of article that we tend to do for uh for crb uh this is just waiting for the adult use uh licensing going on so right now in Minnesota as you know they they have legalized adult use they’ve kind of put together the regulations that will govern the market for adult use which you know always has to come in between legalization and first sales um right now in the State uh they actually have a lot of hemp um they got some news I mean they were in the news a bunch a couple years ago when some lawmakers passed a bill that allowed hemp uh Edibles and uh beverages into the market and so that’s that’s why now if you you know check out a lot of the different hemp beverages that are available Nationwide a bunch of them originally came from Minnesota oh yeah they kind of got a leg up on the on some of the they like codified the farm bill at the state level isn’t that the right way of saying it yeah yeah that’s that’s super cool and primarily for Edibles and beverages that’s right right um so right now there are only two operators in Minnesota you’ve got GTI and you’ve got Viro Health know why I’m looking at my notes Here you go and so they they’re medical operators and between the two of them they have 15 dispensaries and that’s it that’s that’s the legal Market for cannabis in the state um what’s going to happen is you’re going to get 217 new licenses for adult use and what Minnesota is doing is they were giving the first shot at the market to social Equity applies you know every state defines it differently for Minnesota they’re doing it um you know your social Equity applicant if uh you’re a veteran um you’ve got a cannabis related uh arrest record or conviction record or if you are related to someone who has or you know basically if someone in your family has uh directly uh they also give you status based on uh where you live if you spent about five years living in an area disproportionately impacted uh by the War on Drugs um essentially and I guess they had over 1,800 uh applications in there and so the state is now just going through those 1,00 applications giving them final you know vetting them making sure they have all the info they need and then they’ll be entered into a lottery for 217 wow now now some of the reporting you may have seen about Minnesota is that it’s for 282 licenses and the reason for that discrepancy with the numbers is the wholesale licenses the transporter licenses and the testing lab licenses um there were fewer applications than available uh licenses interesting so for some reason they were going to give away say 50 or award 50 testing licenses I don’t know why that number was so big I I don’t know if it was a typo or what but um only five applied so right there is a difference of 45 gotcha so out of these 1,800 they can only get one license uh I don’t know if there is I don’t know that there is a rule preventing one operator from getting say a retail and a processor okay yeah gotcha yeah oh yeah and I did see that later on you actually had the different like the breakdown of the different licenses so yeah yeah 282 licenses broken up into nine different types 100 micro businesses 25 meso businesses I’ve never heard that term I love that term yeah that that was a new one so a micro business can basically uh at one location grow and sell okay right a Meto business can they have I’m not sure exactly what the figures are but they’re owed a little more room to grow so a little larger canopy and they can sell from three different locations wait say that again they can grow so micro business in one location they can have a grow site and they can sell on site so you know like you go to say a brewery where they’ll sell you be around site a Meto business is allowed to have um three retail locations so basically some satellite locations very interesting but the scale keeps it from being like a regular producer or seller whatever gotcha and then you got your 13 cultivators six manufacturers 38 retailers 20 wholesalers 20 Transporters 50 testing facilities and 10 delivery services that’s cool they’ll have delivery yeah looks like delivery applications account for 8.5% retailers micro in Meto businesses account for about 85% of all applications very interesting yeah wow this is this is going to be cool and so they are also going to be a state that is launching cannabis adult use cannabis they’ve codified the farm bill or they’ve found some way of addressing it let’s just say in this case they’ve codified it um it’s very interesting you know and you got to wonder if that’s the way states do it going forward as you said earlier it’s like these states have been grappling with how to do it in fact Illinois we just went through our uh you know swinging in a Miss on a hemp ban and um the way they were kind of structuring it was just that if you sell cannabis at all you know like any cannaboid you must be uh licensed under the Cannabis regulation and Tax Act which I think would have actually worked because it’s similar to uh what Michigan did a notable thing that I thought was interesting was that we I don’t think we would ban online sales uh the legislator was asked about that and from what I’ve heard it’s like it’s this idea that you can regulate your interstate commerce hold on a second am I saying that right like the Commerce within your state um but you cannot make a federally legal commodity illegal for like somebody to buy uh from another state and I think that’s why our lawmakers weren’t going to touch that is that what you were talking about earlier where they struggle like how to do it with the or were you referring to maybe something different yeah I mean that that certainly is I mean it’s definitely a challenge I mean just look at at the Michigan case they don’t speak at all to taking any sort of action against this company in Oran technically right I guess I don’t know if that counts as Oregon violating any rules I mean they weren’t a licensed producer in Michigan and they don’t have a uh you know the complaint noted this they also lacked a Michigan Industrial Hemp license see that’s what I was about to say if you could see the gears turn and I was like you know if somebody in Illinois did something like that like there are I would say in the the way in which they would be punished in Illinois at least obviously not Oregon but just to you know there’s got to be some similarities here um it says in Illinois that you can’t sell hemp especially quantities like that but to another hemp lensey and it doesn’t have to be like Illinois hemp licy just somebody else that’s licensed under a state program uh for hemp obviously that gets a little shaky though because it’s like some states don’t even have that you know um I mean you know I I’m not surprised that that states would be less inclined to worry about product leaving their state right yeah yeah um but anyways yeah that’s sounds like we both aren’t aren’t sure exactly on that so um but it’s a interesting you know kind of concept and story again just my lame and understanding of it I believe that if they tried to ban like online sales that would be violating the dormant Commerce Clause again that’s an arm I’m not a legal professional at all people Google that yeah so yeah that’s definitely what the concern is and there’s a lot of concern about how the dormant Commerce Clause applies to cannabis in a lot of different ways there’s there’s a case going on right now out of Massachusetts involving uh can of Provisions which is based out of Massachusetts as well as verono which you know is a big MSO yeah and they are attempting to argue that the dormant Commerce Clause should allow cannabis companies to move product across state lines that’s kind of a bold assertion um but one of the foundations of their case is that this was a similar case was tried um I think 15 20 years ago uh in terms of medical cannabis and at the time I believe it went up to uh the Supreme Court and at the time it was rulle the ruling or the argument was made that or let me backtrack the um the opinion that came down in this case essentially said that well since there aren’t that many states that have adopted this medical uh cannabis Market it’s hard to make the case that this is an acceptable business pra practice federally and so now what in this new lawsuit what they’re saying is well it’s a lot has changed in that time we’ve got what 24 States that’s legal that have legalized adult use uh is 37 that have done medical most basically Most states have at this point at least have medical and so they’re saying well now it is clearly accepted and I think you need to reconsider this um they’re hoping the you know Plaines are hoping they get to Supreme the Supreme Court on this but yeah that’ll be a dormant Commerce Clause um case and I have a theory I suspect that this lawsuit was filed in Massachusetts intentionally because Massachusetts is within the first circuit uh in terms of appeals so in federal court you go to Federal Court let’s say you lose your case the next level is you know the next thing you can do is appeal and you appeal it to the Circuit then after the circuit is Supreme Court those are your three steps now the first circuit covers Massachusetts um believe it’s massachus Vermont New Hampshire Maine Rhode Island and Puerto Rico for some reason and there was a case a few years back in out of Maine where um I think it was Theory Wellness I’m pulling names out of my ass from like three years ago but uh basically a main based uh medical cannabis provider wanted to sell to a larger MSL but Maine has a require requirement residency requirement so if you own a medical cannabis company you must live in Maine obviously an MSO does not so they they sued about you know over this Rule and it eventually went to the first circuit where the first circuit ruled that as per the dormant Commerce Clause The Residency requirement is unconstitutional and so their argument was um that it’s the investment dollars not the Cannabis itself that’s going over state lines and that is allowed and so there’s at least some precedence that something at least you know remotely or adjacent to you know cannabis has already been found by the Supreme or not Supreme Court but by the Circuit Court to be in violation of dormant Commerce Clause so maybe that’ll apply other places you know there’s a there’s a lawyer out of um New York uh not New York California I think the LA area who has uh filed lawsuits in a bunch of parts of the country challenging their residency requirement literally based on this argument they they shut down or they halted temporarily Licensing in New York when they were trying to get off the ground just on the same exact issue wow that’s interesting um you brought up something that is like kind of making me think right now because yeah you’re like the point that you made about the the cash okay so the weed doesn’t leave the state but the cash certainly does not only does it leave the state but maybe I’m a little wrong wrong on this I don’t mean to jump to conclusions but it leaves the country in terms of let me like try to rationalize what I just said there like all these people most of these companies rather are operating on the Canadian Stock Exchange so I don’t mean to you maybe leing leaving the country isn’t exactly the right term but the point is the money’s flowing not just in Massachusetts or wherever State you know so it’s interesting yeah I mean a lot of them are Incorporated in Canada just so they can primarily get on the stock exchange up there that’s really what that is about but I mean even then it’s a question of you know uh umbrella companies right so like say verono like we’re talking about there’s one company verono that’s the national company um I think it’s that also is based out of Canada as well and then they own State companies so it’s like not verono it’s verono of New York or verono of Virginia you know those are I’m just those are random names but basically it’s how they often do it yeah yeah makes sense and some companies you know don’t even use like the same name you know um right sometimes they use the same name sometimes they don’t sometimes they acquire other companies and just leave those other companies names right it’s really confusing sometimes when you find that you’re like what is this yeah there was there was there’s one instance of uh in Virginia where it was one company that was going to be transferred to medmen as part of some like settlement when a deal like died before medmen itself died uh but the medmen name was still attached to it and then a third company is now like now owns it that isn’t medmen so it’s like verono owns like medmen from like GTI or something like that that’s funny that’s yeah so interesting well um is it mainly cannabis that you cover I didn’t even think to ask you that until just now like M now I mean I I spent a lot of time covering lots of different stuff uh in the Boston area primarily I’ve done hyper local news you know real estate development in the downtown areas like you know this 200 story building is gonna piss off the residents because it’ll make things windier you know that kind of stuff sure um I cover the courts for courthouse news for about five years um so that’s also that really helps when it comes to me you know covering a lot of these court cases in cannabis um mostly like nowadays I mostly write about cannabis um I’m starting to do a little more um you know I got a story that’s completely not cannabis related that I’m working on uh from Massachusetts on behalf of the Boston Institute for nonprofit journalism um I’ll let you know more of that when I have more of a story to tell yeah um and yeah so you know I mentioned I no longer live in New England uh I you know two months ago I moved uh just out outside of Nashville Tennessee so I’m now in the Bizarro world of legal weed yeah where there’s no legal medical here there’s no legal adult use but there are shops that call themselves dispensaries where I can get a $30 e of thca flower yeah how’s that been do you shop for it or uh a little bit um I haven’t had to shop a whole lot lately you know it’s it’s been two months but um I don’t know I must have screwed something up when I was moving and somehow some stuff came with me where I haven’t felt the need to go buy anything so I don’t know what happened there I must have been lucky yeah yeah um but I mean there there there’s shops here I mean it’s all over the place there’s there’s gas station products like there’s Vapes with eight different letters on them like TC V th HC o HHH some [ __ ] uh are you seeing anything though that you you know cuz what’s crazy that I’ve noticed is when go into the smoke shops occasionally to get my papers or whatever um first of all I just have to say that when weed was going to be legalized it’s a light bulb went off the other day I was thinking about it and I was like you know what I remember talking to a dude in the smoke shop and we were thinking about weed legalization and I was like man won’t it be cool when I can just buy weed from you when I come here to get papers and stuff that’s that is a cool idea you know now what you often see to your point is just these like sketchy Brands you’ve never heard of but what I’m starting to see and this is what I wanted to ask you about is Brands I’ve heard of I’m like they sell those in the dispensaries like I saw Incredibles the other day by GTI like in the Smoke Shop um and I looked at it it had the GTI Illinois hemp license number on it and everything I posted it on social media I haven’t been able to dig into it but um other people are certainly seeing it in their smoke shops as well so it’s not it’s by herb which is a pretty well-known uh hemp operator they seem to have gotten into a partnership I don’t know uh like I said you folks look into that to to find the finer details but um I guess what I’m asking is when you go into these stores do you ever nowadays see something you recognize I mean you mentioned chich and chongs earlier um yeah I mean the chich and Chong drinks you know I’ll see in liquor stores and I’ll see a handful of ones like um uh canant trip I’ll see okay yeah yeah um remember which one I bought recently there’s some there’s some decent beverages that I that I’ve liked here and that’s that’s another thing is a lot of these states with regulated cannabis there’s at least some rule about the number of milligrams in these beverages so like uh Connecticut Connecticut tried to ban outside out of state hemp uh or at least make it so that if you have a hemp product in Connecticut it’s got to be uh registered and tracked just like THC products and you know essentially killed a bunch of businesses that were specializing into cvd yeah but they I think they had to come up with some sort of compromise for beverages so now those are allowed and they just they’re capped I think it’s like four milligrams something weak like that but in these unregulated states I can spend eight bucks for a can that has you know 50 milligrams yeah dude I I was actually gonna start this podcast off I’ve one of uh this company in Illinois that has an Illinois cannabis license they also got a hemp license the River Bluff if people want to look into them River collective.com um you can just buy their drinks online and you have 50 milligrams of can I mean they have lower dose ones if you want them lower dose cuz some people do but I like you said I like the 50 milligram a can and honestly like I think actually 50 milligram a can is fine even 25 would be okay because then it’s like you would drink throughout the night you know what I mean just like your friends might be doing because that that’s one thing I’ll drink you know three of these and I’m like damn son I’m feeling good well that’s I mean that’s the problem too is we’re working with tolerance right like yeah yeah you know I I’m not gonna if I have a five milligram you know drink I’m I may or may not feel it I don’t know but I think one of the other ideas with this is they’re trying to open up you know these brands are trying to open up markets from folks who maybe aren’t as open to cannabis you know so it’s part of it is normalizing it so you got to have some of these lower dosages so you know my mother doesn’t like freak out the one time she tried to sip right well and that’s what I love is that yeah they do not only the company that I just mentioned but that most people are going for uh lower doed Beverages and yeah exactly like I got uh several people I go to this thing every week and people they’ll drink alcohol and they’ll smoke cigars but whenever I step out back to smoke weed or whatever they ain’t trying to join me you know so like I brought these drinks and I was like hey guys just saying put it in in the community fridge get this flavor and this flavor they’re 4 milligrams can sip on it try it and you know what uh three people Tried Him the first night and then I came back a few weeks later and it looked like others had had had some so it’s like and what I noticed by somebody that did try it as you just said it was so much more normal cuz they had been s you know they grew up sipping on alcohol and they they know how to like titrate themselves that way they don’t know what a small hit is you know like it’s hard for people right so like when you Sip and kind of go off your feeling like like you say I just think it’s a great way to introduce normal people to the product yeah yeah definitely um though my grandma tried it go on the other one nice you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah totally what you say that you’re not gonna knock if uh H in the other direction though you know it’s good to have lower dosage but I’m definitely happy we have the higher dosage yeah dude I’m all about the higher dosage like uh I went to I went you know another story I did for a gr in a while ago was after New York legalized can but before they launched their Market there was uh a handful of um places on reservations that opened up their own Cannabis shops basically the you know the the reservations are sovereign they’re essentially Sovereign but it’s kind of like this they agree to like adhere by most State rules and laws but they’re allowed to do things like sell weed without it being an issue and so you know I had heard there was there had been this explosion of businesses and so this was uh this would have been fall of 2022 so I drove up to the uh St Regis Mohawk reservation um believe it’s also known as aaasne in uh in the Mohawk language um apologies if I [ __ ] that up but um the reservation is along the northern border of New York State and Canada and it actually straddles both sides so you can cross into Canada without going through any sort of uh you know Border guard checkpoint without a passport any of that um you can literally just go right over no issue and in Canada of course it’s federally legal and so there’s just an explosion of shops there and there’s one stretch of the highway highway 10 in New York that cuts across the reservation and it’s about 10 miles long um I might be wrong about the name of it being 10 but it’s definitely 10 miles long and I counted about 30 dispensaries along that one strip W it’s just packed and I like I found a shop on the Canada side of the reservation where there was a juice bar inside this dispensary and I spent maybe five bucks uh five bucks Canadian so like four bucks uh got like a 32 ounce mixed drink um like a cherry sweet like drink no alcohol but you can pick the dosage in there and you can pick from like as low as 25 milligrams to up to I think you go as high as a thousand wow nice see that would be cool and I I end up going uh uh up to a 100 and that was that was good for me but that was that was quite delicious yeah but you know you bring back like a bottle of a thousand that’s like bringing back some moonshine you know just pour a little bit in the drink every once in a while see see moonshine that’s that’s a little more the language of where I’m at now in Tennessee uhhuh there you go yeah speak the language yeah um so wait are you telling me that uh if I go to this reservation in New York I can technically cross the border without using my passport you can like you can’t leave obviously and get into Canada probably but it’s it’s trickier to do it with a car okay I tried to do it with a car and wasn’t able to find a path but there’s the St Lawrence River you can get across that on a boat and one thing that was interesting is I went to two different dispensaries that are literally on the water and they had Jetties wow little docks and there was well one had a completed dock the other was building it and I just walked in there and I said oh hey I no you’re building that dock is that so you can just bring in a weed from Canada just over a boat they said well yeah like that’s exactly why I’m doing that they they’re you know they’re not even hiding it that is so cool man so like did like did you take your car on a boat or did you just get on a boat I didn’t get on the boat to cross the river but okay it’s already Canada when you’re on that side m I just couldn’t get from that part of Canada to you know the rest of Canada I understand I understand what you’re saying very interesting that is so cool did you uh so you said you reported on this right it was for what Outlet was cool cool I’ll have to try to find that story and uh uh link it um so that sounds super cool did you take any pictures or anything uh yeah I definitely did or if you have something I can make it so that you can share your screen let’s see it actually ended up being a two-parter but this was the I’m GNA send you in the chat here thank you yeah that sounds so cool so they’re since they’re Sovereign they kind of operate Sovereign of New York and Canada correct wow yeah so so there’s a link to the first one and yeah that’s cool all right I’ll share my screen for folks that want to find the story what were you about to say Zach oh I I said there was actually something interesting there too also about uh you know say rules and uh sovereignty is there are two different authorities that cannabis operators kind of refer to and they say if they’re allowed to operate there’s the accepted authority of the yeah that’s the canabar that’s it right there wow so you’re saying the accepted Authority um yeah so they have the or elected Authority on the reservation and when I visited they had approved I think 10 11 different license holders and that’s it now historically there are three sets of what are called long houses which is like real old school tribal like governance and so there was a number of shops I went to where they were like no the long housee says we’re good and so there’s a conflict as to who ultimately has to approve these businesses but they’re already open interesting man I love it it’s is a cool time we’re living in dude isn’t it like that is that part of I mean it sounds like you consume as well but that’s got to be part of why you cover cannabis right just because it’s actually a really fun it’s like a break from the madness topic you know low stakes most times yeah I mean it it is it’s something that uh um I didn’t I didn’t seek it out you know I was I was between jobs and grown in I saw that they were hiring someone and I said like well hey I smoke enough weed to at least know what it is oh yeah and so I you know I I applied and I’ve I’ve long been trying to you know get into business reporting um I feel like there’s not enough critical eyes in business reporting yeah you know I’m not always a pro uh Pro business but you know and not trying to also not trying to report from uh you know from a soap box but you know it’s how it is sure and kind of the way I’ve always looked at a cannabis reporting is you often I often see reporting broken down into like basically two camps in terms of the reporters you’ve got a lot of folks who are really talented excellent seasoned business reporters who may or may not have much experience at all with weed they don’t necessarily know the culture and then you’ve got other folks who are you know potheads they know the culture in and out but they’re just they’re not a Seasons when it comes to actual business reporting and so that and It suffers and so I I always try to kind of like straddle those two you know straddle that line the then diagram of that well that’s where I’m coming from you know sometimes like I just had somebody reach out to me the other day and they were like aren’t aren’t you an investigative journalist I was like whoa whoa whoa I was like no I I mean I I always try to bring it down a Peg and say like I literally I bought this microphone you know um weed was about to be legal in Illinois I wanted to start a podcast it’s like pretty easy to do that folks like um you know and that’s that’s really all it is I have no like uh credentials by any means as far as reporting goes um and I just talk about you know what I what I see and I oftentimes Loop in a lot of actual reporters like yourself and you know some of your uh former colleagues like Mike fuche Brad spearson they helped a lot over the years um you know people from the Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune so I did definitely try to bring in real journalists but I always try to like to your point you know not to get stuck in my own story but to your point I think like sometimes I kind of get frustrated because like yeah people look at me as a journalist but I don’t have exactly what you just said like I’m an advocate I would say I’m an advocate that’s like a accurate description um but to say like journalists like I don’t have those like foundations like you have or others have or they know you know they know where how things move through the system and such if if you TR follow me you know yeah yeah no it’s definitely useful useful to be able to follow those threads right yeah because and you know but the here’s the thing though I will say you know just as a parting thought to this this you know close out this Loop I’ve learned a lot about the political process through being and becoming like a passionate Advocate you know like before when people told me how a bill became a law it was just like whatever but now that it’s like it’s like important and I know like how this could you know we could move policy it’s like wow this this is really fascinating you’re no longer going back and referring to Schoolhouse Rocks on that one yeah exactly so but anyways man um I digress it was really fun to talk with you today um abut I really enjoyed our time um folks check out the show notes um I’ll have Zach’s uh social media the stories we discussed today um and anything else that I can think of that I referenced during the show in the show notes um Zach any parting thoughts um no I I think I think we got it I think uh we’s not going anywhere but hemp definitely isn’t isn’t going anywhere it’s it’s grown too big to fail at this point yeah that’ll be that’ll for sure be interest uh interesting to watch and I look forward to maybe I’m sure the next time we connect we’ll have more H stuff to talk about in cannabis of course right so all right well folks I hope you found as much value in this conversation as I did Zach once again it was a pleasure um thank you again and uh folks we’ll see you in the next episode take care
The Cole Memo 
Leave a comment