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Effective Advocacy Politics (ugh) Tech Criticism

Who You Gonna Trust?

Here in the US we’re all still picking our way out of the wreckage of the 2024 elections, and trying to collect enough shoulder blade bones to conduct a proper divination of the results, but Cooper Lund has already written a good piece on the dynamics of trust at play in the electorate, and I think he touched on several vital questions.

For those in the future who may read this, there a lot of theories and arguments on what drove Trump to a second victory (are young men to blame? inflation in the grocery cart? fear of trans athletes?) and I’m sure that many of them will be settled or proven by the time you read this. I don’t think it’s in dispute, however, that there is an increasing divide of trust, as Cooper describes it, and that it stretches across a variety of interrelated political issues and debates.

The media monoculture is dead, and it’s been replaced by a million talking heads that appear on your phone and tell you not to trust things. Not to trust your doctors, not to trust your teachers, not to trust the government. They appear on your phone no matter what you do because an algorithm has decided they’re the most likely thing to keep you watching so you can keep getting the ads. This constant buffeting of the psyche of each and every American by the winds of these forces has eroded them, and it’s taught us to no longer trust institutions, or each other. American minds are increasingly their own individual bedroom communities, paranoid and twisted, looking skeptically at the outside world.

…The Democratic Party is the party of institutions, the party of Good Governance. It’s the party of trusting other Americans to make good choices for you. There is very little that the Democrats can do to appeal to the Low-Trust voter, and you saw what that means for the future of our politics last night. I would go so far as to say that we’re seeing the effects of a realignment of what partisanship is. The GOP is the party of the perpetual outsider and the Low-Trust voter, the people calling for things to be torn down. The Democrats are the insiders, the institutionalists.

I’m a little more optimistic about reaching the Low-Trust people than Cooper is (more below!), but I have a couple scattered thoughts about the concept of “low-trust” people and movements, and a suggestion or two about how to operate in an environment when the consensus reality doesn’t hold the same sway as it may once have. Not that any of us have “bona fides” in this stuff, but I have a lot of experience with “Low Trust” people in a variety of contexts (my family, working in skeptical protest movements and spaces, roommates, etc). Hopefully my thoughts spark some ideas for you as well– this isn’t a “one guy’s solution” type of problem, we’re going to have to build out a sturdy communal practice for this kind of problem– it’s an “all of us” challenge.

  • Who I’m talking about: a non-comprehensive list. Low Trust people may doubt the consensus about any number of topics– climate change, nutrition, schooling, history, gender relations and gender roles, organizational management, psychology, family court, entertainment, biology. Many of these will have a charismatic influencer or two who spark interest in the topic, and then a community of people who float around in the FB group with a variety of comments. I think it’s actually kind of a fool’s errand to try find a common thread among the topics that a person departs from the mainline with, the answer is with the person themself (more on that in a bit)
  • Problem of technology. I think, as a grounding comment, it’s worth noting just how much of modern life is predicated on trust in the unseen, and how many products, processes, and events we enjoy that are the result of coordinated and unseen work. These are, to be clear, some of the great marvels of modernity, and very few of them are “hiding the ball” on how they are produced, but in their presentation and consumption, much of modernity appears as something to be taken on trust, and trust at a level that nears what some would call “faith.” It is into this kind of space that a lot of Low-Trust options can be presented to someone, and since the target person likely hasn’t much considered the issue, the Low-Trust option appears as a revelatory moment, and the target feels a swell of interest at getting “Behind the Curtain”.
    • A galaxy brain take I’ll throw here: wild theories arise around complex technologies and multi-agent processes, and have for awhile. For the longest time, the most complex technology was a state’s currency, which led to thousands of hare-brained ideas about how money “worked.”
  • A battle for authorities, rather than a battle for “reality”. While I think Cooper is correct to call this broad cohort of people ‘Low-Trust’, I think it a key point to underline: they actually have quite a bit of trust, it’s just in different places than our institutions– some trust their Scriptures the most, some trust a religious leader (almost always a man or men) the most, some trust “their own gut”, some trust an influencer they have a parasocial relationship with. What’s happened is that, on a subjective level, these people have opted out of putting academia/research/institutions on the throne of meaning, and retreated to another ruler.
  • Authority’s Not Here, Man. What I’m about to say may sound as a critique of the mainline liberal mindset, so I want to qualify this on the front end: I am your friend, and I’m on your side, and I’m not with the kooks. But in a world where institutions are losing the authority (for dumb/tech reasons), your claims that are based on said authority are going to suffer. Secular liberalism has a (benignly annoying) tendency to assume itself as being aligned with “reality”, and it assumes itself as self-evident in ways that are no longer going to maintain. Some of this assuming comes from good reasons– liberalism has opened itself up to adaptation and to further evidence as it proceeds through history, unlike orthodoxy. But part of what liberalism adapted to was the dominant institutions — to academia and education, to American empire and welfare capitalism– and each of those institutions’ names don’t ring quite as loudly in the Market/App Discourse Hellzone of the 2020s. So while you and I may be in accord with the findings of the global medical community, the CDC, your favorite academic science or economics poster, or any other traditional institution, those appeals are increasingly insufficient for people who can (and are encouraged to) just throw up a blanket form of doubt and say “nuh uh, I got someone on TikTok/Instagram who says otherwise!” to it. I’m not saying to give up asking “but what about reality?” or demanding evidence, but I’m suggesting that you stop expecting “reality” to hold the power you think it does, especially in audiences that don’t share your own rosy sense of trust in an institution.
  • There’s hope, though! I don’t think there’s any quick way to get a Low-Trust person back to an unquestioning acceptance of institutional consensus, but there are methods that some of us can adopt in our interactions with these people. The two parts I’ll suggest are: don’t allow the skeptic in your life to get off cheaply— they used a dime-store amount of skepticism to leave the mainline, demand that they interrogate their new authority (an influencer, a church, etc) too. Secondly: education and good-faith inquiry. I know that this sounds impossibly kumbaya, and naive, but I come to this position through years of experience– I don’t know any method that is more sturdy. Demanding them accept a mainline authority, or a new authority, is a bold ask, and one that won’t work if you don’t show the authority to be competent. If someone doubts vaccines, this might mean going on the journey of teaching a person the details of the science, and the methods used to establish what works. I fully understand how unfair, vexing, and tiring this suggestion can be– I wish it were different. In any case, I think one reason why these kinds of Low Trust communities persist is because many people who trust institutions get exasperated with skepticism and “give up” on the skeptic, and cede the person’s mind to whatever media sources they prefer. We have to be more persistent for these souls than their media influencers are, one way or the other.
  • Effective debunking. One of my favorite Alfred North Whitehead quotes is “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true…” I think this angers or frustrates a lot of well-meaning people, but I don’t know that many would dispute its truth (hah!) in this age. This is because our interest in a proposition is the vital tether to the question, more than truthfulness (there’s all kinds of true facts out there that none of us care about). This fact of “interestingness” should guide how we approach bullshit– simply saying “not true!” won’t work as well as we think. The art of debunking comes from de-fanging the interestingness in alternative theories. Whitehead concludes the quote with: “But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one,” and in that, I believe, lies the answer. Yeah, it would be super interesting if the world was actually run by a cabal of lizards, and yeah it would be super interesting if eating an all-meat diet made you look jacked and toned, but….they don’t.
  • Don’t Fear the Skeptic. Another one of my favorite quotes comes from George Santanaya: “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.” I think getting over the sputtering indignation at someone being skeptical of well-proven and established authorities is a good idea. Someone being cheaply skeptical, or selfishly skeptical, or stubbornly skeptical, they aren’t enemies to progress, they are pre-formed members of our group, waiting to be persuaded in. Something that the Low-Trust influencers all practice is a near veneration of their audience’s skepticism to the modern proposition. See also: Joe Rogan’s whole deal. Those of us who trust institutions need to be better at honoring that instinct, rather than scold it. Especially considering that the facts are on our side. We’re not the side that needs to demand unthinking acceptance of bold claims, the Low-Trust people are. We don’t need to fear someone’s skepticism, it’s honestly a cool chance for empirical reality to strut it’s stuff. Someone wondering about chemtrails is a potential future fan of atmospheric science or flight.
  • Further reading. I can’t think of a better person in the English-speaking world for debunking than Mick West, and I can’t recommend his work any more highly. Mick has spent decades politely and persistently debunking conspiracies on the Internet, and his techniques/rhetoric are second-to-none. West runs the sites Metabunk and ContrailScience, among his many projects. His Escaping the Rabbit Hole is my bible for interacting with conspiracy theorists.

(Housekeeping: Probably gonna start doing more political-ish blog posts here, free from cannabis policy. Hell, I’m probably going to start using this site more in general as we move through the 2020s. Find me here and on Bluesky, that’s mostly gonna be it, I think.)

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Uncategorized

Cannabis Sales and Live Events, pt 2

In my last post, I laid out some broader visions for any successful system that permits cannabis sales at live events: Positive, Safe, No Minor Use, Responsive/Agile, and Risk-Based. In this post, I want to lay out a more concrete vision of what those values might look like for a successful sales environment at a venue. In a later post, I will begin to explain what rules need to change and what new rules need to be developed in order to create this vision, but for now, I think it’s still useful to brainstorm and imagine what the Promised Land should look like.

Safe – There’s loads more to be discussed about this, but: trying cannabis products for the first time is always a more tenuous affair– not because cannabis is “dangerous”, but because we still do not know very much about how every individual will react to cannabis and THC. For every public venue that is conducting sales, there needs to be plans to accommodate people that are experiencing unpleasant effects, both for their own sake and for others. Some ways that venue cannabis sales can be made safe include:

  • Tiers of potency – As we currently operate in most states, limits on potency are most-often treated as baselines/floors for potency. If a jurisdiction limits edibles/beverage consumption to 10mg THC per serving, most lines will release options that are exactly 10mg. For the purposes of public safety, however, I think it’s quite reasonable to require that a public venue offer a variety of potencies and options for people. 2mg, 5mg, and 10mg beverage options, or even better– offer types of cannabis products that have different ratios of THC to CBD, like 1:2 or even 1:5. Limited options with higher potency is a recipe for increased unpleasant experiences, and also a recipe for decreased sales.
  • Chill-out area/Sequestration – for some people, cannabis may cause anxiety or panic, especially in a public space. For the purposes of public safety and for ensuring maximum enjoyment for others, having a well-advertised and accessible “cool-down zone” will be a smart idea. This doesn’t need to be an extravagant accommodation– think something akin to a tobacco smoking section at a stadium, located somewhere outside the general flow of traffic and oftentimes outside the direct audience for a show.
  • Effective cross-fading prevention – “Cross-fading”, otherwise known as consuming cannabis and alcohol in the same session, is something that venues should look to effectively prevent. Although there are many people who claim to be able to handle both substances at the same time, public policy and safety would suggest that permitting cross-fading at a public venue is only a recipe for problems. How a venue ensures that people don’t consume cannabis and alcohol simultaneously is a question of protocols and practices. Perhaps the most straight-forward system would involve different colored bracelets for customers– the cannabis retail spots will give a green wristband to every person who purchases cannabis at the game, and alcohol retail can offer red wristbands. Employees of each space should be trained on the venue policy, and on ensuring that no one who has been served one substance is permitted to cross over and purchase the second substance at the same event.
  • CBD – A little preface: there is much to still be properly determined about CBD’s ability to address anxiety in individuals, and the most honest assessment of the field would say that there are way too many promises made about CBD. That said, there have been multiple studies that point towards CBD being a promising option for anxiety, and no evidence so far that CBD has potential for abuse or negative indicators of toxicity. Contrary to some beliefs, CBD does not “cancel out” the effects of THC, but it does seem to reduce anxiety. As a precautionary measure, venues should strongly consider also offering CBD-only products alongside the THC products (and I would suggest offering them at a discount to THC). Venue officials should also consider carrying CBD products in the cool-out area.

No Minor Use – This is pretty straightforward in theory, but will need some fleshing out.

  • Well-publicized zero tolerance policies – It’s simply not enough to presume that the public will know and abide by a venue’s policies, and its standards for removal. A venue should happily promote the cannabis products that they offer, but should also be consistent in communicating to people the seriousness with which the venue looks at under age use. Make clear to everyone that anyone found giving THC products to underage people will be asked to leave the venue, immediately, with no refund. Publicize the contact info for audience reporting. Repeat this info before, during, and after games and concerts. Thank the audience for participating in making sure that the entire audience has a good and safe time.
  • Effective Customer Identification as a Cultural Value – Much like alcohol, complying with laws around customer age verification will apply here. Also, much like alcohol compliance, cannabis compliance is the produce of a culture, rather than a moral challenge for each salesperson. From leadership down to the floor staff, a venue must communicate that preventing under-age sales is important and worth focusing on.
  • Potentially: a season ban on consuming cannabis products for anyone that is caught distributing cannabis to minors. Removal from the stadium or venue might be effective in some cases, but I’m also interested in the idea of a venue creating a Do Not Serve list for the rest of a year as a proper consequence for open violators.

Risk-Based – Rather than blanket policies that apply to all venues and arenas, live event sales should be effective and applicable to each space. Venue operators should be expected to continuously reevaluate their cannabis sales practices with an eye towards effectively addressing potential harms where they are found. What this looks like:

  • Recognizing the particular type of audience that a venue tends to attract – If you are a concert venue that often has all-ages or 18+ shows, you have different risk profiles and challenges than an art gallery that occasionally offers experimental art/music performances. If you are a venue that hosts both professional sports and large concerts, preventing minor use of cannabis will be different than a small indoor venue that focuses on jazz ensembles and private parties. Venues must be aware of how they serve products, where risks could occur, and address the risks as they are, not as a legislator might assume them to be.
  • Objective and data-driven policies – Hypotheticals can be helpful (heck, this blog post is based in hypotheticals!), but they can also create unintentional blind spots. As has been demonstrated often in the first decade of licensed cannabis sales, rulemakers and legislators can create onerous and ineffective regulations when they operate based off of gut logic, fears, or worries. Risk-based cannabis regulations take action based off of objective data, and are more effective for doing so. Venues should proactively survey their own practices, and work with local enforcement and regulators to ascertain what is actually happening, and take steps to address the actual harms where they occur.

Responsive/Agile – Cannabis sales at venues will take a wide variety of forms and designs, new risks will occur where no one anticipated them, and having a hard or fixed mentality will only cause further problems. Both venues and regulators must respond to harms where they arise, and be willing to adjust their practices to meet new problems. Perhaps most importantly, a responsive regulatory system will reward compliant/noble actors, and sanction hardened rule-breakers. If a venue is proactive in meeting concerns and conducting safe sales, regulators and legislators should be looking to promote and appreciate the behavior, and use the example as a method to encourage other actors to adopt similar practices. Regulators should be researching and promoting best practices for live event cannabis sales as the regulators encounter them. By framing the issue as one of agility and responsiveness, we can move past the old-fashioned antagonism between regulator and operator, and work towards everyone recognizing that successful cannabis sales are a team effort.

Positive – Incorporating cannabis sales into live events is, I believe, a positive step for society. But even if I didn’t believe that, it’s important for a regulatory system to act as if cannabis sales are a positive addition, and work hard to welcome it as such. Half-measures are a precursor to unsatisfied customers, sloppier compliance, and frustration with the venue experience. Positive cannabis regulations will be looking towards ways to improve operations, rather than restrain or cage cannabis into a smaller offering. Cannabis products should be offered alongside other venue fare, and consuming cannabis responsibly at a venue should be viewed as a great success, rather an unfortunate accommodation. I’m generally agnostic on the idea of in-venue cannabis advertisements– I think I’m fine with a prohibition on billboards or advertisements encouraging cannabis consumption in the public eye (or where young people in the audience may encounter them), and with understated signage and siting being used to make clear where cannabis can be purchased within the venue.

So, there’s a glimpse at some of the ways that live cannabis sales can be created to uphold pro-social values and behavior. I realize that there are many within the cannabis industry who would like an easier system that allowed a wider array of activities, and like any business owners, many in cannabis think that less regulations equates with better regulations. I politely disagree with these people – introducing licensed cannabis to our world is a challenge, and there are issues to address and regulate against. We desperately need cannabis to re-enter polite society, and demonstrate that cannabis isn’t synonymous with breaking rules and self-centered behavior– all of us have an interest in this stuff working well. This is why I ask so much of cannabis operators and activists, and expect to hold us to higher standard. I firmly believe we can meet that safe standard, but it takes a serious attempt and well-meaning folks to become involved.

Next time: an overview of the impediments to live event cannabis sales, and a sketch of some of the laws and regulations that will need to change in order to create this scenario.

Categories
Cannabis Policy

Some Thoughts on Regulating Cannabis Sales at Live Events

I want to start a little ongoing series of thoughts about integrating cannabis products and cannabis sales into venues that host events like sports and concerts. I want to keep this more abstract for several concrete reasons:

  1. We are just starting to see licensed cannabis groups working their way with cannabis consumption in public venues. In Illinois this weekend, the “Miracle at Mundelein” is a prime example of an inaugural attempt– no cannabis sales in the consumption space, but you can purchase products at the dispensary across the street– but it’s a very hodgepodge affair. The state regulators aren’t deeply involved, and the on-site regulations and requirements are an ad-hoc mixture of local rules and state laws. Trying to speak concretely about “public cannabis sales” writ large is useless at this point, we’re only getting started, and each state is its own challenge.
  2. Almost every state’s laws and licensing schemes for cannabis are designed against sales of cannabis at public venues. The laws are designed to control the sales of cannabis– to limit the sales to licensed facilities and dispensaries, and prohibit all other cannabis sales to customers that take place outside of a licensed dispensary. This was done by legislators at the behest of many in the licensed cannabis industry, at least initially. License holders pay large amounts for their privilege, and are generally against the idea of creating more places to buy licensed products, which undercuts their own sales.
  3. Every state’s cannabis laws are different. Their own peculiar licenses, their own requirements for acquiring licenses, and their own landscape of regulatory requirements for licensed operators. There are of course similarities between states, but there is absolutely no uniformity or consistency across jurisdictions.

Given these facts, there’s no single strategy or set of changes that a person could recommend, it’s just too thorny and contingent on other circumstances.

I want to invert the framing of this challenge: rather than talk about all the things that need to be modified or changed from our current position in any state’s system, I want to focus on the destination, where we’re trying to get to. If we can start developing a consensus on what safe Public Cannabis Sales might look like, my hope is that we can more easily agree on what needs to change in each jurisdiction.

So for today, I want to highlight some principles or values that an effective Public Cannabis Sales system should enforce and support, and that all stakeholders (communities, regulatory agencies, licensed operators) should be able to rally behind:

  • Safe – Everyone should be interested in people using cannabis in a safe environment, and cannabis should only be permitted to be sold in a safe manner. There’s no need to grant the privilege of cannabis sales to a facility or operator that doesn’t take safety seriously– if someone’s so uncaring as to be unsafe, there’s always going to be another willing operator who can meet the requirements of public safety.
  • No Minor Use – Everyone should be interested in preventing underage cannabis use and sales, especially the cannabis industry. There’s already significant evidence that developing brains shouldn’t consume THC, and little room for the idea that it’s good or even non-harmful for young people to consume cannabis. Even if there are many people in the modern cannabis industry who don’t realize it, they have a long-term interest in preventing young people too: people who start smoking later in life tend to consume more than the people who started too early! Keeping young people from smoking or vaping weed is an effective way to preserve your future customer base.
  • Risk-Based – Rather than fear based regulations, or stigma-based laws, our system for Public Cannabis Sales should be both based on measurable evidence and on a forward-looking mindset of anticipating problems where they actually are occurring. The first decade of cannabis regulation has shown quite clearly that legislators are unable to fully anticipate the risks and challenges of a regulated industry, and have both over-legislated and under-legislated in particular areas. Public cannabis sales, if anything, are even more important to get right than licensed site sales. We need a system that is consistently compared against on-the-ground reality, and willing to be audited and updated to better address risks where we discover them. We also need a system that is willing to let go of old fears that have been proven to be low-risk.
  • Responsive and Agile – Public Cannabis Sales’ issues are not strictly limited to the site of an event and the holders of the license– there are surrounding communities and households that are just as much impacted by sales and customer behavior, as well as on-site employees and public transit workers servicing the event. A successful system for regulated public sales will need to have built into it a standard of responsiveness and adaptability, as well as public standards of being answerable to community-based input. Annual assessments by a third party would possibly be the pipe-dream for creating a responsive regulatory stance.
  • Positive – We are not trying to banish cannabis to the shadows anymore, and we should be aiming for cannabis’s inclusion to be as positive as we can make it, rather than deny its very existence or potential inclusion. This doesn’t mean pushing cannabis into places without consent, but it means allowing the market for public cannabis to grow towards a demand-based amount in public. Sales of cannabis shouldn’t be unlimited,of course, but instead only limited when informed by evidence of public risk. (See: Risk-Based, above). Having legislators set standards for public use based on their personal levels of taste/distaste for cannabis is an inconsistent plan, and a recipe for more head-aches. Not Positive!

I’m definitely going to have more thoughts on this later, but hopefully we can at least start getting more policy-minded folks involved with the question. This isn’t an issue that should be solved by a closed room of agency regulators, industry lobbyists, and public health partisans, and I think crafting an effective solution to public cannabis sales will have huge impacts to everyone, both inside and outside of the industry.

As a final thought: over the weekend I went to an outdoor concert featuring Run The Jewels, Wu-Tang Clan, and Deltron 3030 (rap nerd flex!). It was a great show, even if it’s always kinda funny to watch these poor sea-level rappers struggle to breathe. As you can imagine, there was a massive amount of weed smoked in this amphitheater, for hours straight. Also, given that these acts have fans from 30 years ago, the age range in the crowd was from teenagers to 60somethings. In terms of a strict reading of current regulations, this concert was an enforcement mess, and thousands of people congregated to break a clear legal requirement. And yet….outside of the usual concert injuries (people falling down the steps while drunk, a fight or two in the back between drunk people)… no one who attended that concert or was in the surrounding areas was harmed by the illegality. After the show, and after my mind cleared, I kept coming back to the idea of consent– how the context of consent mattered to determining the amount of social harm to be mitigated.

Does attending a Wu-Tang concert mean an implicit consent to be exposed to secondhand cannabis smoke? Obviously by the strict letter of the law, no, it doesn’t. But in the realer world of experience, I think it’s safe to say that there was an implicit consent. I know that for myself, there was a full-minded awareness that the show would include that environmental condition. Did the working staff and vendors of the amphitheater have the same level of consent? Obviously not. But rather than presume to speak for the employees, I will instead say: I would love some surveys and data about live event staff’s views and perspectives on working events that are all-but-assured to include secondhand cannabis smoke.

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Once I figure out how to get comments working on this here dang blog, I’ll open them up below for your thoughts or feedback. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to ping me on Twitter (@wisetendersnob) or BlueSky (@snowdenst), I’d love to hear other perspectives, especially from folks with experience working as vendors and staff for cannabis-heavy events as they currently occur.

Categories
Cannabis Policy

Labor Peace Agreements for Minnesota Cannabis and Hemp Businesses

It’s an exciting time for Minnesota cannabis and hemp. Governor Walz’s signature to HF 100 set into a motion a multi-year process that will culminate in a licensed and regulated cannabis industry as well as preserve the unique lower potency hemp edible industry that the state has pioneered over the past year. Every state has peculiar qualities and landscapes to their cannabis industries, but one condition that Minnesota will share with several other licensed cannabis states is the requirement of labor peace agreements (LPAs) for most types of licensed cannabis and hemp operations.

What’s an LPA?

One of the provisions in the bill is related to “labor peace agreements”., This provision determines which types of cannabis and hemp businesses will be required to sign labor peace agreements (“LPAs”) as part of their license application. For the unfamiliar, the LPA in Minnesota’s bill is defined as:

  • an agreement
  • between a cannabis or hemp business and a bona fide labor organization, that
  • protects MN interests by prohibiting the labor organization from picketing, work stoppages, or boycotts against the cannabis and industry

The state defines a “bona fide labor organization” as “a labor union that represents or is actively seeking to represent cannabis workers,” and a determination of being bona fide is important—the problem of “company unions” and other fraudulent groups posing as legitimate groups representing workers is already an issue in other states with adult-use cannabis, like California.

In other words, an LPA is a signed agreement between cannabis businesses and a certified labor union, as determined under the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. Most of the details of a particular LPA are not mandated, beyond the minimum agreement to prohibitions on certain picketing, work stoppages, and boycotts against the state’s cannabis industry.

What’s a Lower-Potency Hemp Edible (LPHE)?

In 2022, Minnesota became the only state in the US with an in-between system of permitting some non-cannabis operators to produce and sell products with delta-9 THC (that is derived from federal legal hemp). The formal definition of a “lower-potency hemp edible” is any product intended to be consumed as a beverage by humans that contains hemp concentrates or artificially derived cannabinoids. The single-serving limits on LPHEs are a maximum of 5mg of delta-9 THC, 25mg of CBD, 25mg of CBG, or any combination of those, within those limits (e.g., 5 mg THC and 25mg of CBD in a serving). LPHEs may not contain any artificially derived cannabinoid other than delta-9 THC, and they may not contain any cannabinoids derived from cannabis plants or cannabis flowers—only from federally legal hemp plants.

These low-potency hemp beverages might already be familiar to you in Minnesota, as the products have already developed a significant presence in the year since their creation. It’s worth reiterating, the particular arrangement — delta-9 THC, produced from hemp, and sold in retail locations alongside other products like alcohol – is unique in the nation, and could potentially mean that Minnesota is able to develop a THC beverage market unlike any other jurisdiction.

What kind of cannabis and hemp businesses are required to sign an LPA?

Minnesota’s new licensing and regulatory system for cannabis and hemp products includes 16 license types– 14 for cannabis and medical cannabis businesses, and two for lower potency hemp edibles. What do the new regulations say about each of those groups?

First, for cannabis and medical cannabis businesses, the requirements are clear:

“any application to obtain or renew a cannabis license shall include… an attestation signed by a bona fide labor organization that the applicant has entered into a labor peace agreement.” 

MN Statute 342.14 Subd. 1(a)(9)

In other words, for every initial application and for every license renewal application, cannabis businesses must submit a signed letter from a labor union that the relevant business is already in a binding LPA. And, while the new applications have not been created or released yet, the legislative language in 342.14 Subd. 1(d) makes clear that an applicant’s commitments in their application to maintaining an LPA will be an “ongoing material condition” of maintaining and renewing a cannabis license in Minnesota.

While that language sounds like all license types must submit an LPA with their applications, there is a cannabis license type that is exempted— microbusinesses. What is a cannabis microbusiness? In Minnesota, microbusinesses are a license type that allows its holder to conduct activities that range across the supply chain, from cultivation all the way to sales. The microbusiness is the smallest license, with some of the greatest restrictions on the size of its cultivation canopy; it is also limited to a single retail location. Per MN Statute 342.28 Subd. 4, cannabis microbusinesses (vertically integrated and small cannabis operators) are not required to submit a signed attestation from a labor union with any application.

Next, we look at the two LPHE licenses coming into effect: LPHE manufacturers and retailers. While the new bill makes clear that LPHE businesses are not presumed to be covered by all of the same requirements and rules as the cannabis license types, MN Statute 342.44 Subd. 1(d) does state that applicants for LPHE manufacturer licenses must submit a signed attestation from a labor union that the applicant has entered into an LPA with a labor union. The LPA requirement, however, is not mentioned as a condition of an LPHE retailer license application.

Do Other States Have LPAs as Part Of Their Cannabis Regulations?

In fact, several of them do, and several other states have movements in their legislatures to add LPA requirements as a condition of cannabis licensing. California’s requirement includes additional agreements from cannabis applicants, including agreeing to not disrupt efforts by labor organizations’ attempts to communicate and organize employees and agreeing to provide labor organizations access to work spaces to discuss workers’ rights and conditions of employment. In Illinois, preferential scoring is given to applicants that submit LPAs with their applications. Connecticut and New York also require LPAs as a condition of receiving final licensure for a cannabis business.

Summary

Out of the 16 total cannabis and hemp business licenses that Minnesota will be unveiling in the next year, only two license types are exempt from the two-fold requirement of (i) signing a labor peace agreement with a bona fide labor organization, and (ii) submitting a signed attestation from the labor union with every license application and every license renewal. Those two exempted licenses are cannabis microbusinesses and lower-potency hemp edible retailers. Per the statutes, if the Office of Cannabis Management receives an application that fails to include the required attestation, they will issue an initial notice of a deficiency to which the applicant has 10 business days to submit the additional necessary information. If the information is not provided, the OCM will reject the application.

Given the inevitable flood of applications to the office with a new licensing scheme, interested individuals and organizations do not want their first applications to suffer delays from foreseeable requirements and risk falling behind or out of the running for one of the earliest licensing windows.

The current regime of cannabis and hemp products in Minnesota is beginning to draw to a close, and the new rules will begin to dawn over the next 12-18 months. On July 1, the state began the complex process of developing its new agency, creating rules for licenses and applicants, and onboarding existing hemp edible retailers and producers. By March 2025 at the latest, all of the new licensed cannabis retailers and producers will be preparing to launch. Compiling an application for any cannabis or hemp license is a long and difficult process, and it will be important for groups and people to determine all of the new requirements for their business. Many of those requirements will be written and published over much of the rest of this year, but the Labor Peace Agreement requirement is one of few that has already been established, and savvy parties will avoid the easy mistakes and have that LPA ready for their first application.

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Finding a Port in the Storm

The great cruise ships of social media are sinking. Time to get on your own boat.

I’m going to build out Snowden St. so that it can house all the necessary buildings for my particular block– a gym, a house of worship, a little masonic lodge, a stadium, a house of my own, and a soapbox for me to stand on when I feel like squabbling– but I strongly encourage everyone to create their own e-street.

I hope to write a small series of blog posts on how I, a rank amateur who has no appetite for coding, am able to have my own little home out here on the open part of the web, free from the siloed confines of a big platform. If I can do this (for an annual cost of ~$50), you can too.