Tag: cannabis

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Cannabis Conversation Reset, 2026

Sheed, mad about Weed

I’ve been grumbling about this on social media for long enough, and today is a “weed holiday” for many purposes, but also a professional holiday for yours truly, so I’m going to lay out some…nonsectarian and sincere gripes I have, as an informed expert, about US cannabis policy and regulation.

(Disclaimer: these are purely personal takes, none of these reflect the opinions of my employer or any political group that I may be affiliated with. This is crusty weed-wonk stuff, straight from my policy-nerd heart. It is likely upsetting to some interest or another, but comes from a place of wanting good policy for everyone. I have no stakes in an active or dead cannabis license, I do not handle plants in a licensed capacity, I have not written cannabis policy for a state or municipality, I am a senior regulatory analyst for the longest-running cannabis compliance platform in the biz. I draft and review audit checklists and standard operating procedures.)

Things in legal cannabis are bad, chat. Most any thing related to a “licensed operator” and “legal weed” is struggling, dying, or dead.

This comes as a surprise to some folks, who see headlines and think “oh wow, working in weed must be awesome,” or “look at those fatcats making money on a historically oppressed substance,” and let me tell you: there aren’t any cats who are fat these days. Big companies have become medium companies, and even some of the “strongest” companies in licensed cannabis are toting around nine-figure tax bills that will come due. Small companies have sold on, closed up, or found a small size that is somewhat sustainable (if you’re on a border with a prohibition state).

And while what I’m about to say could obviously be read in a conspiratorial or seething voice, I promise you I’m just saying this as a mundane fact: the groups that have unquestionably brought in revenue in the first decade plus of adult-use cannabis are the state governments, and sometimes the municipal governments. No one else has secured a steady revenue within the cannabis industry.

Which kinda brings me to my Gripe: we need a new conversation about cannabis policy, one that can get us past the gooey Early Days hype/concern/boom cycles of the 2010s and lower interest rates and national enthusiasm shoved into a handful of states’ markets. We need a conversation about cannabis that involves policymakers and regulators and politicians realizing that the first decade of cannabis was generally a failure for everyone but some customers and most governments. The pile of “failed cannabis businesses” dwarfs the pile of “sustainable or successful cannabis businesses”, and the pile of successes is dwindling, not growing.

We need resets to policies that were written as guesses, educated and otherwise. We need to be able to say that some of the guesses were quite wrong, and try completely new regulatory structures and processes.

This is not a comprehensive list of specific examples or complaints, but I want to demonstrate the comprehensive nature of the misses. A survey of takes:

Every state so far has gone through a predictable Boom/Bust cycle after launching adult-use cannabis in a serious manner. Early prices for adult-use weed are bold and pricey, but as the gray market and the additional licenses enter a state, the prices collapse to levels below what can be a profitable return on the early model. The long term burdens on every cannabis licensee have been (i) absence of basic business deductions for federal taxes, a significant anchor on accounting, and (ii) absence of normal business services in banking and finance. Without regular business banking, companies rely private financing that comes at much more intense rates.

Market saturation has effects on existing states. California and Colorado and Washington benefitted from having national customer bases funneled into state-sized markets. As more states legalize, the booms get smaller, and the early states shrink. There aren’t big, profitable weed businesses in Colorado, and that’s better than California, where many of the biggest names in cannabis have completely retreated!

Private interests have died, retreated, or moved on. Like I just mentioned above, the notions of “Big Weed” and dangers of their corporate control are very antiquated or nonsensical to anyone who’s been in legal cannabis in the 2020s, let alone the 2010s. The names that have lost money trying to be early Weed Business Tycoons (coughcough Jay Z) are long. Anyone who is serious about money has pulled way back on cannabis, and is waiting for federal legalization and integration with basic business accounting before returning.

“Regulate cannabis like alcohol” has failed. There’s a whole lot to be written about the ways that cannabis and booze are different, but: as a question of regulation, it’s just not similar to alcohol production or pharmaceutical production. Alcohol is produced through brewing or distilling, which involves inputs and infrastructure that…sits in one place, and people know about it. Cannabis did not get the name “weed” for arbitrary reasons– it can grow all over the place. Monitoring or controlling unlicensed production of cannabis is an expensive and exhausting prospect (that increasingly looks like the old War on Drugs), even in a state with legal weed. Just ask California.

No one knew. Pharma-vice was a guess. When citizens voted to legalize adult-use weed (never forget, voters faced bipartisan resistance for legalization), we forced state governments into truly foreign territories of policymaking. We tasked states with crafting regulations for the licensing, production, sales, testing, and handling of cannabis and cannabis goods. And (conservative guess) at least 85-90% of the people tasked with drafting the regulations and schemas were non-consumers of cannabis, and many with an overt suspicion and ignorance about how cannabis is made or commonly consumed. The regulations and rules defaulted to a strict and comprehensive ideal of controlling cannabis. We could track it from “seed to sale”, or so we promised each other. Instead of approaching cannabis like a botanical or a commodity crop, we gravitated to models like an extreme version of a brewery or a pharmacy– controls and taxes on retail and customers, but also stringent tracking and surveillance requirements for every step of the production process. This has generally served as onerous to operators, but ineffective at preventing “diversion” of product from licensed retailers to unlicensed markets. Put simply: tracking requirements are more often used for “stacking up penalties upon discovery by another method” rather than ” a source of detection of bad-faith actors by regulators”. (there’s all kinds of allegations and conspiracies about this fact, to put it lightly)

Truly have found the limits of federalism for an…outlaw…industry. It’s banking and taxes. As always. Cannabis in the US is a fascinating experiment in federalism– not many places have the dichotomy to allow one of our constituent states to declare a felony substance a recreational product within their boundaries. The system only arose with prosecutorial discretion, and at any point those policies could change. But it’s undeniable that American cannabis arose in a novel manner, in light rebellion of federal law and jurisprudence. But there’s still limits to federalism for a state-legal substance, and the biggest limit is “federally regulated banking systems”. Cash handling and security, extremely heavy interest rates on private loans, these kinds of impediments are a drag on any business, let alone a fledgling industry trying to fit in.

I don’t think there’s an industry that is more ruled by non-experts. I mention it above, but: even compared to my friends in LLMs or computing, or my friends in firearms or oil and gas or any other highly regulated division of the world– at least those places have some industry voices that are taken as authoritative that policymakers will account for. Cannabis is mostly regulated by liquor-cop style agencies, with rules written by squares (to put it bluntly). I’m not against regulating substances (more on that below!), but: alcohol rules are written mostly by people who are familiar with a drink or two, or at least presume to know what the effect of “one unit” is. Cannabis is still written and handled by policymakers who presume cannabis dangerous, and it is hard to convince people who’ve never consumed that their assumptions are overcooked. Cannabis is a relaxed parent drug, it’s not “highway to fucked up”, definitely not in this current landscape (gestures at dark web).

Cannabis is weird. Cannabis is a recreational substance, and a medical substance, and a botanical substance, and a commodity crop. It’s been treated as a narcotic for many decades, and now we’re trying to do something different. An earlier accommodation, the 2018 Farm Bill, tried to split the baby by deeming certain kinds of the plant “hemp” (and safe for Red States, outside of law enforcement) and the other kinds “cannabis” (Blue State stuff, left to die in US legislative hell). This, as we all know now, went very unexpectedly. But the fact of the matter is: any attempt to shove cannabis into one of these regulatory silos (liquor cops, ag cops, lab tech cops, retail cops, etc) is insufficient, and many of them unnecessary. What it will take is people being open to something different than the past decade. This will include a lot of private investors and operators who are similarly married to the model of previous regulatory schemes– they may have privately benefitted at some points, but the entire system is so miserable that we all have to be open to walking away from the status quo.

Overzealous protections do not come without serious costs. I understand the presumption that some might have– take it slow, take the industry-side squabbles as expected noise, but Just Be Safe, Make Sure No Kids Consume. But the slow and unnecessary costs aren’t just on unsympathetic cannabis operators, they’re impacting the environment writ large. Every state in the country has mandated “child-proof packaging” for all adult-use cannabis products, before any evidence or arguments were made. It’s just common sense, right? What has happened is the laws have mandated millions of pieces of plastic packaging, most that (by regulation or law) cannot be recycled. And to questionable effect! The vast majority of children-consuming cannabis events in our time are “kids eating unmarked edibles”. Children like gummies, they aren’t (or at least haven’t in big numbers) encountering joints and bags of cannabis flower and getting down to business behind their parents’ backs. We need protections for packages that look like candy, I can agree to that, but there’s millions of pounds of useless plastic (in the shape of those little tubes for joints, or forbidding any reusable containers for cannabis flower) that are doing nothing but soothing someone’s misplaced sentiments.

plastic tube packaging that does NOTHING to prevent children from consuming cannabis

We need agility and broader understanding that we’re learning as we go. Look, I have a LOT of complaints about cannabis policy, I can sound like I think I know everything good or bad about cannabis, and why everyone else is wrong and I’m correct. That’s not the case! I have great sympathy for the challenge of figuring out how to safely and reasonably regulate an interesting plant. What grinds the gears is (for work) watching state after state re-enact the structures and forms and assumptions of CA, CO, and WA regulatory systems and rules. The people pass a referendum for adult cannabis, and then state regulators look out there and riff off what someone else has done– it’s the most plausible deniability you can get, it’s the form of regulation most tolerable to legislators and sturdy enough to survive administrative challenges, there’s a reason why the inertia leads this way. But most people who write these rules then just put cannabis aside. It’s an accomplishment to tout, not a vital industry to monitor, respond to, or modify. “Legal weed” isn’t a promised land, it’s a new realm of attention.

We need to chill out. For all the problems of regulating weed, it has to be re-iterated, again and again in the face of clickbait and fretting– most of the problems of Rampant Weed have been light. We don’t need to do a big and exhausting fight about “harms of alcohol” among society and youth, vs “harms of cannabis”. That can be later, but I think, both in popular perception and in the granular details, cannabis’s impact on socially-deleterious behaviors is somewhere between 1/5th and 1/10th and 1/50th the burden of alcohol. And this is in an age with huge interstate markets for discount bootleg hemp-derived THC products! There are serious problems with preventing kids from accidentally consuming edibles, there are serious problems with ensuring some people with mental health conditions avoid THC , there are serious problems with people consuming cannabis while operating machinery like “trading desks” or “infrastructural computing work” or “DOGE crap”. But even the rates of “cannabis and driving”, when we get down to some kind of sturdy data, is way way lower than alcohol. We can take cannabis seriously, without handling it frantically or apocalyptically.

We need to figure out what the goals are. Is the goal to limit cannabis sales to the safest and most overseen manner? Is the goal to allow cannabis businesses to become regular participants in lawful commerce? Is the goal to ensure generational wealth for a limited few license holders? Is the goal to develop sturdy jobs and careers for as many people as possible? Whatever your priority is, we need more earnest and comprehensive discussions about it– how do we make that happen? Is Policy ____ in the interest of us, the enabling or in-power political party, and our political caucuses? There’s just so much Serious Talk to be had, and the intersection of cannabis with existing political struggles (like labor, environment, healthcare) is pretty easy to do…as long as you don’t just keep treating it like Booze Light.

Weed is here, we’re figuring it out, let’s try to be serious about it.

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Cannabis Policy

No One Takes Cannabis Seriously

I don’t mean literally everyone, of course. There are some folks who are intrigued by what cannabis presents, and are interested in studying what cannabis is with an open mind.

In general, however, after a decade of legal recreational use of cannabis in dozens of states, almost no one takes cannabis seriously, in the government or in many cannabis businesses. Rather than see it as the peculiar plant that it is, with wide variety of uses and therapies, governments and business see it as New Booze or the New Medicine, and try to treat it as such.

We have industries and governments treating “cannabis” and “hemp” as if they are distinct plants. This is an unserious distinction, and the ensuing decade of hemp-based cannabinoid products has rendered the labels a mockery. The “two different plants” have even established political coalitions in legislatures, and battle lines have been drawn over a nonsensical concept.

We have operators who act like Consumer Product Good manufacturers, floating to wherever the regulations are weakest. Companies that used to work with licensed cannabis cultivators have left the adult-use states and set up shops in “hemp” jurisdictions. On an individual level, you can’t blame a business for seeking to get out of the red, but it comes at the cost of clarity about the cannabis plant, the products they sell, and the quality they promise.

We have policymakers across the country who do not know the first thing about cannabis, but who know (i) it can bring the local governments some revenue, and (ii) it should be treated like alcohol, and taxed like it. Most policymakers see the cannabis industry as a vice or luxury goods business, and have little patience for complaints about regulations– they see all of it as a privilege they, the policymakers, gave to the public.

Most policymakers also refuse to take seriously the idea that the “US Government is incapable of controlling cannabis production”, even though we spent decades and billions of dollars trying to do just that. They act as if the government has a capacity it never has had, and that the question is just one of the policymakers fiddling around with new privileges and punishments to bring the industry into line.

We will have over a decade of licensed cannabis markets, and almost all of them have withered every person who’s stayed in the game. The functional tax rates are exorbitant, and there is little serious interest in fixing them. There has been roughly 1000x more interest and movement in “fixing” cryptocurrency regulations over the past decade than there has been for fixing federal laws to allow state-compliant cannabis businesses access to standard business services and tax deductions. The policymakers take cryptocurrency far more seriously than cannabis.

And finally, plenty of consumers don’t take cannabis seriously either. They see it as an alternative to booze, and relentlessly search for THC numbers that have little to do with the high one receives. They slam down poor-regulated products with abandon, and think claims about quality or safety are not important. They’ll take cannabis in any form they can get.

I don’t know if the lack of seriousness will go away. I hope it does. Cannabis is a supremely interesting plant, and has loads of applications and opportunities. But until we take cannabis seriously— as a consumable, a commodity, a medicine, a flower, a textile — we will stay in these messes.

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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.

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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.