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The politics of legal weed, the state of affairs for licensees and legal issues in the industry were just a few of the topics covered on panels during NY Cannabis Insider’s live conference in Buffalo Thursday.
Held at Pearl Street Grill & Brewery, the event marked NY Cannabis Insider’s first conference in Buffalo. Panel discussions focused on cannabis industry issues statewide, but also examined the situation in Western New York, a region where retail has been stymied by two separate court injunctions.
Andrew DeAngelo, founder of Harborside and Last Prisoner Project, kicked off the event with a keynote speech about finding opportunity in crisis. DeAngelo advised audience members to take advantage of legal issues in New York’s cannabis industry. Litigation can be important to protecting cannabis businesses, he said.
“We, that come from the legacy market, the last thing that we want to do is walk into a courtroom,” DeAngelo said. “It’s not in our DNA to embrace this tool.””Well – get over that, because our adversaries are embracing this,” he said.
A panel discussion about Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary businesses featured Aaron Van Camp, owner of Buffalo’s Dank716, one of two brick-and-mortar CAURDs in Western New York; Britni Tantalo, co-founder of Flower City Dispensary in Rochester, and the CAURD Coalition; and Samuel Coronado, owner of Buffalo CAURD business Mary Jane’s.
Of the three panelists, Van Camp’s dispensary is the only one that opened before a court injunction in August that is preventing hundreds of CAURD businesses from launching. During the conversation, Tantalo noted some disparity between resources available in Upstate and Western New York and Downstate.
“They have a lot more than we do. In terms of their face time with regulators – they do meetups, they have working groups in Manhattan … I have not seen that here, and that worries me,” Tantalo said.
Panelists also discussed how the injunction is affecting Western New York CAURDs, real estate challenges, and more.
During a talk about legal issues in New York’s cannabis industry, audience members listened to attorneys Paula Collins, Benjamin Rattner of Cermele & Wood, and Thomas Spanos.
Spanos said that one of the main factors causing legal problems is that the Office of Cannabis Management has taken many legally dubious actions, which have created vulnerabilities in the state’s legal weed program.
“Part of the problem with trying to predict what’s going to happen with CAURD is that there’s more than one problem with CAURD,” Spanos said. “OCM likes to play very fast and loose with what the law actually tells them to do, and sadly CAURD is no exception.”
Buffalo Deputy Mayor of Operations Rashied McDuffie and Jamestown Mayor Eddie Sundquist were part of a panel talk on the politics of cannabis, and how statewide issues are affecting the local weed industry in their cities.
McDuffie, who previously worked as an attorney for the OCM, said the injunctions that have kept many CAURD businesses from opening have been damaging to marijuana entrepreneurs in Buffalo.
“The injunctions have been devastating for the city of Buffalo,” McDuffie said. “One [dispensary] in Buffalo … is not enough, we can go much further.”
Brian Lane of NOWAVE in Rochester and Jenny Argie of Stuyvesant-based Jenny’s talked about the state of affairs for licensed cannabis processors in New York.
During the talk, Argie said that even though there’s a perception that processing licensees are among the few in New York’s legal cannabis sector in a good business position, the reality is much different.
“Of about 40 processors, about a third of us are operational right now, and of that one-third, about half of us have had to furlough and shut their doors,” Argie said. “It’s really, really dismal right now.”
Cultivators from three different licensed growing companies talked about issues ranging from competition with medical cannabis Registered Organizations, specific challenges for farmers in Western New York, and how distributors will change the state’s legal weed market.
The growers panel included Joseph Calderone of Grateful Valley Farm, Michael Casacci of House of Sacci, and Michael Yager of Yager Farms.
A panel on medical cannabis featured Nikki Lawley of Nikkiandtheplant.org, and Jeremy Unruh – SVP, Public and Regulatory Affairs, PharmaCann. During that talk, Unruh pointed out that the entry of Registered Organizations into New York’s adult-use market could benefit local cultivators, since ROs are required to stock 50% of their shelf space with New York brands.
“You know what we have? Shelf space,” Unruh said. “That means that of those three dispensaries, 50% – or one-and-a-half – of those dispensaries has to furnish products that don’t come from other registered organizations.”