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Join NY Cannabis Insider for its next full-day conference in Albany on Sept. 25, 2024. Tickets available now.
Happy weekend, everyone!
We hope everyone’s enjoying the beginnings of the fall season, and all the football that comes along with it. Let’s take a look at the stories we at NY Cannabis Insider have been covering.
First of all, we have an all-day conference at the Desmond Hotel in Albany coming up on Sept. 25. We’ll have expert-led discussions and networking opportunities throughout the day, and NY Cannabis Insider writers will be around to chat about all the goings on in New York’s weed industry.
NY Cannabis Insider events are attended by industry professionals, lobbyists and entrepreneurs looking to start their own cannabis business, as well as those from cannabis-adjacent businesses such as legal, security, retail, banking, finance, construction, engineering, business consultation and medical expertise.
Reporter Mel Hyman contributed a story about licensed New York cannabis cultivators who are currently in limbo as they wait for state regulators to approve their transition from conditional licenses to full licenses.
Nearly 40% of the state’s 279 original licensed cultivators have yet to transition to permanent licenses, according to the state Cannabis Farmers Alliance. Some farmers have simply lost faith in New York’s Office of Cannabis Management and haven’t bothered to apply, while a sizable number are stuck in the queue, waiting months and months for OCM to act on their applications.
Hyman also wrote a piece about stakeholders in New York’s medical cannabis program saying it’s crumbling under financial pressure and patient exodus. Just two years ago, there were 40 medical weed shops operating in New York. Now there are 31 — despite the 2021 MRTA legislation that set a goal of 80.
Of the 10 original companies licensed to operate medical marijuana dispensaries in New York, nine remain (MedMen has since gone belly up and left the state; Hudson Health Extracts, the 11th RO to enter the market, has yet to open). And revenues have steadily declined as the patient load has shrunk and the number of dispensaries has diminished.
We covered a Cannabis Control Board meeting, at which regulators pushed forward a measure that would relax distance requirements between dispensaries and approved 123 more marijuana business licenses.
During the Tuesday morning meeting, an OCM staffer also noted large revenue gains in New York’s legal cannabis market. The OCM’s data for August retail sales (which included sales from the final few days of July) reached nearly $100 million – including New York’s first-ever recorded $20-million week. Legal cannabis shops have sold more than $590 million worth of products since the end of 2022.
Dr. Torian Easterling, senior vice president for population and community health and chief strategic and innovation officer at One Brooklyn Health, contributed a guest column about how cannabis tax revenue can eliminate health inequities in New York.
“Most of New York’s approach has, correctly, been centered on individuals or families who were convicted of a cannabis-related crime, prioritizing people who were most harmed and giving them greater access to the dispensary application process,” Easterling wrote. “But thousands more individuals and families have been harmed by cannabis prohibition than will be approved to, or even want to, open and run a legal cannabis dispensary.”
Colin Decker, owner and founder of adult-use brand 7 SEAZ – and owner of Hudson Valley-based Sensei Growth Consulting – wrote a piece that discusses the real world monetary value of a New York cannabis business license.
“Many believe the licenses are a golden ticket to generational wealth, and if you open a store, you now have the keys to the kingdom to print money (the dream that OCM sold to applicants),” Decker wrote. “In my personal opinion, the license is worth what someone is willing to pay for it.”
In another guest column, Decker wrote about the necessity for businesses in the cannabis industry to be able to pivot.
“The wholesale market inside of this large, complex ecosystem of cannabis sales in New York is only going to increase in size and demand,” Decker wrote. “Farmers unable to keep up with the quality standards demanded by the market and those unable to be nimble and pivot will unfortunately be left by the wayside with no business model to support their efforts.”
We ran a story about the Cannabis Justice & Equity Initiative, an NYC-based nonprofit focused on social equity and workforce development in the cannabis industry, which is expanding to Harlem, and offering free job training and legal services.
The CJEI has been serving dual purposes: providing intensive training for community members looking to enter the cannabis industry, and offering legal advice and services to people who are trying to expunge a past cannabis conviction, as the MRTA allows in many cases.
We added a new entry to our “People to know in NY cannabis” series: Bojan Trocevski, operations manager at Hibernica Dispensary in the Bronx.
Lastly, we posted a new edition of attorney Jeffrey Hoffman’s Ask Me Anything segment, in which Hoffman answers questions about ROD licenses, regulations for retailers who want to offer discounts and more.
Have a great weekend everyone, we’ll be back with plenty more next week.