Category: Marijuana News

HOBOKEN, NJ — Even with both medical and recreational cannabis now legal in New Jersey, dispensary owners have faced a slow path toward opening in the Garden State, especially in tiny Hoboken. But as of three weeks ago, the mile-square city has its first dispensary.

The Station — a medical dispensary that will also offer recreational marijuana at some point in the future — quietly opened for business on the last Monday in October.

The spacious business is located on the ground floor of a stately office building at River and Newark streets, just two blocks from the Hoboken train station and a short walk from the Hudson River waterfront.

The owner of The Station — Joe Castelo — had a bit of an advantage, as he owns the building, as well as two other businesses in the same building: The Antique Loft, a sixth-floor event space with catering, and Sweven, a creative space where artists and entrepreneurs can work or hold events.

But Castelo still spent nearly five years working on The Station, he said. He hopes to open for recreational use in the next few months, and just needs approval from the Hoboken Cannabis Review Board, after getting other state

Read More Here...

The passage of Issue 2 has paved the way for recreational marijuana throughout Ohio, but a lot still has to happen before people can head to a dispensary.King City Gardens transformed a former K-Mart store into a medical marijuana facility. It is currently one of more than two dozen Level One cultivators in the state. In light of the passage of Issue 2, the cannabis grow site in Forest Park is looking to expand its operations. “That’s part of any business, you want to prepare,” said King City Gardens Co-Founder, Caveh Azadeh. “We want to make sure that we’re able to support the demand that’s going to come with the growth going from medical to recreational.”The facility is home to dozens of different strains of medical marijuana.The indoor growing facility is made up of eight growing rooms plus drying rooms. In total, the building holds 25,000 feet of grow space. “Once it goes recreational, there is going to be more dispensary licenses and the cultivators are able to grow from 25,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet,” Azadeh said.Growing the already budding business means more jobs. Azadeh believes at full scale King City Gardens could have 400 employees. “Initially

Read More Here...

PHOTO: Amirul Anirban / The Peak

By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer

On November 1, the director and founder of Get Your Drugs Tested, Dana Larsen, was arrested after a search warrant from the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) was executed. The VPD raided Larsen’s three Medicinal Mushroom dispensary locations. He was released without charges or conditions seven hours after his arrest. The arrest and search warrant came just days after the VPD arrested co-founders of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx. The Peak reached out to Larsen for more information. 

Larsen, a lifelong drug advocate, started Vancouver’s third cannabis dispensary in 2008. After its closure in 2019, he had the idea to rebrand the East Hastings dispensary to check drugs for harmful substances, something largely inaccessible to many people who use drugs. Get Your Drugs Tested uses a Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) machine to scan for harmful substances contaminating drugs. The operation is funded through sales of psychedelics from Larsen’s other businesses. He keeps his drug testing services free to customers, as he told The Peak in 2021, “I wouldn’t want to feel that, for the lack of a $5 bill, someone had an overdose and

Read More Here...

If we had the opportunity to sit down with Governor Hochul, we’d have a lot to say.

We’d begin by emphasizing the positive impacts of cannabis legalization: job creation, an explosion of new small businesses, economic growth and revenue generation, and the reduction of the tax-avoiding, crime-attracting, illicit market.

However, I would also highlight the enormous challenges that we are facing, along with some rather obvious solutions:

Firstly we’d note the long and stressful journey that CAURD licensees have traveled so far; the great amount of sacrifice, the many unfulfilled promises, the personal time and capital that licensees have invested, and the precarity of the current situation for all licensees across the entire supply chain due to the outstanding injunction. All of this danger, suffering, and extreme financial risk to innocent licensees, operating in good faith and following the guidance of the state, who are now facing complete financial ruin through no fault of their own, could be completely mitigated with the stroke of the Governor’s pen. This legislative repair was already done for the rest of the industry’s supply chain license types, but not for the retail license. The catastrophic consequences of the choice to not fix the legislative

Read More Here...

Long Island’s first tribally-owned and licensed cannabis dispensary will be opened by the Shinnecock Nation out in Southampton called the Little Beach Harvest dispensary.

Coming to the east end of Long Island, the Shinnecock Tribal Nation looked opened their doors to the first tribally-owned and licensed cannabis dispensary (1). The new location called, the Little Beach Harvest dispensary, officially opened on November 15, 2023 and is a 5,000 square foot cedar facility located on their land.

This store has been years in the making, according to Chenae Bullock, managing director of the Little Beach Harvest (1). The WSHU reported that, “the dispensary is the result of an eight-year-long process,” (1). “The industry that’s emerging in this state. For us to be able to do this, it just gives us a sense of pride and empowerment. It’s a wonderful feeling,” Bullock said (1).

Additionally, Bullock mentioned how the tribe worked together by approving and creating a cannabis ordinance over three years. From there, the tribe needed to bring this to the state of New York’s attention (1). Once a licensing program was formed, the Shinnecock Tribal Nation’s first cannabis dispensary was able to come to fruition. Bullock assists in advocacy work at the state

Read More Here...

Retailers statewide now have the opportunity to sell recreational marijuana after Ohioans legalized it and will alter how businesses operate. 

The proposal will go into effect Dec. 7, but this does not mean retailers will be in possession of marijuana on that date. This has caused questions to surface from citizens. 

The Ohio Department of Commerce will now include a Division of Cannabis Control, because of Issue 2’s passing. They will be responsible for laying out the rules and regulations when it comes to selling marijuana in the state.

“… retail outlets will not be able to sell until all the rules [are] developed by the newly created Division of Cannabis Control,” said Dwayne Siekman, CFO and co-owner of Bliss Ohio, a medical marijuana dispensary in Kent. “So we could see the first sales in Ohio probably around September 2024.”

The reason for the delay when it comes to recreational sales comes down to dispensaries needing to apply for an adult-use license, Dwayne Siekman said. 

“There’s a six-month time frame for us to apply for an adult use license,” Dwayne Siekman said. “Then you have rules that dictate how all the businesses will operate, so that could take up to

Read More Here...

By Steve Gelsi

Rivals Kiva Confections and Wana Brands team up to launch anti-scam campaign to help consumers

Rival cannabis edibles companies Wana Brands and Kiva Confections are warning consumers about online scammers that steal money or sell wares illegally, often at marked-up prices.

Wana and Kiva have banding together amount to launch CannabisSafetyTips.com to help shoppers avoid rip-offs.

As category leaders — the Coke and Pepsi — in the world of cannabis edibles, Wana Brands and and Kiva Confections have teamed up to educate consumers about fake online business accounts, unregulated online products and scammers asking to share financial information.

Here’s four steps they’re promoting to avoid losing money or buying fake products:

Buy in a state with legalized cannabis sales: Wana, Kiva and other edible brands containing THC arenot allowed to be mailed to other states. They’re only sold in licensed dispensaries in states where cannabis is legal, with some local deliveries available in some markets. Wana and Kiva both list states where their products are sold legally on their websites. Buy from a licensed dispensary: Wana and Kiva products sold in unlicensed dispensaries are either

Read More Here...

The California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) put an embargo on three product batches in the state’s regulated market that it suspects were potentially adulterated.

The department sent a letter Nov. 9 warning cannabis program licensees that the continued sale of these products would violate the Medicinal and Adult-Use Regulation and Safety Act (MAURSA), state law governing the industry, as first reported by SFGATE and confirmed by Cannabis Business Times with DCC Media Relations Manager David Hafner.

The products batches include:

Any and all “SHARK BITE – PACIFIC CHEMISTRY” Pre-Rolls from METRC Batch No. 1A406030000465D000001314;Any and all “WEST COAST CURE – BISCOTTI” Disposable Vape Pens from METRC Batch No. 1A4060300009222000010348;Any and all “CRU CANNABIS – MAI TAI” Disposable Vape Pens from METRC Batch No. 1A40603000020EC000009978.

“These items may not be removed or disposed of by sale or otherwise until permission for removal or disposal is given by the department or a court,” DCC officials wrote in the letter obtained by CBT. “The department is diligently conducting its investigation and will provide you with further information as it becomes available.”

According to two specific subsections under the California Business and Professions Code (BPC) listed by the DCC in the letter, department officials

Read More Here...

“We were pushing our rights. We’re just sick of being held down. And every economic opportunity, we’re held back from.”

By Max Nesterak, Minnesota Reformer

About three months ago, Mahnomen County sheriff’s deputies and White Earth tribal police raided Todd Thompson’s tobacco shop, seizing around seven pounds of cannabis, along with $3,000 in cash, his cell phone and surveillance system.

The August 2 raid happened the day after recreational marijuana became legal across the state and was the first major enforcement action under the new law.

But no charges have been filed in the case—and the state may not have the authority to prosecute him or any other tribal member for marijuana crimes on reservations.

Thompson, a member of the White Earth Nation, didn’t have a state permit to sell cannabis nor did he have the consent of the tribal council, which voted days earlier to allow adult-use cannabis and sell marijuana cultivated in its tribal-run facility.

For his part, Thompson doesn’t believe he needs the permission of the state or the tribal council to sell marijuana on the reservation under the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe’s constitution or U.S. treaties with the Ojibwe. That’s why Thompson said he and four other

Read More Here...

Photos: Chris Coe / mg Magazine

Located on Third and Bowery near the perpetually hip East Village, Gotham is precisely the kind of dispensary we imagined when New York legalized: effortlessly classy, confidently understated, and most definitely not “just a weed store.”

We think of ourselves less as a dispensary and more as a concept store,” said founder Joanne Wilson. “We’ve been open for three months, and the feedback has been wonderful.” It’s fitting that Wilson is behind the standout store. The serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and philanthropist has enjoyed a successful career crisscrossing retail, media, tech, and real estate, detailing her life as the archetypal proud, powerful New Yorker in her long-running blog Gotham Gal. While the past decade has seen her become more active as an investor in woman- and minority-owned companies, Gotham marks her return to entrepreneurship and brings her career full circle.

Advertisement

“Gotham is a culmination of so many different things I’ve done over the past couple decades,” she said. “We wanted to make it a place where there are knowledgeable people, excellent products, and great events so you can feel really good being in the space.”

The store’s inventory is a mixture of

Read More Here...