Good morning, insiders.
This week’s big news happened at Monday’s Office of Cannabis Management/Cannabis Control Board meeting, when the agency announced a new round of conditional cultivators, the first round of conditional processor licenses, emergency laboratory regulations and the name of its new director of public policy. Reporter Sean Teehan had the writeup and, as always, we published our updated and searchable database of all licensed growers and (now) processors.
We added a new entry to our “People to know” series featuring Syracuse-native Joe Rossi, who is a lobbyist with Park Strategies and an influential figure in New York’s cannabis regulatory landscape. Rossi successfully advocated for the NY Hemp Extract Law in 2019, the MRTA in 2021 and the Adult Use Conditional Cultivator & Processor Law in 2022, as well as the 280E tax reform measure in the 2022 NYS budget.
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On the medical marijuana front, we published a new story from reporter Tom Wanamaker about the months-long delay with OCM’s home-grow regulations for New Yorkers who rely on cannabis as a medicine – and don’t want to pay the sometimes expensive costs at dispensaries. “It’s frustrating to know that you can cultivate your own, of better quality, at a fraction of the cost,” one patient told Wanamaker.
The founder of Cannaware spoke with NY Cannabis Insider reporter Andrés Rendon about how his organization helps NYC’s underserved get access to information and resources about the state’s legal cannabis space. As an Afro-Latino, Grizzly Bocourt – Cannaware’s founder and executive director – has had negative encounters with police for possessing marijuana, and he is using his organization to prevent the same from happening to others.
In yet another guest column about the OCM’s proposed rules around packaging and advertising, the largest cannabis edibles brand in the US writes that the regulations are “overly excessive and stymie the legal cannabis industry’s ability to compete with and ultimately displace the illicit market.”
Last, we published a new “Ask me anything” with NYC attorney Jeffrey Hoffman, who answered questions about price regulation, licensee financial statements and DASNY spaces.
More to come next week, though fair warning – we’ll be a little light on content as we’re preparing for and putting on our first NYC meetup on Tuesday night. It’s going to be a good one.
Until then!
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