#californiacannabis – “The Huntington Beach City Council has asked voters to approve a general tax on cannabis sales in the city, but it stopped short of pushing through another ballot measure asking if the city should allow and regulate retail and nonretail cannabis businesses….
A simple majority of voters would need to approve the cannabis tax, which would be up to 1% for nonretailers and up to 6% for retailers. A majority of voters — 64.58% — voted to approve a special tax measure, Measure A, on last month’s primary ballot. But that measure required two-thirds voter support because it was a special tax, so it narrowly failed.
“We’re confident that the exact same ballot measure with a 50% threshold will pass, since 65% of the people voted for it in June,” Councilman Dan Kalmick said. “We’re going to continue to do outreach, and I suspect that we can move through this by the end of the year and have an ordinance done.”
#cannabisindustry – “As a possible recession looms in the United States, landlords overcharging cannabis companies for rent might be open to negotiations, said George Mancheril, CEO of Bespoke Financial, a Los Angeles commercial lender that works with cannabis companies.
“Do we play nice, or are you going to be looking for a new tenant in the middle of a recession?” Mancheril asked.
He added that landlords see marijuana businesses as both more lucrative and higher risk, which is why they tend to charge more. But larger macroeconomic factors also play a role.”
#californiacannabis – “Manhattan Beach will ask voters to maintain its ban on commercial cannabis.
The City Council this week voted to place a measure on the Nov. 8 general election ballot that would continue to prohibit marijuana sales, competing with a citizens initiative, the Cannabis Industry Measure, that seeks to repeal that ban and allow up to three dispensaries in town….
The City Council could have also chosen to submit to the ballot a measure to tax cannabis sales, if they’re legalized in November, and a measure that would establish city-ordered regulations such as requiring dispensaries outside of town that deliver to Manhattan Beach to track receipts going to the city and limiting dispensaries in the town to two.
Matt Lesenyie, assistant professor of political science at Cal State Long Beach, said previously that cities’ best options to avoid baffling voters would be to just let them decide on the Cannabis Industry Measure and tack on a tax measure to make the most out of any outcome.
But the council didn’t seem worried about potentially missing out on that tax revenue.”
#californiacannabis – “Bankruptcy reorganization is an option typically utilized by struggling businesses to shed or restructure debt. Cannabis businesses, however, cannot take advantage of bankruptcy remedies because bankruptcy is a product of federal law and federal law still prohibits the sale of cannabis.
As a result, stakeholders in legal California cannabis enterprises must consider alternatives to bankruptcy to collect what they can on their loans and investments in the event the enterprise becomes insolvent or requires restructuring. A well-established alternative to bankruptcy is a state court remedy – the appointment of a receiver over the assets of a business or over the entire business operations. Through the receivership process, stakeholders may obtain many of the same protections available to them through bankruptcy.”
#cannabisresearch – “The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is being sued over repeated delays to requests for records related to psychedelics and marijuana.
This comes amid a multitude of drug policy-focused legal challenges the agency has faced in recent years, including one that concerns DEA’s refusal to provide a doctor with access to psilocybin to treat terminally ill patients under “right to try” laws….
The legal challenge, filed in a federal district court in Texas on Tuesday, comes from a doctor who is part of a separate case contesting DEA’s interpretation of “right to try” laws as it concerns psilocybin, as well attorneys Matt Zorn and Kathryn Tucker, who both worked on that case.
Each of the plaintiffs have laid out the reasons why they are uniquely impacted by DEA’s recalcitrance on FOIA requests. The agency has “adopted an unlawful policy and pattern or practice” of designating requests as “complex,” regardless of the actual complexity of the documents sought, the lawsuit says.
In assigning the FOIA inquiries as “complex” because retrieving the documents in question might involve coordinating with outside offices, DEA has consistently said that the requests raise “unusual circumstances” that exempt them from the statutorily imposed timeline for responding.”
Law Office of Dale Schafer 