Griffen Thorne

Earlier this month, Vermont became the most recent state to legalize recreational cannabis. In the 2020 elections, cannabis legalization initiatives will appear on the ballots in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota (we’ll be doing a weekly series on these states each Sunday leading up to the election, and you can read about […]

I recently wrote a post outlining the long history of religious exemptions to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA). In this post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the hoops that religious organizations have to jump through. Religious organizations that want to use psychedelics for religious purposes and comply with U.S. law are forced to […]

A few days ago, I wrote a post on cannabis investing and the concept of debt v. equity. I noted that it’s very common to see lenders ask for personal guarantees when providing loans to cannabis businesses. Guaranty agreements are a hugely important type of contract that deserve their own post. Below, I will get […]

For thousands of years, groups of people across the globe have consumed psychedelic (also referred to as entheogenic) plants as part of religious practices. In the twentieth century, many of these religious practices were outlawed by international treaties such as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of […]

Towards the end of 2019, it seemed that cannabis investments had all but dried up. Today, our cannabis lawyers are seeing a huge uptick in investment transactions of all kinds in cannabis and hemp businesses. With investments on the rise again, we plan to do more posts on various legal aspects of cannabis investments. At […]

Until a few weeks ago, everyone in the hemp world thought the next big development would come from the federal Food and Drug Administration (after all, the FDA recently submitted proposed guidance to the White House, which has yet to be released). Unfortunately, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) dropped a surprise interim hemp rule a […]

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect at the beginning of the year. CCPA is a massive privacy law similar in scope to the European Union’s infamous General Data Protection Regulation, and applies to many businesses (not just cannabis businesses) that are based in or even “do business” in California. I wrote about the […]

Yesterday, my Harris Bricken colleague Vince Sliwoski wrote a post entitled, “The Oregon Fires and Cannabis“. Given how fires have been ravaging California for the past few weeks, I thought I’d write on how California’s fires are affected the cannabis industry. For the past few weeks, our California cannabis attorneys have been told by a […]

When the 2018 Farm Bill was inked, one of the biggest perceived wins was a provision prohibiting states from interfering with interstate transport or shipment of hemp. It turns out that this protection was for a long time meaningless. Many hemp transporters today face just as much risk when transporting hemp as they did before […]

California’s three cannabis agencies–the Bureau of Cannabis Control (BCC), California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), and California Department of Public Health (CDPH)–aggressively regulate every aspect of the state’s licensed cannabis industry. Most of the agencies’ rules make sense or have some justifiable purpose. Today, I want to talk about some of the rules that […]