Earlier this week, I wrote about how hemp businesses should not yet rely on the 2018 Farm Bill to protect them from their products being seized. This is because although Section 10114 of the 2018 Farm Bill prohibits states from interfering with the interstate transport of hemp and hemp products, that protection is limited to
As ardent followers of this blog are well aware, one of my favorite pastimes is keeping tabs on who is suing whom in the cannabis industry for trademark infringement. These lawsuits serve as great examples for my clients of what NOT to do when choosing a brand for their company. The last couple of years
For a while, criminal conspiracy lawsuits against cannabis operations looked like a potentially promising strategy for cannabis prohibitionists to try and use litigation to reverse the trend of legalization. The idea is to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”), a federal statute intended to combat organized crime–and which allows private rights of
On December 20th, U.S. Tax Court issued its opinion in Alternative Health Care Advocates et al. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The long opinion details various issues related to the specific case, but we will concentrate on one relatively small piece of it. How would the Tax Court treat income paid from a marijuana retailer
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that finding marijuana stems in a trash bag does not permit the police to search the house for evidence of a crime. From a legal standpoint this case has interesting implications on when, where, and what police can search. From a more practical perspective, it shows the
Medical marijuana is legal in Montana. Unfortunately, that does not prevent local employers from terminating workers for legal, off-work use of marijuana in the state. In 2010, while already employed by Charter Communications, LLC, Lance Carlson was issued a medical marijuana card under Montana Medical Marijuana Act to treat chronic low back and stomach pain.
In recent posts, we’ve discussed cases where a neighbor to a cannabis grow sued the grower for nuisance, claiming that growing cannabis interfered with the neighbor’s use of their land. See here, here, here, here, and here. These lawsuits relied on the non-cannabis landowner’s claims that the federally illegal cannabis business caused harm because of odor, disruptive
Poor Josephine County. We have been writing on this blog about the southern Oregon county’s mounting frustrations with cannabis, its successive losses in litigation, and its most recent attempt in federal district court to submarine Oregon’s cannabis programs. We immediately identified this lawsuit as a “stunning overreach” and we predicted the county would lose. To
We’ve written extensively about the dos and don’ts of filing cannabis-related state and federal trademarks, and we all know by now that you cannot obtain a federal trademark registration for goods or services that are not lawful pursuant to federal law. But I’ve heard a lot of creative arguments in this space, and have had many
Back in December, we wrote about Murphy v. NCAA (“Murphy”), a case where the State of New Jersey challenged a federal law that bans states from allowing sports gambling. We explained that this case has important implications for state-legal marijuana programs, because it asks whether the Constitution’s anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from forcing states
