Business

Residents in these states will have to wait a bit longer for recreational cannabis to be legalized.

Despite all that's gone on in 2020, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that we're now less than five months away from Election Day. We'll see voters choose who'll be president of the United States for the next four years, and could even witness the current political makeup of Congress shift.

But one of the more interesting stories for 2020 is going to be which states "go green."

On Wednesday, OrganiGram Holdings (NASDAQ:OGI) announced that its subsidiary OrganiGram signed a supply agreement with Canndoc, which is a subsidiary of InterCure. The multiyear agreement requires OrganiGram to supply 3,000 kilograms of dried flower products by the end of next year. The products should be of high quality and grown indoors.

The cannabis industry is set to reach new heights, beyond the pandemic.

Cannabis stocks in general stumbled in the latter half of last year. Wall Street expects profits, and none of these companies is anywhere near profitability. In the United States, high state and local taxes took a toll on sales, as did the lack of federal legalization of marijuana for either medical or recreational use.

While a fair number of these companies are based outside the United States, many of them trade on U.S. indexes. With Canada legalizing weed back in October of 2018, many hope that the United States will follow in the near future.

US states continue to work on marijuana legalization. They have been looking at strategies to gather signatures and qualify for the 2020 ballot. The pandemic made gathering signatures a challenge. People stayed home due to lockdowns. While signature collection failed in many states, some are still working hard. Arkansas faced the same issue. However, a federal judge allowed the state to look at strategies for signature gathering to qualify for the November ballot.

Having worked with many medical marijuana growers, processors, and dispensaries in Oklahoma, it has become abundantly clear that the cannabis industry still lacks best business practices and accounting support. As I meet with business owners during my capacity as a c-suite consultant, the stress of the cannabis business is ever-present.

Legal cannabis sales continue to grow despite the strength of the illegal market. The new State of Legal Cannabis Markets report from The Arcview Group highlights the strengths of the industry going into 2020, while also acknowledging the challenges ahead.

Empirical evidence pertaining to many disruptive developments such as the invention of the World Wide Web, the growth of social media platforms, and the over-the-top content streaming industry, reveals that identifying and investing in these developing trends early could lead to multi-bagger returns.

California was the first state to pass legislation for medical marijuana, and it was among the first to generate a legal adult-use weed industry. After just two years of operation, the recreational dispensaries have generated over $1 billion in tax revenue, which has gone to fund childcare and anti-drug programs for the state’s youth, environmental initiatives like park maintenance and wildland restoration and public safety grants for local police and fire departments. It is amazing to see so many good things come from the simple act of legalizing marijuana.

In recent years, lawsuits directed against the federal government’s prohibition of cannabis have tried—and repeatedly failed—to knock down marijuana’s Schedule I status.

A recently filed lawsuit, however, suggests the legal wall against cannabis legalization should not even exist, due to a mistake made more than 25 years ago.

In late May, Sue Sisley with the Scottsdale Research Institute (SRI) in Arizona, along with three military veterans, filed a legal action against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.