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More on Cuomo’s amended legalization proposal.
As Cannabis Wire reported last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a revision to his adult use legalization proposal amid pressure from lawmakers. While his office provided the main points at the time, we recently spotted the full amendments documents posted by the Division of the Budget.
One detail in the newly-posted documents stood out in particular: “The board may approve adult-use retail dispensaries which engage solely in the retail delivery of adult-use cannabis products without an approved storefront location.”
This sounds familiar to a license type created in neighboring Massachusetts (reserved for social equity applicants), with which a licensee could store cannabis in a warehouse and then retail the products, via delivery, to consumers.
How do North Carolina residents feel about cannabis?
A new Elon University Poll asked 1,455 people in North Carolina how they felt about cannabis, and found:
• 73% support legalization for medical use
• 54% support legalization for adult use
• 67% support decrim
• 53% reject the “gateway drug” notion
• 64% believe legalization would help the economy
• 63% don’t feel that it is “morally wrong” to use cannabis
But there were a couple of eye opening questions where the “don’t know” responses were so high that there wasn’t a majority opinion on one side or the other.
This was the case in response to a question about whether crime would increase after legalization, with 45% saying it would decrease, 24% saying it would increase, and 31% saying they “don’t know.”
Another question was focused on whether car accidents would rise after legalization, with 36% saying they would increase, 17% saying they would decrease, and a whopping 48% saying they “don’t know,” which illustrates the lack of understanding, both among researchers and among the general public, when it comes to cannabis-impaired driving.
A snapshot of Illinois’ cannabis industry, pre-equity.
In June 2019, adult use cannabis became legal in Illinois. The law allowed existing medical cannabis shops to obtain a license to sell adult use cannabis at their medical shop, and a license to sell adult use cannabis at another location, starting in January 2020. The law also required that up to 75 new retail licenses be issued in 2020, and up to another 110 in 2021.
Those new licenses are supposed to be focused on equity, but the rollout has been riddled with issues and lawsuits. Nonetheless, the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation released a required report last week, and it provides a snapshot of the adult use cannabis retail landscape in the state as of June 2020. Or, in other words, pre-equity. Let’s just say the findings are unsurprising.
