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Ohio tops $44 million in first month of adult-use marijuana sales

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This story was republished with permission from Crain’s Cleveland Business.

Ohio dispensaries sold more than $44.05 million in adult-use marijuana in August, according to the latest figures from the Ohio Division of Cannabis Control.

Because rec sales began Aug. 6, that amount reflects just shy of a full month of adult-use retail activity.

“That is $44 million that we took out of the illicit market and away from Michigan dispensaries,” said Tom Haren, spokesman for the OHCANN trade group and a key figure behind last November’s Issue 2 adult-use cannabis referendum. “I think it was a terrific first month.”

That monthly total includes approximately $11.08 million in non-medical sales recorded during the last week of the month.

On average, there was approximately $1.69 million in adult-use marijuana sold in the state per day in August.

Sales were strongest during the first week of adult-use with an average of $2.3 million in sales per day between the Tuesday when those sales began and the following Saturday.

In the three weeks since, average sales per day have settled around $1.5 million to $1.58 million.

If extrapolating the average daily adult-use marijuana sales amount in August across six additional days, Ohio may have recorded around $54.19 million in rec sales for its first month.

Whether looking at that potential figure or the actual number of $44.05 million, adult-use sales activity in Ohio appears relatively strong compared with the first month in some other markets.

Michigan, for example, recorded approximately $7 million in adult-use sales in December 2019, its first month of rec, according to state figures. However, Michigan had just five adult-use retailers at the time, three of which ran out of supplies.

Illinois recorded $39 million in adult-use sales in its first month of rec in January 2020, according to state data. That figure may also have been higher had the state not faced a product shortage that forced some shops to close.

There is no shortage of product in Ohio and nearly 100 active dispensaries in the state, so this market is not facing the challenges those others saw in the early days of their adult-use programs.

Missouri, meanwhile, had its first month of adult-use marijuana sales in February 2023. The state reported $71.7 million in adult-use sales that month (about $2.56 million per day on average), which vastly exceeded expectations. That same month, the state recorded $31.2 million in medical marijuana sales.

Over the same time frame as the first month of adult-use in Ohio — so looking at Aug. 6 through the end of the month — there was approximately $31.59 million in medical sales, or about $1.21 million per day on average in the state.

Operators are generally pleased with the first month of rec marijuana sales in Ohio.

“We’re just 26 days in, and consumers are just dipping their toes in the water with legal cannabis for the first time, so this is a solid launch right out of the gate,” said Jason Erkes, spokesman with Chicago-based Cresco Labs (OTC: CRLBF), which operates the Sunnyside brand of dispensaries. “With a minimal ramp-up period and no marketing or advertising, the revenue numbers are beyond impressive and will continue to grow as more stores open and more awareness builds about legal cannabis across the state.”

Haren said his expectation is that Ohio’s adult-use market will continue to grow from here as consumers adjust, more retailers open and prices come down.

As of the latest DCC data, the average pre-tax price for marijuana flower in Ohio during the last week of August was $25.46 per one-tenth of an ounce (or a so-called “day unit”) and approximately $9 per gram compared to $26.59 per one-tenth of an ounce and $9.40 per gram at the start of the month.



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Cansortium CEO talks future of Florida market in wake of Amendment 3 defeat

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While many licensed cannabis operators threw significant resources at expanding in Florida in anticipation of an adult-use market being legalized, Florida-based Cansortium Inc. (CSE: TIUM.U) (OTCQB: CNTMF) held steady, which ultimately looked like the right move after recreational marijuana failed at the ballot box.

CEO Robert Beasley said his company now has an edge heading into what could be a heady year of mergers and acquisitions.

Beasley recently spoke with Green Market Report about his top priorities heading into 2025.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What hurdles and business obstacles do you expect Fluent is going to have to deal with and overcome in 2025?

Florida is going to be tough. We’re looking at a total knife fight.

It was a gold rush into this state in the anticipation of Amendment 3 passing. A lot of folks came in, bought up those smaller licenses, put a bunch of stores on the ground. Green Dragon’s a great example of that. They come in and dropped 34 stores overnight, almost. That’s a build-it-and-they’ll-come philosophy.

Well, we built it, and they didn’t come.

Now, our company didn’t do any of that. I decided I would catch it later, that I could not expend financial sums of this company based on a political outcome, because political outcomes are so uncertain.

Now all that supply’s got to come into the market, and it’s going to compress price. We started seeing it Nov. 6, and it’s going to continue until these players will kind of fold under.

When we did this transaction (with RIV Capital and Scotts Miracle-Gro), we acquired a bunch of cash. We’re getting a lot of calls, a lot of interested Florida players saying, “Hey, do you want to talk?” And it’s because we’ve gone up and everybody else is going down now. I’ll admit our sales are also being impacted, but we just happened to have transacted our way into a big cash position right as that happened. Call it luck.

So we’re anticipating a 10%-12% decrease in sales over the year. I’ve been trying to figure out how to publish that, because the winds are against us. The bell has rung, and we are going to have to just hunker down.

Along those lines, what sort of ripple effects are you expecting in the Florida market? Are you expecting any other operators to actually go under or go up for sale?

They won’t go under. The consolidation appetite is still pretty heavy. And we’re seeing more and more new money come in every day. You’re seeing a lot more of that creativity. And so these players won’t disappear. They’ll just be consolidated.

And we’re hoping to be a part of that. We’re buying, we’re out there ready to eat. We’re going to have to grow behind the curtain, and that means more M&A. For instance, we would buy someone a little bit smaller than us, let’s say an 11-store outfit or a smaller grow outfit.

And then we’ve got to get rid of that license. The crazy thing is license price. When I first started in this business, the license price was $50 million, and now it’s $4 million. Pretty soon in Florida, you’ll be able to get a license for $100,000, like you can a liquor license. And then what?

Any other legislative items in Tallahassee that you’re hoping are maybe going to get through this year to help out the Florida cannabis business industry at all?

Everything that’s being proposed now is kind of a whiplash from Amendment 3. I anticipate THC caps, store caps being proposed. Now, don’t get me wrong, as a business person, both of those are reasonable – if done reasonably. Do we want store caps? Well, no, but do we want to be Colorado? No, we don’t want to be that either.

THC cap? What we’re doing to this plant now is a little bit murderous. We’re convincing a plant that used this chemical element as a deterrent, as a pesticide, and we convinced it to produce 32% of its total volume. We could probably back off of that.

How do you feel heading into 2025 about the prospects for Fluent? Are you confident, for instance, that the rescheduling process and the nullification of 280E is going to be completed under the Trump administration?

I am. I think that that was one of the benefits of the cannabis industry from the election. I don’t know that we had a bad choice as far as candidate, because either candidate seemed to be supportive, or in Trump’s case, maybe at least agnostic to cannabis, which is sometimes the best you can hope for out of a politician.

And the process had already commenced. My concern is, what next? Does (marijuana) become an FDA-regulated product? Does that mean are we a pharmacy now? Do we have pharmacists in our stores? We have that requirement in both Pennsylvania and New York, and it adds a tremendous economic burden because pharmacists in that employee class, you’re not in cannabis anymore, you’re competing with Walgreens and CVS and so forth, and they’re very aggressive with their pharmacists, so that could be a problem.

The benefits to rescheduling are obvious and on its face, the detriments are not as obvious.



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He was sent to prison for cannabis. A decade later, he’s getting his ‘Redemption.’

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This story was republished with permission from Crain’s Detroit.

This spring, Ryan Basore will return to Morgantown, West Virginia.

It will have been a decade since he walked out of federal prison there, after serving three years for federal drug crimes linked to a 41-plant medical marijuana grow operation in Okemos in the early days of legalization in Michigan.

But Basore, 48, returns to West Virginia as an owner and operator of a newer, growing marijuana company. His Lansing-based Redemption Cannabis Co. will find its products in a dispensary of one of the U.S.’s largest cannabis operators, Trulieve Cannabis Corp.

“What they did to me and my family … I was a mess going into prison,” said Basore, whose soft voice and wide shoulders say more small-town barstool intellectual than a hardened inmate. “My attitude going in was to use this as my crucible moment. I started walking. I lost 70 pounds. I read 300 books, mostly about branding. I did 100 sweats with the Native American group in prison. I did everything I could so that I was shot out of cannon when I got out. I knew I was getting right back in the industry.”

Basore has spent the last 10 years rebuilding his life — his brother-in-law and father-in-law were also swept up in the federal prosecution and served federal time — and building his brand.

Redemption Cannabis is as much a story as it is a product.

Basore uses his indictment as a battering ram against marijuana drug laws — he helped author Michigan’s adult-use laws that allowed for those with federal charges to gain access to cannabis business licenses and raised funds for pot-friendly politicians like Attorney General Dana Nessel — and as a means to grow his company. Redemption Cannabis donates money to federal prisoners and it got the attention of Trulieve, which is now expanding the Redemption brand across the nation, currently in four states and adding a fifth in West Virginia.

Running afoul

Basore, a longtime marijuana user and advocate, left a real estate insurance career to open Lansing’s first medical marijuana provisioning center, Capital City Caregivers, in 2010.

The success of that operation led Basore to open a medical marijuana cultivation site a few miles down the road in Okemos.

At that time, then-President Barack Obama had eased federal restrictions on state legalization of marijuana. Michigan voters approved the medical marijuana caregiver laws in 2008, but the industry largely existed in a gray area with few rules and then-Attorney General Bill Schuette rallying to upend the law and give county prosecutors authority to shut them down. Schuette later won a Michigan Supreme Court Case in 2013 that said medical dispensaries could be shuttered over the Michigan Public Health code classifying them as a “public nuisance.”

Basore said he was careful in opening the grow site, allowing the Michigan State Police and other law enforcement to inspect the operations before moving forward.

Credit: Ryan Basore Redemption Cannabis founder Ryan Basore, at left, attends a pro-cannabis legalization rally in this undated photo.

But Basore was outspoken for the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, and against Schuette. Despite believing he had the blessing of the federal government, Basore’s operations were raided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, National Guard and the MSP on Dec. 1, 2010, only months after the cultivation site opened.

The investigation would take more than two years, resulting in Basore being indicted on 13 federal counts for the manufacturing and distribution of marijuana.

Basore held out hope that an open seat in Michigan Western District Court would be filled by a marijuana-friendly judge. Obama appointed then-Dickinson Wright attorney Pat Miles Jr. to the role; who did not dismiss the case against Basore or the six others charged, known as the Okemos 7.

By early 2013, Basore said he ran out of money to fight the charges and pled guilty to two felony counts with sentence of 48 months in prison at Federal Prison Camp Morgantown in West Virginia.

“They had threatened to indict my now-wife,” Basore said. “I was out of money and knew I had no choice but to accept a plea deal.”

Basore received an early release in May 2015 after attending a federal behavioral modification program.

He quickly reentered the industry, but only as a consultant. Michigan’s medical marijuana laws prohibited individuals with felonies from holding a license.

Credit: Ryan Basore
Ferndale-based Gage Cannabis awarded Ryan Basore a $50,000 grant as a part of a social equity program after cannabis was legalized in Michigan in 2018. Basore used the grant to establish Redemption Cannabis.

Basore spent the next several years as an axe battering away at the armor of Michigan’s anti-cannabis political establishment.

He, and his partners, became major political fundraisers for Dana Nessel’s campaign to become Attorney General and push the state’s adult-use recreational marijuana laws, which would allow for felons like Basore to hold licenses under a special social equity distinction.

After Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act in 2018, Ferndale-based Gage Cannabis offered $1 million in grants to social equity applicants. Basore secured a $50,000 grant to establish Redemption Cannabis.

“I knew I had an opportunity, but I had no capital and needed to rebuild everything,” Basore said.

Errors and absolution

But the hard luck continued for Basore. He ordered his first batch of Redemption Cannabis packaging in 2019 from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak.

He eventually received the packaging and launched Redemption in 15 stores across the state.

In the meantime, Basore launched the Redemption Foundation, designed to aid federal prisoners in jail for nonviolent marijuana crimes.

Credit: Ryan Basore. Redemption Cannabis founder Ryan Basore, left, and Vice President of Business Development Mark Passerini, right, hold a donation to the Redemption Foundation.

The foundation has purchased wheelchairs, food and gifts for children with a parent in prison and funded expungements. But its largest function is to fill the commissary funds of select prisoners.

Redemption Foundation has deposited money into the commissary accounts of 195 inmates across the U.S. so they can buy better shoes, snacks, toothpaste and other supplies in prison.

Basore said the money goes a long way to supplement prisoner paychecks. He earned $0.14 an hour as a custodian in the West Virginia prison, eventually earning $35 per month working the facility’s law library. Meanwhile, phone calls in prison cost $0.50 a minute and internet use was $0.25 a minute, he said.

Last month, the foundation deposited $15,500, roughly 10% of the cannabis company’s revenue plus donations from partners, into commissary funds.

As Basore’s operations grew, so did the company’s appetite for cultivation. Last year, Driven Cannabis, a grow operation run by his friend Drew Driver in Frederic Township between Gaylord and Grayling, merged with Redemption Cannabis.

The Driven operations, which include 15 acres of outdoor grow, 60,000 square feet of indoor cultivation and 15,000-square-feet of processing, will be rebranded as Redemption Cannabis in the coming months.

The growth is triggered by a licensing agreement Redemption secured with Florida-based multi-state operator Trulieve Cannabis Corp. — the third-largest cannabis company in the U.S.

Trulieve grows Redemption’s handpicked cannabis strains in other states and packages them for Redemption. The brand launched in Maryland in June last year and is now for sale in Pennsylvania, with launches in Ohio and Arizona in the fall later this year.

“Michigan is just a knife fight,” Mark Passerini, vice president of business development for Redemption, told Crain’s. “It’s a crazy competitive market and we’ve been a top-15 brand here for a while. While we’re proud of that, we knew we needed to expand elsewhere.”

Redemption now employs more than 100 workers and is available in 250 dispensaries across the state.

Basore said the company’s blossoming in the tightest margin market in the country makes growth elsewhere easier.

“If you can make it in Michigan, you can make it anywhere,” he said with a rare wry smile.

‘The Jared Goff of weed’

Basore is selling a story with Redemption. It’s a social cause behind a label. It’s his story of incarceration and comeback that he hopes is resonating.

Nick Young, an advisor for Baltimore-based cannabis advisory firm Tivity Labs and adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, said it’s a marketing strategy that works in cannabis.

“Prohibition branding resonates with 30- to 45-year-olds; the people who saw marijuana prohibition and saw it come down,” Young said. “It strikes an emotional chord for them. And I know my students are willing to pay a little more to feel good about a service or brand — whether that’s sustainable packaging or another social mission like Redemption’s. The commissary fund is something they’ve done a good job marketing. I think about them as the Jared Goff of weed. Sent off to rot and came back stronger than before. That resonates.”

Basore’s return to Morgantown with Redemption and Trulieve is a middle finger to the political powers and laws that incarcerated him.

“Leaving that place, I never wanted to go back,” he said. “I can take myself back to that cell in my mind. But now I see that time with gratitude, or try to. Because of that experience, we have to be successful no matter what. It raised the stakes for me.”

And by all measures, Basore has won.

In December, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced it would be permanently shuttering the federal prison in Morgantown, which houses roughly 390 white-collar and drug crime inmates, due to “staffing shortages” and “crumbling infrastructure.”

To complete his full redemption, Basore is seeking a full presidential pardon from President Joe Biden — a clock that will expire on Jan. 20 when incoming President Donald Trump is inaugurated.

Still, Basore said he has contacts within that administration as well.

“That’s redemption to me,” he said. “I can’t have a gun as a felon. Just to be able to go hunting again, to have my slate wiped clean. That’s very real for me.”



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Berkeley Patients Group faces $250K in unpaid bills claims

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Three companies have sued the nation’s oldest cannabis dispensary for allegedly failing to pay more than $250,000 in bills, according to local media reports.

Berkeley Patients Group faces lawsuits from a cannabis supplier, security firm and landlord filed over the past 13 months. The dispensary has denied all allegations in court filings.

Flow Cannabis claims $60,605 in unpaid bills for cannabis products in a December 2023 lawsuit, according to court documents obtained by Berkeleyside, a Berkeley news organization.

ABC Security Service Inc. of Oakland alleges the dispensary owes $73,864 for security services dating back to December 2022.

A third lawsuit filed by property owner AZ DV Real Estate seeks $127,160 in unpaid rent for a planned location at 1101 University Ave. that never opened.

The dispensary has operated in Berkeley since 1999, when it opened as a medical marijuana collective. It expanded into recreational cannabis sales in 2018 after California legalized adult use.

However, cannabis prices and product quality have declined since 2018 due to market competition, which dispensary co-owner previously told Berkeleyside . The company has reported annual sales in the tens of millions of dollars, though current figures weren’t available.

The lawsuits come as California’s cannabis retailers face growing market pressures, occasionally amplified by environmental woes. Many struggle with falling wholesale prices while competing against illegal sellers who avoid taxes and regulations.

The dispensary has faced previous challenges. In 2013, it paid $49,500 to settle a $7.5 million state tax bill. Federal prosecutors in 2012 forced it to relocate from San Pablo Avenue to move farther from schools.

Berkeley Patients Group continues operating at its current San Pablo Avenue location, where it has been since the 2012 relocation.





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