A California cannabis industry executive is calling on President Donald Trump to use his executive power in the waning days of his presidency by issuing a pardon to a nonviolent cannabis offender. Kyle Kazan, the CEO of vertically-integrated cannabis company Glass House Group, issued the plea for clemency for Parker Coleman, Jr. in an open letter to the president.

If you’ve never visited a state where cannabis is legal (and you’ve never been to Canada), you might imagine the fully-legal corners of the world as hash heaven – people picnicking with joints in hand, basking in Bob Ross-like golden rays of sunshine and the sweet freedom that comes from being able to light up whenever you please.

We hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that’s not the reality – like, at all.

It goes without saying, but 2020 was a pretty wild year for the California cannabis and hemp industries. We think 2021 will be a pretty active year and want to list out some things to watch out for as we kick off the new year.

Agency Consolidation: It was announced in January 2020 that California’s three cannabis agencies’ regulatory authority would be consolidated into a single, new agency, the Department of Cannabis Control. We expect that there will be significant efforts in 2021 to make this happen, which will be a big shake-up for California’s regulated cannabis industry.

Making predictions about California’s marijuana industry was a challenge even before a global pandemic changed everything.

It’s not just that the legal cannabis market, which launched three years ago in California, is so new. It’s also the singularity of an industry in which licensed, legal operators still compete against a much larger illicit market, even as the industry’s core consumer product — which is medicine for some people — remains illegal at the federal level.

The harvest was glorious, mellow and abundant. It was sunny and mostly warm up until the first week of November, when forecasts of the first rain and then a hard frost mandated that we cut the final cultivar a few days early. 

Other than the unfortunate farms that burned and lost their whole crops, and some other growers in the immediate area who were smoked out, the 2020 California sungrown cannabis crop doesn’t seem to have suffered much testable damage.

Photo Nikki Lastreto

Even during a pandemic, 'tis the season of giving and gifting loved ones with cannabis seems to be the latest holiday trend. That finding is from a new poll conducted by Glass House Group, a California-based cannabis and hemp company, which runs several dispensaries and a couple of grow sites.

The sale of cannabis in California went legal in 2016, and retailers were able to open their doors two years later. Along with the legal retail sale of cannabis came two new taxes — a cultivation tax on all harvests and an excise tax on the purchase of weed and products made with it; the usual sales taxes, both state and local, also applied. They add up, and in the third quarter of 2020, California’s total cannabis tax revenue was $306.7 million. Of that amount, the state gained sales and excise tax on $11 million worth of retail cannabis sold in cities in Santa Barbara County.

The Bureau of Cannabis Control‘s Cannabis Advisory Committee approved recommendations that would relax several regulations for the California cannabis industry, aimed at helping struggling cannabis businesses. The recommendations were included in the state panel’s annual report.

While arguably the largest state market for cannabis in the United States, California legal cannabis businesses struggle with competition from illegal cannabis sellers, among many other obstacles to expanded profitability. Though classified as essential services by the state, the businesses also have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and new public health requirements for retail and manufacturing industries.

California’s booming cannabis industry has been around much longer than many in the United States, and now, the state is on pace to collect as much as $1 billion in taxes from sales made in 2020, a record landmark for the local industry. 

California is on pace to collect $1 billion in taxes from licensed cannabis sales in 2020, even amid challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and a still thriving black market for it, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s senior adviser on cannabis business said Thursday.

The rate of legal sales has increased this year, and in the third quarter the state fetched $306.7 million in excise, cultivation and sales taxes, bringing the overall year-to-date total to $777 million, said Nicole Elliot, who delivered the keynote during a virtual regional cannabis conference sponsored by the North Bay Business Journal.

“This puts the industry on track to generate closer to $1 billion this year, which is quite impressive,” Elliot said.