Cannabis Business Times spoke with Hillary Peckham, chief operating officer of Etain, an independent, women- and family-owned medical cannabis operator with a cultivation facility and four dispensaries in New York, to get her take on the bill and how the company plans to transition into the adult-use market.
Hillary Peckham: I think it’s really incredible they have passed legislation with an initiative for diverse business ownership.
Additionally, in other industries New York set goals for purchasing from MWBEs for state contracts, and something similar to that to make sure there’s ongoing commitment to support and purchase from suppliers or retailers in those special category licenses I think will be great.
If they can make medical changes soon, that will be really great, because we’ve been waiting years now for some modernization to the program, and I think that it will be really great for patients to get access sooner and for expanded product capacity.
MS: As of April 13, there are more than 147,600 registered patients in New York’s medical cannabis program.
If the doctor thinks you will benefit with medical cannabis, then you can get access to it.
HP: I think making the medical changes as soon as possible will really have a positive impact on the program and start to expand it, which will help drive scaling, etc., and by getting more patients in the medical program and giving more access.
In the bill there are some effective dates of certain milestones, home grow is effective for medical patients six months from the passage of the bill, so I would assume that is in line with when they are going to start making some changes to the medical program at a minimum.
Because the hemp market and access to CBD did have an impact on the medical market and the products that you can sell, so it’s important to have a regulating body that’s aware of the impact it’s going to have.
When you have a tablespoon of ground flower that you’re then going to vaporize, there’s a certain dosage that’s associated with that, but it has to be ground to less than 5 mm, which is a very small particle size.
We’ve been ready for this kind of change, and our process will need to change because curing will come into play whereas mostly the medical program has been focused on sterilization and making sure that it’s pharmaceutical grade before it goes out to the patient.
Because scaling takes access to capital, and we are trying to figure out our next steps in how to accomplish that, so that’s just something that’s on my mind.
HP: Having an existing footprint and just being able to leverage all the expertise we’ve had now for over five or six years, I think will be a really positive thing for us in this next stage.
We’re starting to reach out to some companies in New York City to try and gain some expertise, especially being in New York with so much culinary expertise.
We reformulated all of our products and the packaging and just started launching that March 1, when we got it all in stores.
“My motivation for accepting his appointment, and my primary goal throughout my term, has been to ensure the public health of Massachusetts residents remained a priority as the commonwealth regulated legal cannabis.
“Commissioner Flanagan has been a strong advocate for public health throughout her long career of service for the people of Massachusetts and brought this expertise to her role on the Cannabis Control Commission,” Baker said.
Throughout her service to the commission, Flanagan offered a strong voice for the health and wellness of Massachusetts residents by advocating for patients and working to create and build out the agency’s award-winning public awareness campaign, among other accomplishments.
“The commonwealth’s patients, consumers, parents and youth have greatly benefited from Commissioner Flanagan’s leadership over the past three and a half years,” Commission Chairman Steven J.
“The commonwealth is a healthier, safer, and more empathetic place because of Commissioner Flanagan’s career in public service,” Commission Executive Director Shawn Collins said.
Prior to her appointment to the commission, Flanagan served as a state senator for the Worcester and Middlesex District, co-authoring the landmark 2014 and 2016 laws addressing substance-use disorder.
The New Mexico Legislature worked overtime, and now adult-use cannabis legalization is official with Democrat Gov.
“And the work of making sure that this industry is a success, that New Mexicans are able to reap the full economic and social benefit of legalized adult-use cannabis, that workplace and roadway safety are assured to the greatest degree possible—that work will go on.
Under the bill, roughly 4% of the excise tax would be distributed back to the local communities where the cannabis is sold, whether it’s a city or county municipality, Martinez said on the floor March 31.
“As we embark on building a brand-new industry and we get to set the rules of the game for how this industry will play out … this is a good opportunity to actually raise revenue,” Martinez said.
According to Martinez, economic projections indicate that adult-use legalization would create more than 11,000 jobs and generate $28.6 million in tax revenue in the first year of implementing a program, which H.B.
“We heard from members of both parties; we heard from members of both chambers that earmarking dollars at this stage of the game, when the framework isn’t even legalized, when revenue isn’t even coming in yet, was not a good idea,” he said.
Meanwhile, several main proposals of the adult-use bill remained intact, such as allowing adults 21 and older to possess no more than 2 ounces of cannabis, 16 grams of cannabis extract or 800 milligrams of edible cannabis.
During the first day of the special session in the upper chamber, the Senate Judiciary Committee added 11 amendments to an accompanying Senate Bill 2, an expungement measure for certain low-level cannabis arrests and convictions.
In addition, the bill states by April 1, 2022 the New Mexico Department of Public Safety shall review the public records in the state’s criminal history databases and identify all past convictions that are potentially eligible for recall, dismissal and expungement.
The new Executive Talent service will help companies secure administrative-level talent as they continue to build out and grow their leadership teams, she said.
“Before hiring at Vangst, we engaged her for our VP of revenue search.
Before taking on the vice president of Executive Talent position at Vangst, Bedford was a veteran recruiter at Signal Partners, an executive search firm headquartered in Los Angeles, where she executed executive searches in the legal and compliant cannabis market.
Vangst’s recruiting services include staffing cannabis companies with positions like marketing managers, budtenders and social media coordinators.
“What CEO Karson Humiston has built is pretty much a top-tier staffing marketplace within cannabis, you know, a ZipRecruiter or an Indeed of the cannabis space,” Bedford said.
So, I learned early on how to find whom I’m looking for and how to get them to talk to me.
I’m looking at Tony and I’m like, “Oh, I like him a lot.” So now I’ve got to get you to talk to me.
Once the sell part is accomplished, then I flip to being a buyer, which is now, “How good is Tony?” That is how executive search works.
And then I showed up at Signal Partners, my recent executive search firm that’s built to service investor-backed and owned operations here in Los Angeles—they’re a national leader as far as associating themselves with the investor side of the house.
To be really good in this business, you’ve got to have a killer tech stack, because if you hire me to do your chief marketing officer search, I want to know within 48 hours who are the best marketing leaders in that lane, and how can I go after them, and how can I find them.
And because my network is investors, I’ve spent years building my network of chief executives, executive-level operators, executives in supply chain and executives in technology.
JB: Well, the answers are pharma, supply chain, distribution—it’s consumer product boxed categories, technology, etc.
JB: That’s not a big thing right now with some states still shut down and a lot of people working remote.
The concentration from our side of the desk is, what’s the talent? Then, as far as relocating, if you live in Brooklyn but I’m headquartered in Chicago, we don’t care right now.
JB: If I’ve spent the last 20 years building a prestigious network of killer executives, Vangst likewise has spent the last five years building the best staffing and recruiting brand name in the business.
JB: I had just finished LeafLink’s chief revenue officer search and recruited a guy out of a software-as-a-service marketplace company, and I had also found LeafLink’s head of insights, so I think LeafLink CEO Ryan Smith had suggested Humiston talk to me.
JB: Remember, I’m a talent scout at the executive level.
We get to elevate Vangst’s clients’ game right now by giving them an executive search offering that they previously had to go out and use a search firm.
But I’m super proud to walk in the door at Vangst with a deep network of not only existing cannabis executives, but also a thousand executives with their hands in the air waiting to be called on.
If you haven’t done your job right as a recruiter and you didn’t vet out what his or her weaknesses are, or vet out that his or her spouse didn’t want to be in that sector, or that his or her kid needed a special school and that relocating was a bad idea—in the human-capital space, you’ve got to know all that.
If somebody falls out at three months, what do we do? Well, there are different contractual promises that I say to a client.
And if you fold the politics and the social equity components and the expungement components and all of that, really what I call good-news aspects of cannabis legalization, you’re going to see us getting better.