Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines and perhaps you’re intrigued. Alabama physicians appear to be on the precipice of certifying patients to obtain medical cannabis for certain qualifying conditions. Assuming the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission issues at least one cannabis dispensary license at its meeting on January 8, which it is widely expected to do, that
It’s that time of year again. Our annual round-up featuring some of the most read content on Budding Trends in the past year. This year’s edition has a little something for everyone: marijuana, hemp, mushrooms, state law, federal law, banking, intellectual property, and more!
Before we dive right in, we want to plug our January
As we close the book on 2025 and look ahead, we can’t help but feel a strong sense that we’ve been here before.
On the one hand, with the federal government potentially eradicating consumable hemp in November and the president ordering urgent action on marijuana rescheduling in December, it may not be an exaggeration to say
A few weeks ago, someone at a holiday party asked “Whitt, why doesn’t Budding Trends take on the weighty legal issues of the day and instead resort to cheap pop culture references and puns?” I thought about responding with a quote from “Run Like an Antelope” but then it hit me: Maybe we
Sportscaster Jim McKay famously said that “our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized.” When the federal government enacted a law that, on its face, would essentially eradicate the consumable hemp industry in America, my first reaction was great sadness for those I had gotten to know in the industry and those millions of
You’re awake. This is real. Yes, the federal government just passed a law that, if it goes into effect in its current form in a year, will essentially destroy the non-industrial hemp industry as it exists today. So now what?
I suspect it will take some longer than others to process the shock. While anti-hemp
“It’s not about ‘having’ time. It’s about making time. If it matters, you will make time.” – Unknown
Stakeholders in the marijuana space have been anxiously awaiting news about rescheduling marijuana since the Biden administration announced its intention to consider rescheduling in August 2023. And while we are less than a year into
This past summer, a collection of hemp companies in Charm City Hemp, LLC asked a Maryland federal court for a preliminary injunction halting aspects of Maryland’s cannabis licensing scheme (the term cannabis encompassing both recreational marijuana and hemp). Specifically, plaintiffs alleged that Maryland is wrongly requiring hemp producers to acquire a “recreational cannabis license.” That
Few areas of law have been able to expose the contradictions of federal cannabis policy quite like the Dormant Commerce Clause. The Constitution’s long-standing rule against state economic protectionism has recently found itself in the middle of cannabis licensing disputes. The result is a body of case law that is fractured, just like the state-by-state
There’s a scene just before the final firefight in Platoon, Oliver Stone’s unflinching view into the experiences of a group of young Americans fighting in Vietnam, that reminds me of the state of the potential rescheduling of marijuana by the federal government. In the scene, as Sgt. “Red” O’Neill (played with the typical