The program is “designed to expand opportunities for marginalized or under-represented individuals to participate in the state’s regulated marijuana industry.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

Missouri received nearly 900 applications for its final round of marijuana microbusiness licenses, with the Missouri Lottery scheduled to draw applicants on September 9 for 77 available licenses.

But unlike the entrepreneurs selected in the program’s first two rounds, this year’s applicants will enter a system reshaped by two years of growing pains and dozens of license revocations.

Jimi Poe, owner of 816 Dispensary in Platte City, was among the first microbusiness licensees selected in 2023. Two years later, he opened Missouri’s first operating microbusiness dispensary.

“It was definitely a long journey,” Poe said during the Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation’s latest podcast episode. “It was a journey that round three people are not going to have to go.”

The microbusiness program was established through the 2022 constitutional amendment voters approved to legalize recreational marijuana. It was “designed to expand opportunities for marginalized or under-represented individuals to participate in the state’s regulated marijuana industry,” according to the state’s website.

As part of the DCR Out Loud episode, Poe spoke with Lesley Turek, the division’s chief equity officer, about the evolution of the program since its inception in 2023.

This is the third and final lottery for microbusinesses, where the state will issue at least 29 wholesale and at least 34 dispensary licenses to meet the constitutional requirement of 144 total micro licenses.

Poe was one of the “pioneers” of the microbusiness industry, Turek said, and as of August 18, there are 21 operational microbusiness licenses—five dispensaries and 16 wholesale.

These companies heavily relied on each other to learn and grow their businesses, Poe said, so it’s important for new owners to build relationships right away.

“That’s one of the great benefits of the microbusiness program,” Turek said, “is that it really is a community.”

Turek, who oversees the microbusiness program, also stressed that the winners should also develop a relationship with their compliance officers so they understand the new rules put in place in May. They’re rules cannabis regulators proposed in 2024 after they revoked numerous licenses due to unconstitutional ownership deals.

“I think it’s really important too for licensees,” she said, “both current and future applicants, to understand—any sort of arrangement or agreements that you are trying to get into, include DCR with those so that we can make sure that you’re remaining compliant.”

The new rules governing the microbusiness program provide a deeper explanation of what it means to “majority own and operate” a license, which was a requirement in the 2022 constitutional amendment.

They allow regulators to complete an extensive review of potential ownership arrangements before the licenses are issued, rather than afterwards. And they mandate that regulators communicate directly with majority owners, not consultants, and that applicants take a course on compliance before applying and after receiving the license.

Poe’s journey

When Poe was 20, he said he got slapped with a nonviolent marijuana charge.

“I had a so-called friend get in trouble,” Poe told Turek, “and he wanted to get out of that trouble, so he hooked me up with an undercover cop and told me it was his uncle.”

He ended up selling 12 pounds to the undercover cop and did 14 months in prison.

“I was dating my wife at the time, and I remember telling her that, ‘Hey, do this bit with me, and I promise I’ll never sell marijuana again,’” Poe said. “And I never did until here we are, selling marijuana together in the dispensary under a state license.”

August 4 was the 20th anniversary of the day he got busted.

Now his charge is an important part of his business’ story, and it also made him eligible to apply for a microbusiness.

“I remember when I first won the license, I was like, ‘I’m gonna be the first to open,’” he said. “That was my goal from the time I won the license, and I also wanted to make my mark within the industry. So I felt like I achieved those goals.”

While it took two years instead of the six months he anticipated to open, Poe stressed that it won’t be as hard for these new winners.

“There’s a lot more people that are coming online,” he said, “and there’s a lot more stuff out there than when I first started. There were a lot of gray areas, and people were still trying to figure it out.”

When he opened his doors, “people thought I was crazy,” he said.

He only had nine different strands of what the industry calls “flower,” or dry weed in containers.

Now he has 32 different strains of flower, disposable distillate carts, multiple different dabs and 12 different pre-rolled joints. His menu started as one page and now it’s eight pages long, so “things have grown tremendously,” in a year, he said.

“We’re still lacking on the manufacturer side,” Poe said of the microbusiness community. “The manufacturing and equipment and the know-how, people are still trying to figure that out.”

Turek said before the Missouri Lottery draws the winners, cannabis regulators will vet the applications for basic things, like making sure no one has applied twice and application fees have been paid.

“It does take a little bit of time,” she said, “because if, for example, an application fee doesn’t come through, we give that person a chance to make that payment so that they can go to the lottery.”

Then after the draw, Turek said they’ll be in “full processing mode.”

They will be conducting a full review of the top-drawn applications, making sure that all the business arrangements are compliant with state law and background checks show no disqualifying felonies.

“We’ll start by making a phone call to reach out to the owners and say, ‘Hey, it’s us, DCR. Here’s your specialist with this team,’” Turek said. “Give you specific names to contact and tell you what’s going to happen in the process.”

If that application doesn’t meet state requirements, then the next top-drawn applicant will be processed. This is part of the new rules to prevent numerous license revocations.

Lisa Cox, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department for Health and Senior Services that oversees the cannabis division, said the division plans to award microbusiness licenses from Round 3 before the end of 2026.

Currently, there are 46 microbusiness licenses from the Round 1 and 2 that are active but not yet approved to operate.

Poe said that’s partly because owners were nervous to open and unsure if the microbusiness program was going to thrive.

“I’ve been operational for over a year,” he said, “and I’ve proven that we’re going to make it.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

Photo courtesy of Mike Latimer.

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“Defendants are free to implement the law as they see fit, including accepting applications, holding a lottery, and issuing adult-use recreational and social equity cannabis licenses.”

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

A federal court order that blocked Rhode Island regulators from awarding cannabis retail licenses is now lifted, clearing the way for a new application process already underway.

U.S. District Court Judge Melissa DuBose on Friday dissolved the preliminary injunction she issued against the Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission on April 8 now that the state’s 2022 Cannabis Act Act no longer requires all retail license holders to be majority-owned by Rhode Island residents.

“Defendants are free to implement the law as they see fit, including accepting applications, holding a lottery, and issuing adult-use recreational and social equity cannabis licenses,” DuBose, a Biden appointee, wrote.

DuBose indicated in a July 22 order she would grant the state’s motion to dissolve the April ruling once the three lawsuits challenging Rhode Island’s residency requirements were kicked down from Boston’s appellate court, which happened August 11.

Under the new law signed by Gov. Dan McKee (D) on June 10, applicants are defined as a person or a business who has “made an application for issuance of a license or certificate to own or engage in a cannabis business.”

The amended Cannabis Act voided the original application process, and the Cannabis Control Commission opened a new one on August 7. Online submissions for the state’s three license types will be accepted through Monday, November 23.

“The General Assembly’s passage of SB 3313 removed provisions deemed likely to violate the Constitution and because of that, the controversy at issue in the preliminary injunction is no  longer immediate or real,” DuBose wrote.

The legal challenges began in May 2024, when California cannabis entrepreneur Justyna Jensen sued the Cannabis Control Commission in U.S. District Court in Providence, arguing Rhode Island’s residency requirement for licenses under the original Cannabis Act violated interstate commerce protection. That same month, Florida resident John Kenney filed a second federal lawsuit against the commission objecting to the residency requirement. A California resident filed a third lawsuit on similar grounds on November 24, 2025.

DuBose initially dismissed the complaints in February 2025 since two were filed before the commission enacted the state’s inaugural cannabis regulations in May 2025. But the cases were revived in December by Boston’s federal appeals court, which demanded DuBose rule based on the merits of the cases.

Her April ruling barred the Cannabis Control Commission from holding a lottery to award licenses and reviewing the 97 license applications submitted for 20 new retail cannabis licenses.

Because of the state’s recent changes, regulators filed a motion in late June to dissolve DuBose’s preliminary injunction arguing the complaints against the residency requirement were moot.

Kenney and his attorneys supported the state’s request. Jensen and her legal team opposed it, claiming the new law still disadvantaged out-of-state applicants because they would have to secure property in Rhode Island on a short timeline in order to qualify for a retail license.

DuBose was unpersuaded by Jensen’s argument.

“She has had years, not months, to scour the Rhode Island market in search of a suitable property,” DuBose wrote in Friday’s ruling. “She has also had at least four months to search for property since this court entered its injunction.”

Jeffrey Jensen, Justyna’s husband and attorney, did not immediately respond to request for comment Monday.

Charon Rose, spokesperson for the Cannabis Control Commission, said the agency welcomed DuBose’s decision to dissolve the injunction but declined to comment further amid the ongoing litigation.

No applications for adult-use retail licenses have been submitted as of Monday afternoon, Rose confirmed in an email. The commission has received 32 interest forms from prospective social equity applicants, with 13 applying for initial screening for the license type reserved for people adversely affected by the war on drugs.

Social equity businesses must be majority owned by one or more people who can show they were disproportionately impacted by criminal enforcement of past prohibitions, including being arrested or having a family member who was.

The certification process will remain open through September 11.

This story was first published by Rhode Island Current.

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“Our focus is to maintain that momentum by implementing the amended Cannabis Act as efficiently as possible.”

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

Rhode Island’s Cannabis Control Commission on Friday reopened the application process for prospective retailers after regulators’ first attempt to license more pot shops was halted by a federal court order and voided under a new state law.

Gov. Dan McKee (D) on June 10 signed a pair of bills that undo a provision in the original 2022 Rhode Island Cannabis Act that required cannabis retailers be majority-owned by Rhode Island residents, along with kickstarting a new application process within 60 days.

They’re changes the state made in order to resolve the trio of federal lawsuits that led to U.S. District Court Judge Melissa DuBose blocking the Cannabis Control Commission from holding the lottery it was planning to hold in May to award licenses.

DuBose also stopped regulators from continuing to screen and review any of the 97 retail license applications submitted by the original December 29, 2025, deadline.

“Our focus is to maintain that momentum by implementing the amended Cannabis Act as efficiently as possible,” Michelle Reddish, chairperson of the three-member regulatory panel, said in a statement Thursday.

Online submissions for the state’s three license types will be accepted through Monday, November 23. Prospective retailers seeking a social equity license, reserved for those adversely affected by the war on drugs, must first receive certification by September 11.

The commission’s announcement did not include a timeline for regulators to review applicants nor say when licenses would be awarded.

The revised law requires social equity businesses to be majority owned by one or more people who can show they were disproportionately impacted by criminal enforcement of past prohibitions, including being arrested or having a family member who was.

Under the 2022 act that legalized recreational cannabis, the commission can offer 24 new licenses to retailers, with six reserved for social equity applicants and another six reserved for worker-owned cooperatives. But not every license type received an application in each of the six geographic zones during the first go, which left regulators with a maximum of 20 licenses to issue across the state.

As it stands, nine shops are selling recreational cannabis in Rhode Island under hybrid retail-medicinal licenses grandfathered in from the state’s medical marijuana program.

The halt in the state’s first application pool left many would-be business owners continuing to pay rent on storefronts they may not even be able to open. Though they can’t recoup their property costs, the new state law allows those initial applicants to be refunded any fees paid to the commission.

All prospective retailers were required to pay an application fee of $7,500 and a yearly $30,000 licensing fee. Fees were waived for the first year for approved social equity applicants.

Over half of all applicants—56—sought general retail licenses. Another 19 were worker cooperatives while the remaining 23 were for social equity applicants.

Charon Rose, spokesperson for the Cannabis Control Commission, said in an email Friday that refund checks are expected to be issued on a rolling basis beginning next week. She did not state how many of the 75 applicants who paid the original application fee sought refunds.

This story was first published by Rhode Island Current.

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As cannabis companies look for new growth strategies, many are seizing a golden opportunity: licensing their intellectual property. Offering licensees access to manufacturing processes, brands, copyrights, trademarks, patents, or technology for adequate consideration is a creative solution to the challenge of breaking into new territories. Licensing also enables companies and brands to expand despite restrictions on interstate commerce and limits on the number of cannabis business licenses in a given state or country.

Smart businesses are joining forces to grow. Much-hoped-for federal legalization likely remains years away; in the meantime, licensing offers multi-jurisdictional operation and asset-light value creation. While this strategy requires careful due diligence, the rewards can be positive and profitable.

How can cannabis companies take advantage of intellectual property licensing? Executives need to ask the following: What is your company best at? What drives the company’s economic engine?

The answers to these questions will help your company discern its unique place in the value chain. This is your differentiated offering to the industry, and it can be anywhere in the production process from seed to sale. The chain begins with plant genetics and includes growers, processors, ancillary businesses, and retailers/dispensaries.

Within the high-velocity cannabis industry, your company may have valuable intellectual property other companies can bring to market in new ways. By differentiating your company from the competition, you will create the value licensees seek. Heavy promotion of your “value add” to your licensees will expand your brand’s footprint far beyond licensing. Bottom line: True differentiation is value creation.

Licensing is like renting your intellectual property. Like any good landlord, companies should execute careful due diligence when researching potential tenants. Once your value-add is established, do the research to make sure any partner company is the right fit for you. Ultimately, the agreement must be advantageous for both parties.

Steps to a smooth transition

A smooth onboarding process is the best way to guide your licensees and ensure the partnership will be mutually beneficial. Every partnership must start with a discovery phase, where a mutual non-disclosure agreement is signed and both parties outline their goals and expectations.

Next is the design phase to specify how the intellectual property will be used in a mutually agreed-upon application. Following the design phase, an intellectual property licensor ideally supports its licensees with clear standard operating procedures to enable smooth onboarding and scaling. The final phase is growth, where licensors support their partners’ expansion into new markets and creation of more innovative products.

Licensing operations

Once you have a strong understanding of your company and the unique differentiation you can offer licensing partners, it is vital to develop a robust content kit for your partners. This should include specific documentation about the intellectual property and other rights, content, and materials to be licensed. This kit may include, for example, patents, formulations, trademarks, designs, packaging, marketing materials, and standard operating procedures.

It is a licensor’s responsibility to ensure licensees are given the tools and resources they need to be successful. They will require a training process and materials for their employees, as well as ongoing engagement and support from your company. Your sales and media-relations teams will be integral to licensee success, because they can guide the narrative of the new market opportunity.

Ensuring the success of your licensees will open future licensing and expansion opportunities.

The licensing model at work

Solving a real pain point for your licensees is the only way to bring value to your partners—resulting in a win-win relationship. At Azuca, our mission is to solve onset, predictability, dosing, and delivery challenges for edibles. We created a range of safe, fast-acting, effective, tasty, and trustworthy formulations that allow consumers to experience a precise dose and predictable onset time every time they consume an edible. For manufacturers, our TiME INFUSION formulations are cost-effective and scalable. They deliver reduced active ingredient waste and are offered to partners in a cost-effective licensing structure. We have successfully licensed our fast-acting infusion methodologies, our branded products, and our wholesale bulk ingredients.

What doesn’t work

While licensing offers a great opportunity, bear in mind these business pitfalls: You cannot violate the Golden Rule—your company needs to treat other companies the way you would like to be treated. If the licensing agreement isn’t a win-win under which both partners experience growth and financial success, then it’s not a good fit. Additionally, misaligned expectations may yield a partnership that is dead on arrival. Sales projections, process maturity, and level of operational involvement should be understood and carefully negotiated and implemented for a successful collaboration. Finally, your company must stay true to its values.

Compliance, confidentiality, and a win-win outcome should be at the forefront of any licensing agreement. Expansion is hard-fought in the pandemic age, but creating collaborative licensing agreements with other companies can accelerate your growth and brand footprint.

Kim Rael is president and chief executive officer at Azuca, a privately held, investor-backed company serving the global cannabis industry with fast-onset edibles formulations. Azuca commercializes its own line of chef-quality, edibles products and licenses its fast-acting TiME INFUSION process, enabling a predictable and controllable experience every time. Rael holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford.

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“We just want a fair shot. We’re not asking for anything special, no special privileges, but what they promised from the very beginning.”

By Hannah Meisel, Capitol News Illinois

Nearly seven years after Illinois lawmakers approved recreational cannabis legalization, applicants who lost out on coveted business licenses are still battling the state in court, alleging the law’s rollout undermined its purported equity goals.

At the time of its passage in 2019, supporters of Illinois’s landmark law touted it as the most equity-centric legalized cannabis program in the nation. But one of the centerpieces of that legislation—setting aside the majority of cannabis business licenses for “social equity” applicants disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs—proved more complicated than the law’s authors had imagined, setting off years of litigation over the process.

The final lawsuit of dozens filed following the first cannabis licensing lottery in 2020 finally got its day in court last week, marking the conclusion of a yearslong legal saga testing the state’s legalization policy. But it’s also the last chance for the plaintiff, Well-Being Holistic Group, to have an opportunity for a dispensary license after all four of its applications lost in three lotteries.

“We just want a fair shot,” the Rev. Otis Davis, said after a hearing in the case. “We’re not asking for anything special, no special privileges, but what they promised from the very beginning… So we just saying, ‘Hey, that the system is broken, then they should redo it, and they should give everybody a chance.’”

Davis preaches at Repairers of the Breach Ministries in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood and unsuccessfully ran for Chicago City Council in 2019. He was part of the team that applied for dispensary licenses as Well-Being Holistic Group in 2020. Chris Harris, an attorney who’d represented Davis, teamed up with his client along with Harris’ friend and business partner David Roberts to submit the applications.

Harris was blunt in his assessment of Davis’s value to the team: “Otis being a veteran, Otis being a practicing minister on the South Side of Chicago coming from a disproportionately impacted area—we had what we thought was a perfect team, and a team that was designed to win this type of license.”

In fact, Well-Being Holistic Group’s applications received perfect scores, but still didn’t win a license. While most lawsuits filed against the state after the lottery process were from applicants who disputed their scores for a chance to be included in the lottery, Well-Being’s case argues a different legal theory, which attorney Chris Carmichael of Henderson Parks said is the “most difficult path” of all the lawsuits.

Plaintiff alleges lotteries were rigged

Well-Being argues that the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which operated the lotteries, improperly allowed roughly 450 ineligible entries into a lottery of 901 applicants for dispensary licenses in the Chicago region. That, Well-Being argues, nearly doubled the size of the pool and reduced others’ chances of winning.

Well-Being alleges the entries should have been flagged as ineligible because corporate dispensaries that already had a footprint in Illinois’s medical cannabis market had their fingerprints on applications for social equity dispensary licenses.

In one case, Carmichael said a company paid for roughly $500,000 in application fees—something IDFPR and the consultants hired to vet applicants and conduct the lotteries should have caught, as the “remitter” line on those cashier’s checks contained the name of the company.

IDFPR maintains it did its due diligence by checking out the individuals named as principal officers on the license applications, which the agency argues would have caught any attempts to flout application limits or hide true ownership of the entity behind an application.

But Well-Being argues vetting only individuals missed the forest for the trees, causing IDFPR to overlook dozens of applications having the same corporate sponsorship.

Alex Moe, a lawyer from the Illinois Attorney General’s office, told Cook County Judge Patrick Stanton that Well-Being was “missing that consultants were expected” to take part in the application process. There were no rules against those consultants paying for application fees either, he said, unless consultants had undisclosed financial interest in the entity applying for licenses.

Further, Moe said Well-Being’s theory of mathematical unfairness in the lotteries is fundamentally incorrect.

“Even if Well-Being is correct and half the applicants should not have been in there, it doesn’t change the outcome,” he said.

By following the “paper trail” created by the lottery, Moe said IDFPR recalculated what would have happened if the applications Well-Being allege should’ve been marked ineligible weren’t in the pool. Well-Being would have placed 126th out of 450, he said.

“That’s something we know with mathematical certainty—that Well-Being would not have received a winning drawing,” Moe said.

Corrective lottery?

But Carmichael pointed out that since the state has social equity cannabis dispensary licenses going unused, “the only possible meaningful thing to do is to run a corrective lottery.”

The state already ran corrective lotteries after initial litigation held up the license awarding process for a year. The first dispensaries owned by social equity license holders didn’t open until November 2022—nearly three years after the application process opened. As of January, only 64 percent of licensed social equity dispensaries were operational, according to an analysis by The Chicago Reporter.

Stanton, who pointed out multiple times during the hearing that IDFPR had wide latitude over interpreting state statute, said he understood Well-Being’s claims but seemed skeptical of its arguments that a court should step in and tell a state agency how to do its job.

“It sounds to me like…there was some vetting done before the lottery. Maybe not the level of vetting you think should’ve been done,” he told Carmichael. “You’re saying they didn’t do enough. And I feel like, ‘Okay, that’s sort of the decision of the department.’”

The judge said he would need more proof that IDFPR “didn’t follow statute” in order for judicial review to be warranted.

“They did something,” Stanton said of IDFPR. “Perhaps not enough. Applying the standards they did, it seems to me they caught what they should’ve caught.”

The judge is set to rule at a May 21 hearing.

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Photo elements courtesy of rawpixel and Philip Steffan.

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