Consultant sees federal crackdown on recreational pot
Kris Krane, president of investing and consulting companies 4Front Ventures and 4Front Advisors, joined Boston Herald Radio yesterday to talk about the Trump administration’s stance on recreational marijuana and what it could mean for Massachusetts.
Q: When did 4Front Ventures start and what do you guys do?
A: We started in 2011 and we are an operations and consulting company in the medical marijuana space.
Q: What are your thoughts on Sean Spicer’s comments last week, because it seems like it’s had a real freezing effect at least when it comes to investors.
A: Now what Spicer’s comments seem to indicate was that we’re likely going to see this administration treat medical marijuana and recreational marijuana differently. What that means is still very much up for debate. They use the term “increased enforcement,” but (Attorney General) Jeff Sessions made some comments last night. And while they were certainly not positive towards marijuana ... I think what we’re likely to see, or at least what they seem to be saying right now, is that they are going to be much more aggressive in looking for recreational businesses that are out of compliance with state law or that are violating state law in some way and if they are going to make that more of a priority for the Justice Department to go after those businesses.
Q: So you don’t see any need to sort of pause or slow down the process right now?
A: Look, Massachusetts already delayed implementation by six months so I don’t see any need for any kind of pause or further delay right now. It’s going to be many months before we have any kind of rules in place.
It’s going to be many, many months beyond that until the state has to start spending significant money to ramp the program up. ... By that point we’re going to have a much better idea, and certainly by this summer, we’ll have a much better idea of what the federal government is actually going to do here.
Q: Are you seeing and hearing the same thing I am that in terms of funding that has sort of frozen recreational businesses?
A: It’s only been a few days since the Spicer comment so it’s very hard to say. We did see some freezing of investment, or at least in folks who decided to take a wait-and-see approach when Sessions was announced as the attorney general. But since then I haven’t seen a whole lot of action ... so there’s still a lot of interest out there.