South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Marijuana stores at Florida Circle Ks?
Email hints that legal recreational weed could follow
Will Florida follow in the footsteps of 19 other states and the District of Columbia in legalizing recreational marijuana use?
It’s complicated. To get a sense of how complicated that question is, look no further than two announcements last week that indicate how badly major cannabis companies would like to expand availability of weed in Florida, and how cautious the state government would likely remain even if the question gets on the 2024 election ballot and passes with a 60% or more supermajority:
On Oct. 19, Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries, a multi-state marijuana cultivator, wholesale and retailer, announced plans to locate about 10 of its RISE Express pot dispensaries at various Circle K convenience store locations across the state.
The email announcement stated that “For the first time ever, a cannabis dispensary will open in a convenience store.”
It continued, “Consumers will now be able to buy cannabis just as easily as they do their gas, cigarettes, beer and other consumer packaged goods. Gone are the
days of having to go out of your way to buy cannabis. Green Thumb is meeting the consumer where they are.”
The email, sent on behalf of Green Thumb by Briana Chester of the Los Angeles-based public relations firm MATTIO Communications, did not mention that those consumers would have to be registered to purchase marijuana for medicinal use, as is currently allowed in Florida through an expensive and restrictive set of protocols.
The email did, however, include a link to a movie clip of two fictional stoners meeting a character played by reallife stoner George Carlin at a Circle K store from the 1989 movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
“Strange things are afoot at the Circle K,” says Ted in the clip.
The email included a link to Green Thumb’s official news release, which acknowledged that the rollout was an expansion of the company’s medical retail foot print as part of a “test and learn” program to give “patients ... more access to cannabis.”
Consumers both for and against legalizing recreational marijuana might have been surprised by news stories suggesting that pot shops would soon be coming to their neighborhood Circle K store.
While the number of dispensaries in Florida have increased to nearly 500 since voters approved a ballot measure in 2016 legalizing marijuana for medical use, none have so-far been co-branded with a major retail chain.
Such a high-profile pairing can trigger confusion about what uses are and are not allowed, says Sarah Reiner, an attorney with Florida-based law firm GrayRobinson whose areas of focus include the cannabis industry.
“When people start talking about selling at 7-Eleven or Circle K, it changes their perception away from medical uses and its aspects,” Reiner said. “People think about who comes in and out of convenience stores — kids from middle schools and high schools.”
Efforts to reach Chester and Green Thumb by email and phone were not successful.
Not so fast, says state
After the stories ran in publications and websites across the country, the Florida Department of Health released a terse statement to the Washington Examiner.
“This project has not been approved by the state,” the department said. “Florida has never approved a Medical Marijuana Treatment Center to operate out of a gas station.”
Regardless of the fact that
Circle K is more than a gas station, and that a Green Thumb spokesperson told the Examiner that its RISE Express outlets would have independent entrances and be inaccessible from the inside of the Circle K stores, the state’s message to Green Thumb was clear: Don’t get ahead of yourselves.
And that’s the approach legal and industry experts say the state is likely to take as marijuana companies, sensing demand for legalization among the state’s diverse population of consumers and recreational-use advocates, push toward what they see as an inevitable outcome.
There’s no doubt that companies smell gold in Florida.
Despite requirements that users seek a medical examination averaging $250 that’s not covered by insurance, plus $75 for a state-issued marijuana ID card and retail prices that are typically higher than what weed costs on the illegal market, the marijuana business is booming in Florida.
The number of patients qualified to buy medical pot has more than doubled
since January 2020 — from
299,044 to 761,973. So has the number of dispensaries, increasing from 213 to 488 over that same time period, according to data from the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Medical Marijuana Use.
Even without legalization of recreational use, the cannabis industry expects the number of medically qualified users in Florida to surpass 1 million by 2024, and revenue to increase from
$1.3 billion to $2.5 billion a year by 2025.
In its second quarter earnings call with investors, Green Thumb executives identified Florida as one of three states ripe for industry expansion and investment. The others were New York and Virginia, which legalized recreational weed last year, and Minnesota, which enacted a new law in May legalizing not smokable cannabis, but hemp-derived edibles and beverages with up to 5 milligrams of THC.
The four states have cannabis markets that are “highly immature and underdeveloped” and are in the “early part of the [cannabis industry] growth curve,” Green Thumb founder and CEO Ben Kovler told investors in July.
The process ahead
But as the reaction to Green Thumb’s hasty Circle K announcement exposed, legalization advocates will have to find ways to overcome reticence from state policymakers and regulators, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and its GOP-controlled Legislature, even if recreational use is approved overwhelmingly, experts say.
DeSantis in January suggested he doesn’t favor legalizing recreational marijuana because of the way it smells.
“What I don’t like about it is if you go to some of these places that have done it, the stench when you’re out there, I mean, it smells so putrid,” he told reporters.
And despite the popularity of medical marijuana with voters, various legislators have year after year proposed limiting the potency of THC and the amount of cannabis that patients can buy.
In August, the state Department of Health imposed an “emergency rule” that set maximum THC levels for various non-smokeable cannabis products that patients can buy in a 70-day period, and capped the amount of smokable marijuana consumers could buy in a 35-day period to 2.5 ounces.
That upset patients who prefer to buy larger quantities at a time to take advantage of volume pricing, advocates said.
After more than 70% of Florida voters passed a 2016 ballot initiative legalizing medical marijuana for a long list of illnesses and chronic pains, the Legislature rebuffed them by banning the smokable variety, legalizing access to the drug in vapor, oil, edible and pill form only. Gov. Rick Scott’s administration defended the ban in court until a judge ruled it unconstitutional nearly two years after the voters spoke.
As the state appealed various rulings on the issue, DeSantis took office in 2019 and summoned the Legislature to overturn the ban. Even as they complied, prominent legislators grumbled that they did not agree with the about-face.
Last year, the state Supreme Court rejected two recreational marijuana ballot initiatives, saying that wording of the proposed Constitutional amendments would be “misleading” to voters. Opponents of one of the initiatives included Attorney General Ashley Moody and the Florida Chamber of Commerce.
A new petition to get the question on the 2024 presidential election ballot was carefully crafted to pass the Supreme Court’s review, advocates said.
It will also need to withstand the Supreme Court’s scrutiny and get about 900,000 signatures before Floridians will get a chance to vote on it.
Tampa-based attorney Richard Blau, regulated products section chair at GrayRobinson, said the new petition proposes a Constitutional amendment that’s “clearly targeted to focus on commercial applications and commercial development.”
Reiner says that the proposed amendment shows its backers “are very cognizant of the potential struggle they will have [with state lawmakers and regulators] if they get the votes to pass it.”
As written, the amendment would allow anyone older than 21 to buy and consume cannabis. But it
would also ban home cultivation and allow the Legislature to select whether any other cannabis companies can enter Florida’s market.
Currently 22 companies are licensed to sell medical marijuana and Florida law allows 22 more to be added. Although advocates have criticized the Florida Department of Health for moving too slowly, the Office of Medical Marijuana Use web page states it is moving forward to award up to 22 additional licenses.
Safe & Smart and bankrolled
Tallahassee-based cannabis company Trulieve Cannabis, the nation’s largest pot company, is pushing the initiative with $10 million so far in financial backing. Trulieve is also the largest marijuana retailer in Florida, with 121 dispensaries. It’s one of just five companies in Florida with more than 40 dispensaries each.
The political action committee, Smart & Safe Florida, formed to get the amendment across the finish line, has hired two consulting firms with ties to Republican lawmakers to help get its message out. Another consultant with deep Tallahassee ties, Steve Vancore, represents both Trulieve and the PAC.
The state Division of Elections website shows about 7,000 signatures have been verified so far, but Vancore said many more have been submitted and are winding through the process.
Speaking for Trulieve, Vancore notes that Florida voters overwhelmingly support recreational marijuana. A poll released in February by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab found that 76% of respondents support allowing people to possess small amounts of cannabis, while just 20% oppose.
More than 70% “is everyone,” Vancore says. “We don’t see any single demographic group with support below 50%,” he said.
That includes the Republican-voting “freedom crowd” that attends Bike Week rallies in Daytona Beach and likes to smoke a joint with their beer, he said, as well as young Democrats on college campuses. Young people want it, and so do older Baby Boomers, he said. Vancore said the lowest level of support comes from the oldest voters who grew up supporting the War on Drugs and believed movies like Reefer Madness.
Critics, including Florida chapters of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, contend that the proposed amendment was written to keep the state’s largest growing companies in control of a recreational market.
Melissa Villar, executive director of NORML’s Tallahassee chapter, says the proposed amendment excludes 800 cultivators of hemp products, who are able to grow low-THC-based hemp-derived CBD products thanks to a 2018 federal law. They’d like to grow cannabis as well, she said.
“We want licensees to go through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, like other businesses,” Vilar said. “Now they have to go through the Department of Health. We don’t feel 800 hemp cultivators should go through a scoring process.”
Vilar says she fears that the recreational-use amendment backed by Trulieve will lead to over-taxation, lack of competition and high prices. Ultimately, that would push legal cannabis consumers back to the underground market as is happening in California, she said.
A wild card that could boost chances for acceptance in Florida is if the federal government heeds President Biden’s call to decriminalize marijuana by removing it from its list of Schedule 1 — or most dangerous — drugs, they said.
But conceding the realities of today’s political system, they said DeSantis and Florida’s Legislature would be more likely to follow the federal government’s lead if a Republican president was spearheading the effort.
Reiner and Blau each say they expect the initiative to not only get on the ballot but to get the 60% supermajority needed to amend the Constitution.
What happens next remains unknown, they said.
“It’s a matter of implementation,” Reiner said. “How quickly do they want to move? What kind of restrictions will be imposed? Who’s going to regulate? As we saw previously, it could take some time to figure out.”