Can I Sign Missouri Banking Form

Can i industry sign banking missouri form easy

you have legal questions Amy the attorney has the answers welcome to today's show and here's Amy hello and this is Amy the attorney I am welcoming Bob Reeg and Redman is that correct and she has had a business law firm in in Kansas City for quite some time she has focused primarily on probate in the early and middle parts hurt and I shouldn't say early in middle parts but she's now focusing on medical marijuana and has become a whiz kid about the ins and outs of Licensing businesses who want to become dispensaries I'm gonna mispronounce that so maybe you'll say it for me and so welcome hi thanks for having me all right so we're going to start and I really want to start with what is the state of medical marijuana in Missouri today is June the 11th of 2019 I know it's a rolling ball could change but from what what was passed in November what is happening now so patient caregiver and business license applications went online a week ago on June 4th the regulations while people will refer to them as final they're not final there are emergency regulations and there's going to be public hearing on those next month in Jefferson City which I'm hoping to make - and essentially the situation you have now is patients are currently going to their doctors or cannabis friendly clinics to get their certifications and recommendations because those have to be 30 within 30 days old by the time you apply and the soonest you can apply as a patient or a caregiver is going to be July 4th then on the business side you've got business owners who are getting together their standard operating procedures which I call SOPs they're you know getting the real estate lock down trying to figure out where they're going to place their businesses because the licenses are going to be attached to the premises and they're getting their documents from the Secretary of State business organization stuff like that so that's on the business licensing and application side on the law and the regulatory side we're still having a conversation with the department about what can be on the licensing application what should be on the licensing application and then maybe challenging some things that people are having a bit of an issue with and so that dialogue is continuing and the department emailed me this morning on an issue that I had addressed with him the other day and told me that they would get back with me next week but right now they're updating their FA queues and trying to iron out some of these details as well so okay yeah it's I'm so happy it happened I love reading your Facebook post because you seem passionate about the issue but also in a very holistic way including talking about people that are currently imprisoned for marijuana and what the state should be doing to address those people we're going to get to that but I want to break some of this down of what you're talking about so first I want to talk about you mentioned caregiver user is there a mechanism for somebody that cares say for somebody who couldn't be licensed I mean is there a differentiation of the caregiver and user yes sort of okay so first you have your patient right and to be a qualified patient under amendment 2 there's 10 different categories that you get your certification under everything from autism and migraines and multiple sclerosis to the last category which is anything your doctor thinks it would be beneficial for realize that most doctors won't certify under that last category so early in the game because they're worried about getting audited so they're just gonna go with the easiest thing so if you have a patient who is younger than 18 years old or maybe is well let's just start there their parent or guardian can be a caregiver for them and so what you do is you turn in your patient application with your doctor's certification that has to be less than 30 days old and then the caregiver turns in their application to be your caregiver which will allow them to purchase marijuana on your behalf to transport it on your behalf to administer it on your behalf and if you pay an extra hundred dollars to grow it in a locked facility on your behalf and also to administer it to you and that caregiver status works the same if you're an adult you know disabled person or even if if I wanted to be a patient and I didn't want to grow my own I could hire a caregiver to grow mine for me and a caregiver can have up to two patients that they grow for as well as being able to grow for themselves so a caregiver can also be a patient they just can't be so incapacitated that they don't understand what they're doing for someone else okay so this would be that's a separate application separate process for the caregiver persona or caregiver role in the in the business correct okay all right so let's talk about the user and the process you said the applications begin July 4th where do they apply so they apply online through the Department of Health and Senior Services website so if you google Missouri DHS s Medical Marijuana you can't miss it it will take you right there on the top right hand side of the webpage they're going to have a drop down menu where you could choose you know for facilities for patients you know whatever you're going to go to that patient button and you're going to click it and it the applications right there you can actually look at the application now and even print it off and fill it out so that when you go to apply online you'll have all of your information already there things that patients need to realize that they need to have number one that doctor's certification is less than 30 days old number two they need to have a 25 dollar application fee ready to go a copy of their driver's license or state-issued ID and also something akin to a passport photo that is less than three months old so they need to turn all of those things in and be able to apply that way if they want to grow their own there's a special section on the application where they have to explain to the department where they're planning on growing it and how they plan to maintain the security of that area so only the patient can have access to that area or their caregiver okay all right let's let's backtrack so online is going to be the only place that you can apply correct unless online shuts down then the department is going to notify people through their website of alternative means of application okay good all right so let's talk about the grow you tell you growing your own you talked about it a little bit in the previous two segments but I want to nail it now what are the costs involved and what are mean are they doing this in their basement what is half you know what would give me the whole deal on growing your own so a patient can grow up to six plants six flowering plants I should say at one time you can have what they call teenage plants that are under 14 inches tall you can have clones but you can only have six actual flowering plants for people who don't understand how grows work flowering depends on deprivation of light so in a controlled environment for an indoor grow and most the time when you're getting the plant started early on and the clone stage or even the teenage stage they might get 18 to 24 hours of light a day but then when you want them to start flowering you back that off to 12 and 12 and so they get 12 hours a lie 12 hours of dark they start flowering so at that point the patient can add an extra hundred dollars to their application to apply for a home grow you know what if you've got a closet at home you can actually grow in your closet as long as you're able to lock it and no one else is going to be able to get into it but you just basically have to have a secure location whether it's in your basement whether it's a closet whether it's a spare bedroom I even have some clients that are talking about basically creating a facility where there's different rooms or different pods that they can lease to patients and caregivers to grow their own so that's also going to be an option if you want to do an outdoor grow there has to be a screen over the top so you cannot access it from the top there has to be slats so that you can't necessarily see what's in there and of course it has to be locked so it's not like you're trying to keep the squirrels out of your garden you're trying to keep everyone out of your garden and I think it's going to be a lot more difficult to control your growing conditions in that kind of an environment but Missouri has is one of three states in the country with some of the best soil or cannabis cultivation the other is Oregon and I believe North or South Carolina so you know we do have good growing conditions here but for the patient the cost is going to be lower to grow outside potentially because you're not going to have the electricity stock that you're going to have with the lighting situation that I just told you about but the other issue is that you may not be able to have as consistent of a supply depending on what your needs are and we can get into quantities if you want but at the end of the day the only way that you're really going to be able to as a patient that the standard is 4 ounces of dried flower per 30-day period or its equivalent and don't ask me for the equivalent off the top of my head because I'm really bad at math and you're not gonna be allowed to use combustible extraction methods in your home so if you do want an extract my best advice to patients is just once it becomes available go to a dispensary and by your DAB's try to make a bed at home so in under the the new law is it's not just the smokeable marijuana that we're talking about it is the all the different products I've been to Colorado so I've seen what's available are all the things like you said dab oils I can't even wear some of them are all of those going to be legal in the state of Missouri as well if you have a card yeah and we in the last legislative session they were trying to put in place a ban that would have prevented edibles that would have appealed the children can't be shaped like a fruit can't you know have a cartoon character on it can't you know be sweet or whatever that went nowhere thank God but you know yeah you should be able to find it you know and they even allow suppositories in Missouri which a lot of people are like oh who cares about that well actually somebody who is in a horrific amount of pain does care about that because that is probably the most effective delivery method it enters the system rather quickly it lasts for a very long time and you can take very high doses that way without the corresponding head high or whatever you would normally get if you were to ingest that amount like through it edible or whatever and the reason that's important is a lot of states don't have suppositories they're very very difficult to find so our law specifically allows for it which is great okay let's talk about when you have the card and where you can and what we're going to specifically talk about smoking just because it's probably the most obtrusive and most noticeable what is the law regarding what where can you smoke that legal marijuana not in a public place so basically you'll be safe in your home and theoretically and practically speaking you shouldn't be doing it around other people in Missouri who aren't patients because then you don't you know if the smell attracts law enforcement or whatever and you're the ones smoking it they're going to assume everyone else is partaking and then you're going to have a bit of explaining to do so typically in the privacy of your own home is is the way to go however some locations may be able to provide a spot for a patient and either a family member or a caregiver if they want to have them with them to consume their cannabis medicinally on premises it'll be like a little room you go in there by yourself and get the job done but the trend nationally is towards consumption lounges so I've got a client in Southern California who opened up the first legal consumption lounge down there and it's just like a bar except no alcohol cannabis instead and lots of water and snacks so that's on the horizon and I've been telling my dispensary clients you know if you're if you're smart you're gonna get a premises where you can't you have extra space so that when that does become a possibility you can easily retrofit your space and then you don't have to apply for a new a whole new license you've already got a license on the premises let's talk about the business side of this which is where you're representing probably the most amount of people what are the different kind of businesses associated with the medical marijuana industry we use there's dispensaries but I'm sure that there are other kinds of I mean start with the dispensaries but there's probably other kinds of businesses that are associated with this industry so I'm just gonna go down the food chain so first you got to have a cultivator which is your classic pop farmer okay and it's either going to be an indoor grow an outdoor grow or a greenhouse which is kind of considered a combination of the two to get it from the cultivator to the next stop you're going to have a transport company so transport companies are going to take the raw flower plant material to the testing facility testing facility is going to test the product tell you how much THC CBD CBG and whatever is in that product they're going to make sure that there's no pesticides solvents things like that in it that's not contaminated from there the product can be taken to a manufacturing facility so it's a manufacturer of infused products I call them MIPS but basically they're the ones that make your gummies they make the oils shattered ABS bait pen cartridges all of that stuff they may take that back to the testing lab make sure that the solvents are completely out of it that they use for the extraction process then you're going to take it to a dispensary and the dispensary is where you're going to ultimately be able to purchase these items the dispensary the myth the testing lab the cultivator they all use the seed to sale tracking system seed to sale tracking gets implemented for everybody December 2020 the reason for that is how are we going to get the original plants and seeds here when it's illegal to transport across state lines so we refer to that as Immaculate Conception so there's an Immaculate Conception period in the state of Missouri for one year and so January 1st 2021 that's when you're going to start seeing you know that you can only then if you're trying to buy seeds or clones you'll only be able to buy them from dispensaries or a licensed business so you know they're not going to don't-ask-don't-tell how it got here before then it is very policy that's surprising yeah well I mean how else is it gonna get started so um but you know when you go to these trade shows every possible industry that you can think of is in the cannabis industry you've got to have HVAC people to get the exhaust just right you've got to have soil guys who do nothing but produce soil for this you have I saw a dry ice guys show up the last conference I went to in Vegas he looked like he had been just dropped there out of a helicopter he had no idea why it was there and I and I said what is the dry ice machine about he goes I have no idea there's that there's a manufacturer down there he can tell you well I wasn't asked him and what they do is they they take the flour and they put it on a screen and they put dry ice on top of it and all the kief which is the pollen and the trichomes and everything falls through the screen onto a metal plate because they're dry ice and that's what they make really really highly concentrated concentrate that up so yeah every single industry will be affected by this every single area of law will be affected by this absolutely absolutely alright we are going to get to the criminal part of it but I have a couple questions the testing facility is homegrown exempt from having to go through the testing facility yeah that's correct it's very expensive to get your cannabis tested number one most home growers probably aren't going to want that expense although if they wanted to they could but number three interesting factoid for the crimina defense folks out there there is not a single lab that is DEA certified in this country to test for THC levels okay because this is schedule 1 controlled substance under the CSA so no level is an acceptable level right all right ok you talk about CBD and hemp and because basically they be scheduled lized THC derived from him but not any other form of THC and is that I mean this is just kind of from left field just is that just pilots because I mean like what is keeping the United States government from making it not a Schedule 1 substance me what is happening politics politics but what is the projects the the politics is basically that there there's a certain segment of the population that still buys into the fake news of reefer madness and still thinks it's going to kill brain cells and cause people to be stupid and unproductive and whatever the case may be and it's just it's just a matter of getting out there correcting the history correcting the the narrative on this and you know moving forward with science which and we'll talk about that when we get to criminal and DUI and stuff but there's not a single study out there that will link THC to impaired driving and also they have not been able to do a single study that verifies that a person can physically overdose from this stuff it's impossible so there while there may be cannabis related deaths like there is drunk driving related deaths or drinking related deaths like somebody gets wasted and falls into a pool and drown so I'm sure that's happened with cannabis right like cannabis does not directly cause death in and of itself like a fall can or anything else again is a delivery going to be part of the mechanism here in Missouri could you deliver marijuana to somebody absolutely so if you get a cultivation license a MIT license a dispensary license it includes your ability to transport transport so every facility license is going to have different transport requirements so a cultivation facility can transport to another licensed facility whether it's a testing facility or a myth a myth can transfer to test to a dispensary and a dispensary can deliver to its patients and caregivers that's that's wonderful I mean yeah I mean because I mean if the whole plane is acts patient access and you're dealing with severely disabled people who may not be able to drive or may not have reliable access to transportation then absolutely the only thing is before it leaves the dispensary it has to be paid for so they may have to take the payment over the phone or something to that effect but they're not going to allow the product to leave the dispensary until it's paid for okay on these businesses that are the businesses that you're helping Shepherd through the this process what are the costs associated for them oh that is such a loaded question so it's it's it's going to really depend on their business model so some of my clients are what's called vertically integrated and what that means is they're getting a license not just for a dispensary but also a myth and a cultivation as well so they can do all three things and so it's going to be very expensive for them because they're going to have three separate applications potentially three separate locations and so you know they're going to have a lot more cost if you're just doing like a thousand square-foot dispensary your costs are going to be much lower part of the issue that I raised with the Department of Senior Services Health and Senior Services was they had implemented capital requirements in their licensing structure it was five hundred thousand dollars liquid capital for cultivators and three hundred thousand apiece for MIPS and dispensaries it got reduced to three hundred thousand dollars on cultivation and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars permits and dispensaries but think about that in an industry that doesn't have any banking whatsoever you can't get a traditional bank loan you can't even locate your business on a property that has a more a bank mortgage on it where are you going to come up with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars liquid capital to show these folks and that's you know a significant amount of points on your license application so um I did make an argument that I thought that that violated equal protection because of the disparate impact that that has on urban communities and people of color who I think belong in this industry but are going to struggle even more with access to capital than the average person so the costs are considerable the other thing is if you have a dispensary or depending on the type of business model that you have they're requiring you to have a pharmacist on call or on retainer which is crazy to me because the pharmacists have never been able to prescribe this and I'm not really sure what kind of education they get on it other than just cursory education because less than 10 percent of our medical schools even get into the endocannabinoid system with their residents and their and their students so but it's an extra expense that you're just going to have to have in order to apply and clients will sit there and say well I'll just put it on my application and I won't do it well no you can't do that because your application signed under oath and if you have a significant deviation from that after you've been awarded your license your license can get yanked if you don't notify the department after the fact that things have changed so whatever your plan is now you need to kind of stick to it what is the money that the state has allotted for enforcement both in the business sector and in the user sector or home grow sector what are the enforcement mechanisms and the their money and people for it I don't know how to answer that question it's a very good question so all the money that they have taken for prepayment of application fees it totals almost three and a half million at this point that money is earmarked for veterans programs so also in the legislature last year something that didn't make it was they were trying to say well if there's lawsuits or whatever involving this law and it's enforcement against the department we want them to be able to utilize the veterans fund to pay for Legal Defense which I found kind of egregious and I think it's unconstitutional under a - but that's just my opinion that didn't survive luckily so the money issue I'm not really sure about to be quite frank I don't know where it's gonna come from if they're going to use it out of the veterans fund or if they have a certain portion of that that they're gonna earmark I do know that there's going to be seven enforcement officers for the entire state of Missouri know you're gonna have a hundred ninety two dispensaries 60 grow facilities and about eighty two MIPS so I'm guessing that the emphasis is going to be on enforcing business as it has been in other states that have done this rather than attacking the patients and the caregivers unless there's some sort of report of abuse or law enforcement involvement we're gonna what about you actual smaller municipalities cities counties and their reaction to this I happen to be on the Grand View website for Grandview Municipal Court and there was a notice of a meeting a general public meeting to the legislative their City Council to discuss the new marijuana regulations and how it would affect Grandview can you speak to that at all not Grandview specifically all I know about Grandview is they're going to have a hard time placing dispensaries or any businesses there because unless they implement a variance through their ordinances the law basically says that they have to locate these kinds of businesses a thousand feet away from any Church secondary school primary school or daycare and grand views got a lot of churches it's going to be very difficult to find a spot and in Grand View unless they shorten that distance and some cities have some cities in Missouri absolutely have Columbia for example in and I should say the law doesn't allow any municipality in this state to prohibit a cannabis based business okay what it does say is that the city can regulate reasonable time place and manner right and of course you can't have a big pot leaf out front or anything like that advertising is going to be very strict that's why when you go to Colorado you see all these adopt-a-highway signs with the cannabis businesses on them because that's how they get to advertise on signs so there's going to be restrictions like that like in Columbia they tried to say well in our downtown district you can only put them on the second floor of a building and and that failed and so there have been lots of little skirmishes and the City Council meetings as to how this is going to work but most of the time the trend is to say okay we're going to be welcoming because they realize it's gonna bring revenue but at the same time they can't charge any additional tax on the marijuana and they can only do reasonable time place and manner restrictions and there's a meeting coming up in Kansas City I believe on the 12th so maybe tomorrow I think it's tomorrow will there be areas in the state of Missouri that it will be harder to get medical marijuana than say the city's I mean will there be a dearth of dispensaries and businesses in out state or mid Missouri well I think part of the problem that you're facing is and you can see it in some of the application requirements right so with the merit-based scoring system if you locate your business in an area that has a lower employment rate you're going to get extra points on your license and so there are people that are actively looking in congressional districts in zip codes that are economically distressed because they could potentially bring jobs to those areas however isn't economically viable for a business to locate in an area like that and we're not really sure I mean if the income is lower there then they're not going to be able to mark up their product like they're used to there's about a 300 percent markup on average nationally just because if you're a dispensary you don't get the tax deductions under 280e that a normal business does so you're right offs are less and your markup is higher but in an economically distressed area that may be a problem what abysses mentioned just amid some tax and then obviously licensing what are some other cross-sections of the law that are going to intersect with the medical marijuana in Missouri banking so triad bank is the only bank that's going has said that it's going to assist these types of clients and the fees are probably going to be pretty high there is a banking bill currently pending in the United States Congress that might change all of this they hope to get it passed by the end of the year but we'll see child custody and divorce cases it's no longer an illegal drug if a parent is medicating with cannabis that's not going to be grounds to be an unfit parent probate and Trust law which is my baby in the background that I come from my big concern is with patient and caregiver home grows because there's just a tiny little blurb at the end of the regs that basically say okay you've got 10 days to notice that notifying the department if somebody dies then we're going to give you a letter that allows you to transport their cannabis whether it's plant cannabis or whether it's purchased cannabis to a local dispensary for disposal well number one who's going to pay the dispensary to dispose of it because disposal is kind of expensive sometimes depending on whether or not it's a hazardous material and they won't know whether it's a hazardous material because they won't have it tested so they don't know what's been put on it in other words um number two in probate we have to inventory every single asset so are you telling me that the cannabis is not an asset doesn't have a value that creditors can come after to get their debts paid and it's not available to the heirs I mean so there's a lot of issues there or if somebody who owns one of these businesses dies is their license transferable how does that work when it comes to DUI laws you know the the I believe it was the Highway Patrol at any rate some state level of law enforcement up in Michigan commissioned at us to get done to try to see if they could figure out what a legal limit would be for drivers and the test said there's no way to determine a legal limit for this they recommended none employment is another big one a lot of states are doing away with employment discrimination against cannabis users and some states are saying you know you can't test for this any more work comp in Missouri our work comp statutes basically will only deny benefits if you are found to be under the influence at the time of the accident so that's not gonna cover somebody who just you know went home the night before had some before bed woke up fine the next day and was injured on the job so I mean insurance coverage is insurance gonna start to cover this oh you know what are we gonna do under the Affordable Care Act it's something it's like it will literally affect everything yeah I just love being talking to you because I just know you you're passionate about the issue and you're just giving us the whole view of it and it is going to impact us and even you know for people that wouldn't think oh it's not gonna impact me Fanning it is going to be in your life in one way or another and you may not even know it until something pops up yeah absolutely all right let's talk about criminal enforcement of marijuana laws I had read on your blog that you know Jean Peters Baker who is the prosecutor in Jackson County pretty much after the amendment to past who then said we were going to pretty much stop enforcing it with some exceptions she didn't say everything but then we will no longer prosecute marijuana cases is that's a trend that you've seen across the state tell talk to me a little bit about that so we've got that now in st. Louis and in Kansas City and it's a I believe it's a hundred grams or less you would probably know better than me I had a gentleman call me about a month ago he was flying in from Denver he was an amputee so he's missing a leg and he had two cartridges in his backpack vape cartridges he went outside to smoke a cigarette to wait to get picked up his friend was inside to claim the bags and they saw a k-9 unit tag his bag a bag claim and of course you know it was the situation of am I in trouble and I said well okay CPD has jurisdiction over the airport so you're probably just gonna get a citation nothing ended up coming from it to be honest with you and I was very happy about that but yeah that that seems to be the trend and there there is a growing trend towards decriminalization of numerous types of drugs psilocybin and peyote most recently in denver and oakland respectively and i know that there's a groundswell for that here too i mean most people are like oh hold on we just legalized marijuana here i mean you know but what's happening is as the trend grows towards what some people refer to as recreational use I'll call it adult or therapeutic use there's also a trend towards just decriminalization of other substances in general too just because everyone's starting to realize that criminalization has been based primarily on politics not on science and so I think you're gonna see more of it and I wouldn't be surprised if we had full adult use here in Missouri in the next two to three years and you know maybe also psilocybin or magic mushrooms would follow that just because of its therapeutic use on PTSD and severe depression when nothing else works how do the legislature address at all people that are incarcerated for marijuana at this time while they were I mean I know the amendment to pass they're doing some law so anybody in Jeff City talking about the people that are incarcerated right now yeah there there was a rep out of st. Louis I would butcher I would say his name but I'm gonna butcher it's all good you rep out of st. Louis and there have been a couple other reps too that have put forward expungement bills that just didn't really make it anywhere and that's super disappointing because when you think about it these are people are incarcerated for doing something that is now pretty much egal in a majority of the states across the country and there are people like Augie Busch who are making millions if not billions off of this industry while others are being locked up for the exact same thing I find it morally abhorrent that being said you know in California and Colorado and in other states they're really starting to push that decriminalization and the expungements and and all of that and I think that it should have been the first step and then you know businesses should have been the second step but I mean no one listens to me so right it's money yeah money right you're absolutely right that's it so let me ask you this okay I keep saying that let me ask this I do that every time what about the doctors like I know that there are specific clinics in Kansas City that are going to start seeing patients to get the license is that gonna be the trend or rebels I asked my doctor in January after had passed and she was like I don't feel comfortable doing it I'm not going to do it III don't know if she has changed her mind but will be the trend be a specific doctor that pretty much sees these patients that need this or do you feel like it will expand to general practitioners somebody's doctor I I'm not sure how to answer that question either because right now yeah the trend is to have places like the green clinics which by the way I highly recommend excellent organization or you know business company whatever you want to call it franchise they are incredible and what happened is you take your medical records from your treating physician who has already diagnosed you and you go to a doctor that understands cannabis is knowledgeable about it is not afraid of it it won't fear monger it won't make you feel like a criminal for going in there they review your medical records they give you an evaluation based on those medical records and say yeah I can check the box for migraines so a couple things about that thing number one is you can get a medical card from another state for instance California doesn't have a residency requirement and say you have a medical card from California you're in Missouri and you have less than your four allotted ounces on you you're immune from prosecution period but you're not going to be able to probably buy it in a dispensary which is another odd constitutional argument where you're given an immunity from prosecution but not the privilege of buying it so does Full Faith and Credit really exist medical tourism has become big in the states that do allow reciprocity like Nevada but then you know you've got this other issue too will these doctors start to come online and part of that is actually a cost issue for them I saw one doctor and one of the groups that I belong to and get my information from her insurance premiums went up a thousand dollars a month just for recommending medical cannabis do they go up a thousand a month for recommending fentanyl I mean I I don't know but it might be an economic thing for some of these doctors I think again it goes back to the education thing if we can get out there and start educating people and getting rid of the fake news that was done by reefer madness then maybe you know we'll see these insurance rates drop it becomes more economically feasible for these doctors to do this also you know as as lawyers amendment to protects professionals it protects CPAs it protects you know lawyers it protects doctors from you know working legally in this industry on a state level but one thing that hasn't happened yet is that our office of chief disciplinary Council has not yet come out like they have in Colorado and said if you're a lawyer and you're a patient we'll protect you they haven't done that yet and so you know there's some of us that are eagerly waiting for that decision and wondering if our ethics counsel is even going to touch it at all so and I think there's probably something going on with doctors in that realm too there's there's a lot of fear for professionals yep yeah that makes sense that makes sense all right so what have I not asked you that you think people are wanting to know or should know about you know often I get asked and I'll just kind of go through the the typical questions I get asked on a regular basis great how much money do I need to to open up a dispensary you're probably gonna need about half a million dollars to get a sensory up and running and that's gonna be hard to come by until you get your license and once you get your license then you're gonna get a bunch of investors you have to be 51% Missouri owned in order to get a business license you have to be a Missouri residents resident with proof of residency in order to get a patient card here and be allowed to grow your own if you're a caregiver you can have two people including in plus yourself so three that you can grow four and then if I'll be able to stock you can the caregiver sell that marijuana to the other two people you're just growing it for them they're growing it for them now it's not a situation where sale of the product is a lie sale of the service is a gray area so there's that okay what I'd like it depend land it depends I mean you go to these conferences and you you can talk to people who have been in this industry for ten years in another state and you'll ask them questions and their answer is we're not really sure what's happening we don't really know what's going on so I mean it's kind of the Wild West we're just sort of muddling our way through it the best we can and you know I should say that the state is doing a really good job implementing this I mean there there have been other states that have had nightmares situations like Arkansas God when did they pass their law like four years ago and they only have three dispensaries in the entire state so I mean I know everyone's impatient but you know for all of their faults the department's doing a very good job trying to implement this on the timeline that they were given and we do need to be grateful for that but like with any other law it's imperfect and if there are questions or comments that people have they need to let the department know they're actually fairly responsive but you know there's there's lots of constitutional issues here and one of those issues I pointed out the other day to the department was they want people to on our application describe how they're going to handle financial transactions when there's no bank involved um that violates a federal money laundering statute right so you're you're asking people to put down in writing in a thousand words or less how they plan on handling financial transactions that are illegal under federal law and then they sign that for under Oh this amendment right against self incrimination so you know there's so many areas here that just have to be parsed out and it would just be infinitely easier if you just d schedule at all um and i know we're here to talk about cannabis but i get asked a lot about the CBD situation okay great and the issue with that is also nobody knows but they they have the farm bill in 2018 which d scheduled heme derived THC so essentially what that means is someone could grow acres and acres of hemp take it to a lab have all the THC extracted out and theoretically that THC is not a schedule 1 controlled substance and is legal whereas you could grow a pot plant and that is illegal so I mean there's some interesting stuff there and I call it quasi legal because there have been raids on CBD facilities where they are pulling all of the edibles off the shelf and that's because the FDA has yet to come in and say whether or not it's a safe food additive and put regs in place for that and then also the USDA is going to be granting licenses to have farmers through local state and educational programs so theoretically if you don't have a license to grow hemp that would also be illegal even though it's being bendy scheduled so I mean even CBD is in flux right now explain to me CBD and THC okay so you have a you wanna chart I can show you a chart sure okay so essentially you have a plant that has a ton of medicinal properties a lot of different medicinal compounds but they're all different and so what they're trying to do is they're trying to isolate certain compounds and really people who tend to be advocates of this plant want a full spectrum so what you have here can you see that yep so basically these are all the different cannabinoids you have in the plant and every single one of them has a different medical use okay and so for instance if you have CBD it says here that it reduces spasms anxiety it's a sleep aid muscle relaxant antidepressant increases appetite pain relief reduces nausea inhibits tumor cell growth and is anti-inflammatory THC on the other hand is a pain reliever increases appetite relieve spasms antioxidant muscle relaxant and relieves nausea there are one two three four five six seven eight nine ten different compounds in the plant and we only really talked about two of them which is CBD and THC and THC is the psychoactive component in the plant so CBD is it doesn't necessarily get you high I like th sleep s well in fact if you were to vape it or eat it or whatever you're not gonna feel all stoned you're not gonna feel high you might feel less pain you might feel less anxious but it's not gonna be the pronounced oh yeah I'm gonna sit back here and relax right you know you're just gonna go about your life like you took an Aleve is what's gonna happen did the Department of Health and Human Services create a entire division or is it just under the general auspices of Department of Health and Human Services they created a special division and I don't know if they call it a division but they have you know all different kinds of divisions within them for instance they're the same entity or the same body that regulates mo HealthNet which is our Medicaid program they also put out regulations for nursing homes they do all kinds of things right so yeah it's a subsection of that department and if you save you to get a hold of them would you just be the same thing that you mentioned at the top of Google Department of Health and Human Services marijuana and gets you to a place where you can ask them questions absolutely and they they have an email and they also have a phone number that you can contact them at to comment or ask questions okay and we'll get those on the screen during the edit I am so happy you came on I this is a subject that is always interested me I'm so glad it finally passed in Missouri and I hope that we do you say two or three years down the road that it's legal for everyone and I want to work with you or anyone that wants to work on expungement and exoneration of people or that are still incarcerated because of marijuana it's ridiculous I've been doing criminal defense since 2002 and I'm always just stunned at the lack of knowledge around marijuana and by prosecutors and they're somewhat veel and are their zeal about prosecuting this harmless I mean what I consider to be somewhat harmless drug and I'm ready to see that change and I'm happy it's changing in my lifetime I feel like there's a lot of stuff in the criminal justice world that is changing this the pendulum is swinging and I'm just ecstatic to be seeing it and being a part of it because it's a long time coming and has so much to do with race and class and money and it's it's time for some justice so thank you for coming on to the show so much for having me it's been a pleasure [Music] you you