With yet another RFA deadline behind us and high hopes that those we represented this year will be awarded licenses to bring relief to New Jersey’s growing population of medicinal marijuana patients, I am delighted to be back blogging here.
As the State’s patient base rapidly expands (at the time of this writing, it stands at more than 55,000 individuals), there will undoubtedly be additional licensure opportunities in the coming months to, one day, achieve scale and increase supply from Montague to Cape May. Because of this, it will be critical that aspiring cannabis entrepreneurs continue to advocate for, and participate in, future RFA processes.
However, and understandably, entering the cannabis industry may seem daunting for a number of reasons – and one in particular seems to arise more often than most: banking and capital concerns.
In light of this, when invited to contribute another guest column to Justin Zaremba’s New Jersey Cannabis Insider briefing (thank you, Justin), my colleague, Jenny Chung, and I thought it would be helpful to offer three tips to assuage these concerns:
- Because of the nature of their business, attorneys can be instrumental in connecting capital sources to promising ventures (in the spirit of full disclosure, I am an attorney). Tap them and their networks.
- Federally-chartered banks are, indeed, discouraged from engaging the industry – but reprieve may soon be on the way in the form of the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act of 2019.
- Developing an application, team and business model that appeals to your host municipality and the State at-large is key to sophisticated investors. They will want to be certain that you have done the legwork in assembling an attractive team and gaining local support.
I encourage you to read the full article – where we take a deeper dive into these three points – here, and stay tuned for further updates and additional content from CSG’s Cannabis Law Group.