TRENTON – Just four days after its stunning denial, New Jersey cannabis regulators reversed course and renewed a dispensary chain’s license to sell legal weed to recreational customers at two South Jersey locations.
It wasn’t immediately clear what changed in the days since the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission voted to deny the license renewal for Curaleaf, which operates 150 dispensaries in the United States.
The commission did not publicly announce an emergency meeting on the subject, other than a pop-up window on its website.
A spokesperson for Curaleaf did not immediately return a request for comment.
Shortly after the initial rejection last week, the company issued a fiery statement calling the decision “an outrageous act of political retaliation.” On Monday morning, it arranged a protest in front of the Statehouse over the decision, claiming that the decision put “over 500 jobs at risk.”
Potential job losses were at the center of the rejection in the first place, after commissioners took umbrage with Curaleaf’s decision to close its cultivation center in Bellmawr without providing any notification, including on its renewal application.
“I am concerned about the layoff announcement that was made last month before any information was provided to the commission about any changes Curaleaf was going to make,” said Cannabis Regulatory Commission chair Dianna Houenou, who abstained on the April 13 vote. “I think it’s important for the board and the staff at large to have proper insight and timely notice of major changes to a facility’s operations.”
Thirty-five of the 40 employees working at the center were offered new jobs, Curaleaf chief compliance officer James Shorris told the commission. The remaining five employees were not due to job performance or other issues, he said.
Curaleaf, which is headquartered in New York, reported over $1.2 billion in revenue for the 2021 fiscal year, including nearly $586 million on cannabis sales alone, according to financial documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Curaleaf has been reckoning with the biggest downturn in the cannabis industry since states began selling legal weed in 2014. Across the country, cannabis prices have fallen to new lows as supplies hit an all-time high in states where it’s been available for years.
In January, Curaleaf announced that it would close most of its locations in California, Colorado and Oregon in order to “(focus) on the markets that are generating strong profits and are very stable markets.”
The announcement came less than two months after it laid off an additional 220 employees.
H/T: www.northjersey.com
