SOUTH JERSEY (KYW Newsradio) — In an abrupt change of course, cannabis regulators in New Jersey voted on Monday to renew licenses for adult-use sales at one of the country’s most prominent marijuana companies.
The conditional vote renews the retail licenses for Curaleaf's dispensaries in New Jersey at least for now. They will need to wait until the Cannabis Regulatory Commission meets on June 1 for the final word.
The first anniversary of recreational marijuana sales in New Jersey is April 21. On that date, current dispensary licenses will expire if they go unrenewed. Just last week, the Commission had voted to not renew for Massachusetts-based Curaleaf. The Commission said they hadn't been given proper notice about Curaleaf's plan to close one of its facilities.
The decision left the company able to sell product only to people with medical marijuana cards. Curaleaf vowed to fight the decision, posting to Twitter: "We will continue to aggressively pursue the renewal of our licenses."
As a crowd of supporters gathered on Monday morning outside the CRC offices in Trenton to protest against the vote, the Commission called an the emergency meeting to reconsider. Two abstentions and a "no" in the five-member panel's April 13 vote were converted to three "yes" votes just four days later. The motion passed, 4-1.
But approval of cultivation and manufacturing permits and adult-use retail licenses at the Bellmawr and Edgewater Park dispensaries is only conditional. (The license at a third location, in Bordentown, is not yet up for renewal.) Curaleaf has until June 1 to meet certain requirements.
If they want this latest decision to stick, they're going to have to meet certain requirements by June 1 -- including negotiating collective bargaining agreements with unionized employees, and producing certain documents pertaining to changes to its cultivation facility in Bellmawr.
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