Marijuana Business Magazine March 2019

March 2019 | mjbizdaily.com 21 © 2019 Marijuana Business Daily, a division of Anne Holland Ventures ; this information is current as of Feb 14, 2019. Years in the making, voters favored medical cannabis in a 2014 referendum. Other U.S. territories that have approved MMJ include Guam, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. An Office of Cannabis Regulation (OCR) will be established and publish rules within four months, and the issuance of licenses will start three months after that. Licenses will be provided for MMJ product manufacturing facilities to process cannabis through extraction and infusing the extracts into goods. Larger commercial cultivation operations will be allowed to grow up to 1,000 plants. Health Canada Applications Continue The number of marijuana cultivation license applications in Canada grew 30%—from 588 to 840 applicants—between August and December 2018, according to Health Canada. Currently, 145 authorized cultivators, processors and sellers are licensed under the Cannabis Act. Beacon Securities analyst Russell Stanley estimates the Canadian market alone can’t support all the prospective cultivators in the pipeline. “Within Canada there are over 130 licensed producers, and we don’t need 130 of anything for the Canadian market on its own,” he said. “There has to be a reckoning. It’s a when and not an if.” Analysts expect the current amount of licensed product throughout the country to turn to oversupply in two to five years. That means new entrants into the market—and even most current cultivators—will need a strategy beyond cultivation.