“Walgreens of Weed”: How Pot Law’s Seedy Start Created Florida’s Cannabis Oligopoly

Something smells funky in Florida’s medical marijuana industry — and it’s not coming from a smoldering joint.

Back in 2016, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) secretly recorded Tallahassee developer J.T. Burnette — who has since married Kim Rivers, CEO of the multimillion-dollar Florida-based cannabis giant Truelieve — boasting that he and his childhood friend, then-Florida house member Halsey Beshears (R-Monticello), cordoned off access to commercial cannabis licenses by tweaking a cannabis bill signed into law in 2014 that governed the state’s then-fledgling medical marijuana industry.

The bill mandated that licenses only be granted to nurseries with a 30-year-history in the state and the ability to post a $5 million bond. This was an advantage to Burnette’s then-girlfriend, Rivers, and to Beshears’ brother, Thad Beshears, who sits on Truelieve’s board of directors and co-owns Simpson Nurseries (which was founded in 1902).

“All we did is at the last minute said, ‘You need to be [a] 30-year nursery,’” Burnette tells the agent, according to the FBI transcript.

Burnette then professes that the state’s first handful of licenses was “fucking real valuable.”

“We didn’t have to know anything more than that,” Burnette says. “All we knew — we didn’t know how to — we didn’t know how to grow marijuana [but] we were in the ship.”

Set up when only low-THC medical marijuana was legal in Florida, the 2014 licensing arrangement gave a small group of companies a tight hold on Florida’s cannabis industry, which persists to this day and makes it seemingly impossible for smaller growers to even attempt to elbow their way into the market. [Read More @ The Miami New Times]