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Cannabis company Cookies faces lawsuits alleging kickbacks, personal enrichment

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Cookies, among the most well-known American cannabis operators, is accused in separate lawsuits filed by current investors and a onetime business partner of using coercive “strongarm” tactics and bullying to force them to pay company executives “millions of dollars in personal benefits and kickbacks” as a cost of doing business with the brand.

The two lawsuits, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claim Cookies President Parker Berling and other board members and executives solicited and pocketed “kickbacks” in the form of cash, jewelry and other gifts.

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This “hidden forced private tax,” in the words of one suit, is levied on anyone wishing to do business with California-based Cookies, both lawsuits allege.

Cookies’ CEO and co-founder, Gilbert Milam Jr., commonly known as Berner, is named in only one of the suits, which was filed by a pair of investors. He declined to comment to MJBizDaily.

Through

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From client to co-founder, Storz & Bickel executive on US tour to drum up cannabis business

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Jürgen Bickel is not only the founder and managing director of Storz & Bickel, he’s also a longtime client of the company’s iconic cannabis smoking device.

The medically certified product manufacturer, based in Tuttlingen, Germany, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Volcano vaporizer, which has sold hundreds of thousands of units worldwide since its early days on the market when Bickel first tried it as a consumer.

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“It’s really for people who are frequently using cannabis,” he told MJBizDaily during a recent interview and product demo at a private cabana at The Woods in West Hollywood, California.

“There’s a lot of patients who really need to use it several times a day.

“They need reliability and reproducibility.”

The Woods, owned by

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Virginia governor expected to veto recreational marijuana sales legislation

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Virginia appears set to remain the only state in the country with recreational marijuana legalization but without legal sales.

That status quo would continue if, as widely expected, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin again vetoes adult-use sales legalization bills that state lawmakers recently sent to him.

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For the second straight year, Virginia’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed legislation that would finally set up adult-use sales in the state.

Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam, signed legalization into law in 2021, but that bill had a clause that required further action to create a market projected to be worth hundreds of millions.

The most recent legislation would give exclusive adult-use sales rights to the state’s existing medical marijuana businesses, which include major multistate operators such as:

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Trump research cuts threaten cannabis studies, poses rescheduling questions

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The Trump administration’s plan to cut federal research funding threatens 565 ongoing experiments involving cannabis, according to an MJBizDaily review and interviews with scientists and academics.

An accompanying freeze of new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants is also stymieing future research at a key moment – and raising questions about the fate of marijuana rescheduling as well as suggesting profound consequences for the regulated MJ industry.

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The NIH announced Feb. 7 that it would drastically reduce to no more than 15% the amount of “indirect costs” – money used to cover administrative and facility-related bills – financed by federal research grants.

Without fully funded indirect costs, “I literally cannot do my research,” Angela Bryan, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the

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