In this Beverly Hills Bar Association continuing legal education program, Shay Aaron Gilmore reviews the pivotal cannabis and hemp developments from California’s 2024 legislative session, distilling a busy year of lawmaking into the essentials that attorneys need to advise their clients confidently and accurately. The session is designed for practitioners across practice areas — corporate, regulatory, employment, real estate, and litigation — who encounter cannabis and hemp questions and need a reliable, current briefing on the state of the law.
Gilmore walks through the marquee measures Governor Newsom signed into law, beginning with the widely discussed “cannabis cafes” bill (AB 1775), which authorizes cannabis retailers and microbusinesses operating consumption lounges to prepare and sell non-cannabis food and beverages and to host live events, subject to local approval — a significant expansion of the permissible business model for lounge operators. He explains the practical conditions and local-approval prerequisites operators must satisfy before they can take advantage of the new authority.
The program also covers AB 2555, which extends until January 1, 2030 the sales-and-use-tax exemption for medicinal cannabis donated by licensed retailers to qualifying patients — a five-year lifeline for California’s cannabis compassion programs — and SB 1059, which eliminates the “tax-upon-a-tax” problem by clarifying that state cannabis excise taxes are excluded from the gross-receipts base used to calculate local taxes and fees. Gilmore addresses SB 1498’s expansion of advertising-and-marketing enforcement, which extends existing restrictions to unlicensed operators and industrial-hemp manufacturers and empowers the Attorney General, county counsel, and city attorneys to bring civil actions with substantial penalties.
He also reviews the structural licensing reforms in SB 1064 (the new consolidated combined-activities license and the removal of the “excessive concentration” consideration), the demographic-data collection required under SB 1109, and the research-facilitation and environmental-remediation measures rounding out the session. Throughout, the emphasis is on client counseling: what changed, when it takes effect, and how attorneys should adjust their advice. Practitioners leave equipped to guide cannabis and hemp clients through the 2024 changes with confidence.