In this bylined Daily Journal article, Shay Aaron Gilmore delivers his annual review of the cannabis and hemp laws enacted during California’s 2024 legislative session, walking practitioners through a slate of bills that clarified, expanded, and continued the state’s regulatory framework for commercial cannabis and hemp. As with his other annual reviews, the article pairs precise statutory analysis with the practical, client-facing implications that matter most to operators and their attorneys.
Gilmore opens with AB 2841, which addresses a persistent backlog in California’s cannabis research applications by authorizing the Research Advisory Panel to hold closed sessions when discussing projects that require sharing trade secrets, intellectual property, or proprietary information — creating a limited, carefully bounded exemption to the Bagley-Keene open-meetings law so that the Panel can clear its research backlog. He then analyzes SB 1511, a technical correction that resolves an ambiguity created by the recent expansion of the Compassionate Access to Medical Cannabis Act (“Ryan’s Law”), confirming that general acute-care hospitals may allow terminally ill patients to use medicinal cannabis.
The article gives detailed treatment to SB 1498, which extends California’s advertising-and-marketing restrictions — including the prohibitions on marketing to minors and on billboards along border-crossing highways — to unlicensed operators and to industrial-hemp manufacturers, distributors, and sellers, and empowers the Attorney General, city attorneys, and county counsel to bring enforcement actions. Gilmore explains SB 1059’s elimination of the “tax-upon-a-tax” confusion by clarifying that the sales-and-use tax is the final tax and that state cannabis excise taxes are excluded from the local gross-receipts base.
He also covers SB 1064’s creation of the new Combined Activities License (allowing multiple commercial activities other than laboratory testing at a single premises) and its removal of the “excessive concentration” consideration from DCC licensing decisions; SB 1109’s voluntary demographic-data collection; AB 2643’s environmental-remediation study and funding redirection; AB 2555’s extension of the medicinal-cannabis donation tax exemption to 2030; and AB 1775’s authorization of onsite food, beverage, and live-event sales at consumption lounges. The article equips attorneys to advise clients accurately on each change and its effective date.