CannaPath Cannabis Compliance Blog

Drew Duffy, MHA, FACHE · Founder, CannaPath Regulatory Solutions · 8 min read A few years back a friend of mine retired out of healthcare and decided he wanted to open a cannabis shop. He knew what he was doing in a lot of ways. He had run operations for decades, he understood budgets, and he was not the sort of person who rushes into things. He found a building he liked. Good visibility, fair rent, a part of town that made sense. He negotiated, he signed, and he called m

By Drew Duffy, MHA, FACHE Founder & Managing Director, CannaPath Most people think finding a retail location is one of the last major hurdles before opening a cannabis business. For some Minnesota operators, it has become the mistake that costs them the most money. Prospective retailers have signed commercial leases after receiving verbal approval from a landlord — only to discover later that the property cannot legally be licensed because of where it sits. By then the lease

By: Drew Duffy MHA, FACHE, Founder & Managing Director How the FPOR revision cycle quietly runs Minnesota operators out of time — and how to submit an approvable plan the first time. If you have preliminary approval from the Office of Cannabis Management, you have already cleared the hardest part of getting into Minnesota's market. Whether you won a lottery for a capped license or qualified directly for an uncapped one, you did something most applicants did not. The trouble i

Minnesota's adult-use cannabis market is no longer a question of if. It's here, it's growing, and the numbers are real. But anyone operating in this space right now knows that "open for business" and "running smoothly" are two very different things. At CannaPath, I don't trade in fear. I trade in clarity. So let's look at the market as it actually is: the momentum that's genuine, the structural problems that are equally genuine, and — most importantly — what you can do about