It’s official: Curaleaf is taking its bid directly to shareholders 🗳️

M&A
It’s official: Curaleaf is taking its bid directly to shareholders 🗳️

Curaleaf $CURLF ( ▼ 1.61% ) went public with the proposed terms on Monday.

The $4 per share offer is about a 45% premium on Aurora’s $ACB ( ▲ 1.94% ) 30-day average share price, dated to August 10 before Curaleaf announced its intention. 

The company says it found a path to about $40 million in annual cost synergies, and that the combined, $3 billion market cap company would be “uniquely positioned as the premier public vehicle for blue-chip institutional and long-term investors,” seeking exposure to legal cannabis.

“Today, we are putting this proposal directly in the hands of Aurora shareholders,” Curaleaf CEO Boris Jordan said in a statement. 

“We believe our Offer provides immediate value and a unique opportunity to participate in the upside of a larger, more diversified global cannabis platform with meaningful exposure to the growth of the U.S. market.”

OH, DEA
The DEA finally admits cannabis is mostly safe 🌿

August 17 was the final day for all parties to submit their briefs to the DEA judge in the hearings to reschedule cannabis. It’s a waiting game now — the judge will read through carefully, and then ultimately make his determination to the DEA administrator.

Reading through the briefs was astonishing. The DEA, perhaps the pre-eminent symbol of the War on Drugs throughout the last five decades, wrote up nearly 100 pages supporting the move to reclassify cannabis to Schedule III. You should skim it for yourself, Marijuana Moment posted them in full.

The DEA attorneys discussed the efficacy of cannabis for pain relief, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and its safety profile compared to other drugs. They also discussed the relatively minor problems stemming from cannabis use disorder, and that cannabis has far less of an impact on public health than other drugs like cocaine or fentanyl. Like I said, an astonishing position for the DEA. 

In its summary, the DEA admitted the “vast majority” of people that use cannabis do so in a manner that does not "result in dangers to themselves or to their communities." This is the same agency that routinely put people in prison and ruined lives for the drug it now admits is mostly harmless.

And now, when you see fear-mongering in the mainstream press or in conservative circles, you can simply show them what the DEA says. 

Speaking of, buried on page 101 of the filing is your favorite cannabis newsletter — us! In an odd twist, the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana cited our Cultivated Live episode with attorney Gary Kaminsky in an effort to discredit Dr. Corey Burchman, who testified about cannabis and pain management. 

-JB

South Dakota home grow licenses jump 1,072% in four years 📈

State health officials told lawmakers home cultivation licenses for medical marijuana patients grew from 61 to 715 between fiscal years 2022 and 2026, and the department flagged the boom as a regulatory concern since grow-room diagrams are often hand-drawn and lightly vetted.

Rescheduling won't fix cannabis research's money problem

A new New England Journal of Medicine piece from academics at Vanderbilt, Yale, and UCLA says Schedule III clears two of three historic barriers to cannabis research, but leaves the biggest one untouched: funding. Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to bankroll studies on a drug already sold through state-licensed dispensaries, the authors argue, so rigorous research still depends on government money that's been shrinking.

The NYSE is cozying up to cannabis. About a week after AdvisorShares, the ETF provider behind $MSOS ( ▼ 0.44% ), rang the NYSE bell, cannabis got another appearance: Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers and her team rang the bell. $TRLV ( ▲ 2.32% )