“I feel like … because it's in the middle of a lawsuit, we're putting the cart before the horse,” Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve said last week before casting the lone vote against licensing a new storefront for The Source. ”Are there some council members that are fine with that? I'm not.”

The first confirmed case in Nevada is a person under the age of 18 in Clark County, who was hospitalized with symptoms of pulmonary illness linked to vaping. The patient has been released from the hospital and is recovering.

The state has not released further details about why Pupo is on leave from his job as the agency's deputy executive director, citing the fact that the matter is a personnel issue. But Pupo came under fire in court over the summer and most recently in a newly filed lawsuit by marijuana companies that want the entire application review and licensing round redone.

The department and related entities “are now engaging in a cover-up of the rampant illegality and corruption that infected the license application process for the recreational Dispensaries,” the complaint says.

The Empowerment Center, located 15 feet away from the dispensary, is urging council members to deny the license on the basis that it could pose too much of a temptation for clients at a vulnerable stage in their lives.

Marijuana tax contributions have increased by 33 percent year over year, from $74.7 million paid last fiscal year to $99.18 million in the 2019 fiscal year, with another $10 million fees on top of that. The Nevada Dispensary Association announced the milestone in a press release on Tuesday, along with a warning that the state should not take the strong collections for granted.

Taxation officials noted that a “vast majority” of licensees will still be able to move forward toward opening their dispensaries because the injunction Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez issued on Friday is limited to licensees who didn't provide complete identification of every member of their leadership team. 

A Las Vegas judge has issued a partial preliminary injunction in a drawn-out, hard-fought dispute between marijuana companies and the state, prohibiting certain businesses who won a conditional state license in December from moving forward to open dispensaries.

Tying marijuana tax dollars directly to essential school expenses may not be the most prudent policy, according to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The organization released a study Monday underscoring how difficult it can be to predict how marijuana revenue will perform, and what trends will shape it going forward.

A marijuana-related court hearing that began in May came to a conclusion Friday with defense attorneys arguing the Nevada Department of Taxation complied with the spirit of the ballot question that legalized recreational marijuana when granting dispensary licenses.

Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez said her ruling would be based on whether the department exceeded the scope of its powers and if the state acted arbitrarily and capriciously in implementing a voter-approved ballot question legalizing recreational marijuana. She will also be looking at how ownership diversity and dispensary floor plans factored into application scores. 

A three-month-long court proceeding over a marijuana licensing dispute carried on for another day on Tuesday, with a top state official continuing to deny he favored existing dispensary license holders in the contest for new ones, and those who won the coveted licenses testifying that their losses during the legal delay are racking up.

“If it’s legal outside, it’s none of our business,” said Jon Okazaki, associate general counsel for the school district. “It is only our business if it comes into work and it negatively affects their ability to do their work.”

One of the faces at the forefront of efforts against human trafficking is Nick Trutanich, U.S. attorney for the District of Nevada, whose office is tasked with investigating such cases. The Nevada Independent caught up with Trutanich at the seminar to discuss the challenges of those prosecutions, as well as his office’s priorities on marijuana enforcement and public corruption cases.

In the months before recreational marijuana was legalized in Nevada, politicians, liquor store owners and lobbyists wondered whether the highly anticipated legal cannabis industry would cut into alcohol sales. Two years after the first dispensaries opened on July 1, 2017, they have their answer: no. 

Plaintiff attorneys argued that clients who applied in September 2018 did not receive fair, mandated and procedural consideration to attain a marijuana license, which in turn denied individuals who did not receive licenses of a property right. Citing the 14th Amendment, plaintiff attorneys argued all license applications needed to follow fair due process.

“I think the writing is on the wall that it will go out of business if we can not have the same opportunities as others,” said Zakalik. “As we have seen in other industries and present in this industry, there will be a strategic approach by those who own majority licenses to essentially put them out of business.”

“As I sit here today, I am losing $1.5 [millions] or more a month on a mothballed facility. Those are very real damages,” said Groesbeck, referring to the revenue he believes he would have generated if he could have expanded the business.“This isn’t a projection. This is real dollars, real sales.”