MariMed Inc. (PNK:MRMD) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Pablo Zwanik: Thank you. And if I can add one — just one last one. So regarding the 280E, I guess a two-part question. There are states that have begun to remove 280E, right? And Illinois I think was one of them. And that’s been helpful to the industry. Do you see potential for Massachusetts to do that? And then, at the federal level, I could argue that the industry has been lobbying a lot for safe and maybe, hoping for a rescheduling. But maybe not enough has been done in the industry lobby. It terms of just taking, eliminating 280E for the industry, right. There’s a lot of debate about the implications of rescheduling and rescheduling, I don’t want to get into that. But again, is the industry doing enough in the sort of lobbying to get to 280E out? It seems that there’s just too much focus on safe and rescheduling period? Thanks.

Tim Shaw: Well, let’s say a very good question, I’d say, it’s a tough political question, which is always an exciting thing to have to not talk about. 280E, you say, it removed in states. It wasn’t removed. They changed their tax laws in states — in several states, Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland are three that we’re in that have changed the law that you don’t have to follow the Federal 280E for filing your taxes, which is a great savings to all the industry. The fact is, you’re correct. The government should be looking at rescheduling as more than half the country now has legalized some type of cannabis in their states. The rescheduling would be much stronger than the banking act and would bring a lot more stability to the industry overall.

Not just MariMed that sounds the way to run their operations correctly. But to the smaller and the mid-sized companies that have to deal with this horrible tax that takes away from your cash flow and causes us to charge the customers more for the product that they’re buying. It would be great to see the government concentrate on that. But unfortunately as our government has shown, they’ve got crazier things that they want to concentrate on. And this is something you’re right. We probably need to have more lobbies pushing to get this looked at.

Pablo Zwanik: Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] There are no further questions from the phone lines. So this will conclude this morning’s conference call. We would like to thank everybody for participating and ask everyone to please disconnect their lines.