Marijuana Business Magazine October 2019

October 2019 | mjbizdaily.com 39 Pennsylvania Harvest Health & Recreation, an Arizona-based multistate cannabis company, reached an agreement with Pennsylvania regulators to drop two permits for medical marijuana companies it was pursuing in the state. The company also will not operate the two facilities it already built in New Castle and Shamokin, with 18 employees affected, the company said. Instead, Harvest will focus on the five other permits it was awarded in Pennsylvania, allowing it to operate 15 dispensaries, three per license. Pennsylvania caps the number of licenses one company can hold at five. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who strongly opposes marijuana legalization, wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal that allowing hemp cultivation is just as problematic. Noem argued that law enforcement doesn’t have the testing capacity to discern between marijuana and legal hemp, which has no more than 0.3% THC. South Dakota is one of three states with no laws on the books permitting hemp cultivation for research or commercial purposes.