What you need to know about Trulieve and Amendment 3

No marijuana company has donated more to the campaign for Florida’s recreational marijuana measure — which is why no company in the state has generated more attention this election cycle.

Not that Trulieve is a stranger to the spotlight. It is Florida’s largest medical marijuana operator, with more than 150 stores statewide.

And it has contributed the vast majority of that the approximately $150 million received by Smart & Safe Florida, the group leading the Amendment 3 campaign.

“Amendment 3 is funded by one big cannabis company,” Governor Ron DeSantis said recently Fox News appearance. “They don’t do that because they care about the interests of Florida. They do it because they want to make a profit.”

DeSantis went so far as to accuse the company of trying to create a “cartel” in the state constitution, now a common line among the governor and his allies. Cartels were traditionally groups of companies that conspired to fix prices, but the word is now associated with illegal drug organizations.

Real representatives have repeatedly refuted that criticism and a whole bunch of others which has been launched in recent months against it and against the recreational marijuana measure.

Amendment 3If at least 60% of Florida voters approve, 21-year-olds would be allowed to possess up to three ounces of marijuana or five grams in concentrated form. With the amendment going to voters on Election Day, November 5 – and already in front of early and mail-in voters – it may be difficult to separate Trulieve from the ballot initiative.

Here’s some context to help:

DeSantis and allies say amendment is ‘corporate greed’, but Trulieve and competitors say governor is ‘misguided’

Since Trulieve is the largest medical marijuana company in Florida, it stands to reason that it would also be positioned to control the majority of the recreational market.

Amendment 3 allows current medical marijuana providers to sell recreational products, although supporters are quick to point out that its wording explicitly allows the Legislature to also issue licenses to other entities.

“They’re actually creating a more competitive marketplace,” Steve Vancore said at a recent Democratic-WFSU meeting in Tallahassee. debate on the amendment. Vancore is a spokesperson for Trulieve, which also represents the Smart & Safe Florida campaign.

Florida Amendment 3, recreational marijuana use, candidate forum

Dr. Jessica Spencer, Director of Advocacy, No. 3, and Steve Vancore, Smart & Safe Florida, participated in a candidate forum on Florida Amendment 3

Tallahassee Democrat

Vancore mentioned that there are 24 other medical marijuana companies in Florida: “That’s more than we have supermarket chains,” he said, before noting that the DeSantis administration sits up 22 additional medical marijuana licenses.

“You don’t spend more than $100 million creating a competitor in your backyard,” replied Jessica Spencer, director of advocacy at No on 3, who debated Vancore. “You do it to create a consumer. … The bottom line is that they did this for themselves. This is about corporate greed.”

But even some of Trulieve’s competitors have defended it.

Trulieve CEO Kim “Rivers has twice as much business as I do, and you don’t see me sitting here complaining about her,” Boris Jordan, chairman and CEO of Curaleaf, said in an interview. “She built (that) company from the ground up in Florida. And honestly, (DeSantis) should be praising her for doing what she did, instead of criticizing her.

Jordan, whose company donated a few million dollars to the pro-change campaignsaid he is a Republican who believes DeSantis “has been a great governor for the state of Florida.”

“I think he’s just misguided on this issue, though,” he said.

The ‘Canadian company’ is not

According to DeSantis, Trulieve is not only creating a “cartel,” but a Canadian cartel.

“How ridiculous is this, that we would essentially let our Constitution serve as a rent subsidy for some Canadian marijuana company?” DeSantis said during a breakfast speech the 2024 Republican National Convention.

The Florida-founded company calls that ‘completely untrue’.

In 2018it acquired a mining company in Canada through a process known as a reverse takeover, in which the merged company Trulieve Cannabis Corp.

This allowed the company to trade publicly on a Canadian exchange while avoiding the stock market restrictions that marijuana companies face in the United States, where their product is federally banned.

Like Vancore before put it in an email: “The only connection to Canada is a holding company created so that shares can be publicly traded. Trulieve Cannabis Corp. is NOT the licensee, nor has it, the holding company, made a single donation to the Smart & Safe Florida campaign. “

The ads and lawsuits

The ads for and against Amendment 3 have given Floridians a taste of controversy — and they’ve also stirred up more of it.

New Senate Democratic leader Jason Pizzo, D-Sunny Isles Beach, sued the Florida Department of Transportation over a taxpayer-funded ad that said, “DUI crashes are increasing in states with legalized marijuana, leaving everyone is at risk.”

“Whether or not legalizing marijuana is exactly the issue voters will decide when considering Amendment 3 on the ballot,” his lawsuit saysfiled in Leon County. The ad “unfairly places the government’s thumb on a scale beyond its authority and stands in stark contrast to previous neutral advertisements it has run.”

Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey ruled against Pizzosaying that he does not meet the legal requirements to file a lawsuit and that the ministry has the “budgetary authority to spend money on public sector commercials, and that the commercial in question makes no mention of Amendment 3 , voting or the elections.”

Trulieve herself has not been left out of the legal drama.

The company filed a defamation lawsuit earlier this month against the Republican Party of Florida, accusing it of launching a “deliberately misleading campaign… that falsely accused Trulieve of putting the initiative on the ballot to eliminate competition and entrench its so-called monopoly .” Two television stations that showed the ad were also named in the lawsuit.

In a court filethe Republican Party of Florida responded that Trulieve wanted to “silence the marketplace of ideas.”

“Political statements belong in the public square, not in the courtroom,” the report wrote. “Political expression should also not be hampered by unfounded lawsuits.”

Trulieve: A story about green origins

Florida’s first medical marijuana dispensary opened in 2016.

It belonged to Trulieve.

That happened months before Florida residents even passed the medical marijuana constitutional amendment that ushered in today’s cannabis market.

The company, a result of three nurseries in Northwest Florida combined to receive the state’s first medical marijuana license in 2015. That was made possible via an invoice The year before, low THC products were allowed for patients with cancer or other serious health conditions. In 2015, another bill was passed to increase the allowable amount of THC and expand the patient base.

Rivers, Trulieve’s CEO, describes her company as a “classic startup.”

She told the Florida News Service that for the first few days “I didn’t receive a salary and I was in the back making capsules and making sure the shipments were sent on time. “

By the time the medical marijuana amendment went into effect, so was Trulieve well ahead of the pack. From there the company grew steadily, with some traces, as the company then did sued the state in 2018 over alleged “arbitrary” caps on the number of stores companies can have.

Trulieve would open in October 2021 its 100th store.

But around that time, the company faced some challenges the Tampa Bay Times called his “first great public embarrassment.”

Tallahassee developer John “JT” BurnetteRivers’ wife, was subsequently convicted on federal government corruption charges an undercover FBI investigation into City Hall . Although the charges were unrelated to Trulieve, prosecutors argued for a harsher sentence, accusing him in part of “exploiting his personal relationships with state legislators and of undisclosed conflicts of interest to gain unfair advantage in the medical marijuana industry.”

Trulieve representatives insisted that Burnette had “no formal involvement” with the company and never spoke or acted on its behalf, and they emphasized that Trulieve was never part of the case. Still, after the conviction, the Tallahassee Democrat quoted a financial analyst as saying the situation looked like a “disaster” for Trulieve and suggesting there would “probably” be a change in leadership.

Yet that chapter has not played a role in the debates over Amendment 3. And Rivers remained CEO and has led the company to dramatic growth. including one $2.1 billion acquisition of former competitor Harvest Health & Recreation Inc., making Trulieve the nation’s largest medical marijuana retailer.

With 156 of Florida’s nearly 700 dispensaries, Trulieve sells more than 30% of the state’s medical marijuana products, according to data to be stated. It has shops in nine states.

“I’m a Floridian. I was born and raised in Jacksonville,” Rivers said in an interview. “Trulieve is a Florida-born company. We started here eight years ago with ten employees and have grown to where it is today.”

This reporting content is supported through a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Douglas Soule can be reached at [email protected].