New Jersey Extends Curaleaf's 12 Licenses to Dec. 31, and the Commissioner It Sued Votes No

On Thursday, Oct. 29, New Jersey's Cannabis Regulatory Commission met at 200 Riverview Plaza in Trenton, a session moved from its usual South Clinton Avenue address and pushed back a week from Oct. 22. After an hour set aside for a closed executive session, item eight on the agenda read like housekeeping: annual license renewals, administrative extensions. David Tuason, who directs the commission's compliance and investigations office, explained the one that mattered. A single licensee held 12 licenses and permits across the adult-use and medical markets, he said, and because of ongoing litigation with that entity over a licensing requirement, staff recommended extending all 12 to Dec. 31, 2026. (S1, S2)

Chair Harris Laufer moved to do exactly that. Then Commissioner Krista Nash asked to say a few words about what she called "a reprehensible display of corporate entitlement by Curaleaf," a company, she said, that New Jersey had licensed, enriched and welcomed in good faith. (S1)

Nash had reason to take it personally. She is one of the officials Curaleaf sued in federal court in October 2025, and her name sits on the state's notice of appeal to the Third Circuit alongside the commission's. Her remarks, as recorded by Heady NJ, reached for a barnyard proverb: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." When she finished, the commission voted 4-1 to keep Curaleaf's New Jersey operations licensed through the end of the year. Nash cast the only no. (S1, S6)

The vote is a small administrative act in a large fight. New Jersey's cannabis law requires every licensee to keep a labor peace agreement with a bona fide union, and the commission fined Curaleaf $610,000 in 2025 for operating 122 days without one. On Aug. 10, 2026, U.S. District Judge Michael A. Shipp entered final judgment declaring that requirement preempted by the National Labor Relations Act as applied to Curaleaf. The state appealed three days later. Until the Third Circuit rules in case No. 26-3067, that declaration stands as to Curaleaf, and the commission has chosen extensions over a renewal fight with the state's largest cannabis operator. Thursday's extension buys both sides until Dec. 31, three weeks after the commission's next scheduled meeting on Dec. 10. (S2, S4, S6, S13)

The same afternoon, the commission turned down Curaleaf on a separate request with no connection to the lawsuit. Chief Counsel Aruna Mohankumar presented a waiver application from the company to use pesticides in its cultivation other than those the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has deemed minimum risk and exempted from the federal insecticide, fungicide and rodenticide law. New Jersey's rule for cultivators, N.J.A.C. 17:30-10.9, forbids any pesticide except those minimum-risk products. "We've denied previous requests as pertains to pesticides," Laufer said in recommending denial. The vote was 5-0. (S1, S7)

Taken together, the two votes describe the commission's current posture toward Curaleaf: it will keep the company operating where a federal court has tied its hands, and hold the line on the rules no court has questioned. (S1)

Nash's case against the company rests on a contradiction she believes Curaleaf has built into its own litigation. In New Jersey, Curaleaf asked a federal court to strike down a state licensing condition. In Michigan, two of its subsidiaries persuaded a federal appeals court that a cannabis supply contract could not be enforced because the underlying business violates federal law. On Sept. 10, 2026, a Sixth Circuit panel accepted that argument and erased a $31.8 million jury verdict won by Hello Farms, a grower whose harvests the Curaleaf units had agreed to buy. "Curaleaf is certainly talking out of both sides of its mouth," Nash said Thursday. (S1, S14)

Her framing echoes the argument New Jersey lost in Trenton. In its motion to dismiss, the state told Shipp that unclean hands barred Curaleaf from using federal equity to rewrite a state licensing regime so it could operate more freely in a market federal law declares criminal. Shipp's May 27 opinion rejected that. The doctrine requires an immediate and necessary relationship between a party's misconduct and its claim, he wrote, and he could not see how a dispute over whether a state labor rule violates federal labor law had a sufficient nexus to the federally illegal product. Curaleaf's lawyers had put the distinction more sharply in their briefing: the state's basic error, they argued, was to conflate the cannabis product market with the labor market, which is fully lawful and fully regulated by the NLRA. (S5)

That is the strongest version of Curaleaf's position, and it does not depend on consistency between Michigan and New Jersey. A company can argue that federal law voids a cannabis sales contract and also argue that federal labor law governs its workforce, because those are different federal statutes applied to different conduct. Nash's version is the moral one: a company that claims federal illegality as a shield in one courtroom should not wield federal law as a sword in another. "It does not get to use the federal courts to enable its federally illegal conduct," she said. Curaleaf did not address the commission Thursday, according to the Heady NJ account, and its public position remains the one in its filings, including a complaint that called license loss "the commercial equivalent of the death penalty." (S1, S5, S13)

“If Curaleaf wants to operate in our state-created, state-regulated cannabis industry that remains federally illegal... it must comply with state law and state licensing reviews.”

— Krista Nash, Commissioner, New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission

Nash also warned that Curaleaf no longer stands alone. "Other copycats here in New Jersey are now trying to follow in Curaleaf's steps by rushing to federal court," she said. She did not name them on the record, but the docket does. Verano Holdings, which runs four Zen Leaf dispensaries and a Branchburg cultivation site in New Jersey, sued the commission and UFCW Local 360 on July 31. On Oct. 5, The Cannabis Place 420 Corp., a single Jersey City dispensary, filed its own five-count complaint, case No. 3:26-cv-12967. (S1, S9, S10, S11)

The Cannabis Place is the case that complicates both sides' story. Its founder, Osbert Orduña, a 52-year-old Marine veteran, opened the store on John F. Kennedy Boulevard on Nov. 9, 2023, and became a showcase for the labor law Nash defends. In July 2024 the dispensary hosted union officials and former Senate President Steve Sweeney, an architect of the mandate, for a public signing of its union recognition agreement with Local 360. Sweeney said the system was working exactly the way it was supposed to. (S8, S9)

By June 2026 the partnership had collapsed over contract terms, and the store terminated its agreement. According to its complaint, it then approached every other union it could find for a replacement labor peace agreement, and none would sign. "New Jersey's mandate doesn't protect workers; it creates a state-sponsored cartel that holds minority and veteran entrepreneurs hostage," Orduña said. His lawsuit points to William Wallace, the commission's director of labor compliance, who previously worked for the UFCW. (S8, S9)

The state answered in court that The Cannabis Place faces no imminent harm, because the commission administratively approved its renewal and has not issued a notice of violation while the Curaleaf appeal proceeds. Its lawyers called the complaint "woefully premature." The fight moved to City Hall anyway. On Oct. 7, after Local 360 urged the Jersey City Council to delay the store's local license renewal, the council pulled the item without a vote, three days before the license was set to expire. A federal judge paused the expiration on Oct. 9, and an Oct. 15 consent order with the city requires a council vote. The company says the order kept 20 employees working. (S8, S10)

Hugh Giordano, Local 360's director of organizing, used Thursday's public comment period to describe what a labor peace agreement buys an employer. The union agrees not to strike, leaflet outside the doors or call a boycott, he said. "It makes us neutral." In exchange, workers get an organizing path toward raises and vacation benefits. Then he turned to The Cannabis Place, which he said he had once spoken up for at commission meetings. "They have money to hire attorneys, they have money to pay their employees," he said, and he threatened to stand outside the store urging customers not to go in. (S1)

Sam Ferraino, the local's president, has framed the wave of litigation as opportunism timed to Washington. "Nobody fought the law then," he told Heady NJ in August, after Verano sued. "The minute Trump came in, the minute they started fighting the law." He said 218 union members work for Verano in New Jersey. (S11)

Management-side lawyers see a different pattern: a type of state rule that federal judges in Oregon and New Jersey have now struck down, enforced against employers who signed when a signature was the price of a license. Dean Kpere-Daibo of Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, counsel to The Cannabis Place, called the case a test of "whether state regulatory bodies can be weaponized as enforcement arms for politically connected labor unions." Local 360 answered in an Oct. 19 statement that called the lawsuit's allegations baseless and pointed out that Constangy advertises union-avoidance services. (S8, S9, S12, S13)

For the commission, the practical problem is arithmetic. Each new federal complaint arrives with a renewal date attached, and each renewal forces a choice between enforcing a rule a federal court has declared preempted for one company and extending licenses while the appeal runs. So far the commission has chosen extensions, for Curaleaf in 2025 and again Thursday, and an administrative approval for The Cannabis Place. The rest of Thursday's business looked like a functioning market: ownership changes, license conversions and new annual licenses for two manufacturers and a Rockaway Township retailer, each approved without objection. (S1, S3, S8, S13)

Nash closed her remarks with a warning about precedent rather than a prediction about the appeal. "We should not sit idly by," she said, and then: "If any company wants to harvest profits in this state, they must respect our laws and our requirements." Laufer thanked her, the commission voted 4-1 against her, and moved to the next item, the pesticide waiver they would deny unanimously. The extension she opposed expires on New Year's Eve, unless three judges in Philadelphia, or the five commissioners in Trenton, decide something first. (S1)

Keep Reading

Policy & Compliance

DEA Moves to Deny a Minneapolis Dispensary Over Minnesota's Law, Not Anything It Did

An order signed by DEA diversion chief Cheri Oz says a license covering both medical and adult-use sales cannot qualify. The agency's own list shows 30 Minnesota applicants, 209 in Missouri and 160 in Ohio waiting; none were among the 900-plus dispensaries registered Oct. 30.

By Cannabis Inc, Editorial Staff·8 min read

Policy & Compliance

Hochul Ends New York's Cannabis Labor-Peace Mandate the Day the Judge Weighing It Dies

Chapter 369 repeals the 2021 union-neutrality requirement at once, but a deal with legislative leaders strips the AFL-CIO-seated wage board meant to replace it. A Brooklyn retailer's fully briefed federal challenge now waits for a new judge, and organized labor gets neither the mandate nor its replacement.

By Cannabis Inc, Editorial Staff·7 min read