A few weeks back I wrote a blog article where I stated that I was not interested in preparing the legal paperwork for any company that was raising funds for a cannabis related company. In the same article I said that I would also decline the opportunity to prepare the paperwork for an initial coin offering (ICO).  Either would be lucrative for me but in both cases I saw significant problems for the investors.

I might have predicted that people would start sending me the paperwork for ICOs that were looking to fund cannabis businesses seeking my thoughts and comments. Two stick out as examples of how not to raise money for your cannabis business.

In July, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a report on ICOs. Crypto-currency is all the rage this year with some offerings raising millions of dollars in a matter of minutes and coins when issued quickly appreciating in price. Bitcoins for example have been appreciated significantly this year and some people think that Bitcoins are a legitimate investment, an assertion that is questionable at best.

The SEC correctly concluded that most crypto-currency offerings would fall within the definition of a security and thus its jurisdiction.  There was really no surprise as the SEC initiated about a dozen enforcement actions against crypto-currency issuers before it wrote its report.

Because an ICO is the offering of securities it is required by law to either 1) register with the SEC or 2) be exempt from registration assuming that an exemption is available. In either case, the issuer of the coins is required to give potential investors all the facts that would be material to making an investment decision.

If investors who purchased the coins got a discount on an ounce or two of marijuana the coins might not be securities. These two cannabis ICO offerings are clearly offering securities.  In both of these cases, investors profit if the underlying business profits which is more than enough for these to be securities and the SEC to have jurisdiction.

There are some facts which the SEC and any securities lawyer would consider to be material. This would include who is running the company; how much money is being raised and what will it be used for; the basic structure of the company’s ownership; how investors get paid and how much they might expect; an idea of the size of the market in which the company intends to compete and the names of the companies that are its major competitors.

Nothing really earth shattering,but the SEC has been reviewing offerings and ruling on how these facts are disclosed for decades. Making the disclosures correctly requires a fairly good idea of what the SEC expects and an equally good idea of the operation of the business offering the securities which is why securities lawyers who prepare offerings really have to know what we are doing.

The first cannabis ICO I looked at was for a company called Growers International.  Like all ICOs it uses a “White Paper” (which it prefers to call a “Green Paper”) instead of a traditional prospectus.  I doubt that it was prepared by a securities attorney. (I would suggest that you might add the words “Like, cool” or Yeah, man” between the sentences and it would read like the script of an old Cheech and Chong movie but I do not want to insult Cheech or Chong.)

From the Green Paper: “Q: Why should I trust the team? How do I know this isn’t a Pump & Dump situation?  A: We ask that all investors do their research on the people behind Growers International. Our lead developer has found success in both the cryptocurrency arena as well as in the cannabis industry. If there is any question regarding the legitimacy of the project, we encourage investors to reach out to Ryan (Lead Dev) personally on slack.”

It is always a good idea to research the people who are running any company into which you are making an investment.  In this case the “Green Paper” discloses the management to be: “Lead Developer: Ryan Wright (34, California / Taipei); Blockchain Programmer: Eddie E. (48, New Zealand); Web / API Developer: Michael J. (32, Maidenhead, England); Social Media Director: Devvie @Devnullius (40, Sweden); Community Coordinator: Jeremy Toman @MadHatt (37, Canada) who prefers the name ‘Tyler Dirden’ or ‘MadHatt’;Graphic Designer & Cryptocurrency Consultant: Chris S. @Elypse (26, Detroit); Community Manager: @DayVidd and Bitcointalk Manager & Financial Consultant: Dr. Charles @drcharles (26, USA).”

I suspect that if you contact Mr.Wright as suggested he will vouch for them all if he bothered to ask their last names. Do not bother to ask about Members of the Board of Directors as they have apparently not yet been appointed, so one Director might turn out to be Pablo@Escobar.

The other cannabis related ICO I reviewed is prepared more professionally but still, in my opinion, misses the mark by a good country mile. The company is called Paragon Coin, Inc. It is in the process of raising $100 million through the ICO. Just to be clear Paragon supports the cannabis industry, it does not appear that it intends to grow or distribute cannabis itself.

Paragon intends to bring block chain to the cannabis industry.  It intends to use a distributed ledger to bring order to this fragmented industry. According to the White Paper the company intends to “offer payment for industry related services and supplies through ParagonCoin; establish niche co-working spaces via ParagonSpace; organize and unite global legalization efforts through ParagonOnline; bring standardization of licensing, lab testing, transactions, supply chain and ID verification through apps built in ParagonAccelerator.”

All that is fair enough and the names and pictures of the operating personnel are included. Their education and work histories going back 10 years which I would have expected to see are not present.

The White Paper clearly notes that cannabis is not legal at the federal level and asserts that it will only operate in states where it is legal. This is the prime oxymoron of the cannabis industry.  Illegal at the federal level is illegal everywhere. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug and possession or sale is a felony in all 50 states. That is a fact about which that the cannabis industry does not want to think and largely ignores.

The Paragon White Paper describes one of the Risks of investing in its coin offering as follows:

CERTAIN ACTIVITIES INVOLVING MARIJUANA REMAIN ILLEGAL UNDER US FEDERAL

LAWS. SUCH ACTIVITIES INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO: (A) DISTRIBUTION OF MARIJUANA TO MINORS, (B) TRANSPORTING MARIJUANA FROM STATES WHERE IT IS LEGAL TO OTHER STATES, (C) DRUGGED DRIVING AND OTHER ADVERSE PUBLIC HEALTH CONSEQUENCES, (D) GROWING MARIJUANA ON PUBLIC LANDS, (E) MARIJUANA POSSESSION OR USE ON FEDERAL PROPERTY, AND

(F) OTHER CRIMINAL ACTIVITY OR VIOLENCE ASSOCIATED WITH THE SALE OF MARIJUANA. TO THE EXTENT THE COMPANY AND/OR PARAGON COIN, INC. MAY NOT PREVENT CERTAIN OF ITS USERS FROM USING PRG TOKENS IN VIOLATION OF US FEDERAL LAW, IT MAY SUBJECT THE COMPANY AND/OR PARAGON COIN, INC. TO CIVIL AND/OR CRIMINAL LIABILITY AND THE UTILITY, LIQUIDITY, AND/OR TRADING PRICE OF PRG TOKENS WILL BE ADVERSELY AFFECTED OR PRG TOKENS MAY CEASE TO BE TRADED.

This derives verbatim from the Cole Memorandum which was written in 2013 as a direction from the US Department of Justice to Federal prosecutors as to how they should allocate their resources when they decide who to prosecute and for what. It never made cannabis legal anywhere.

More importantly, the Cole Memo it is not an Act of Congress or Federal regulation and not binding on the current administration in any way. Any suggestion that it will continue to be followed under the current administration is wishful thinking given the Attorney General has repeatedly stated that it will not.

Medical marijuana has been legal in California for more than a decade. That did not stop the federal government from raiding and closing down a large medical dispensary in Oakland, CA in 2012. Parenthetically, Paragon’s initial co-working space is slated to open in Oakland, California.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this offering is that it intends to fund the use of block chain, a relatively unsecure distributed ledger to link the many growers and suppliers in the cannabis industry. If successful it may well deal a serious blow to the cannabis industry it is trying to support.

One of the leading ICO platforms, Coinbase, has been engaged in a two year battle with the Internal Revenue Service which wants a list of all the people who use its platform to trade Bitcoins. The IRS alleges that people are trading the coins profitably and not reporting the gains and paying the taxes. The US government has also alleged that drug cartels and other bad actors use crypto-currency to launder money.

If you are in the cannabis industry you have certainly heard stories of how the DEA would obtain the customer lists of hardware stores that sold supplies for hydroponic growing. Everyone who was a customer did not use these supplies to grow cannabis but the government used those lists to identify and prosecute people who did.

If you have a “decentralized” list of a large group of people who are on the list only because they are affirmatively in the cannabis business as Paragon wants to create, how long do you think it will take for the US Government to obtain it? Think that will be difficult because Paragon never touches any marijuana or sells it?

The CEO of Paragon, Jessica VerSteeg, is also CEO of AuBox which the White Paper describes as “an upscale marijuana delivery service in the SF Bay area”. That is more than enough “probable cause”for the DOJ to get its hands on Paragon’s distributed ledger and the names of every company that uses it. The icing on the cake will be when they tell the judge that the cannabis industry is full of drug cartels and money launders which, of course, it is.

When you write the risk factors for a securities offering, it is important to disclose all of the things that might reasonably occur.  Assuming that this ICO raises the $100 million that it seeks, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that the Attorney General might just seize that money under the federal asset forfeiture provisions. The people behind this offering somehow refuse to accept that there was an election last November and that there is a new sheriff in town.

What I took away from these two offerings was a sense that they were prepared by amateurs who were attempting to do something that was way over their head. In this current administration, raising money for a cannabis company waves a red flag in front of the US government. Compounding that fact by raising money through an ICO just increases the size of that red flag, exponentially.

I personally do not think that there is any hope for Green International but Paragon did not demonstrate that it needed $100 million and could have certainly raised a lesser, more reasonable amount in a more traditional fashion which is what I would have advised them to do if they had asked me.