Cannabis businesses don’t have many options when it comes to insurance, because major insurance players are staying out of the market until cannabis is reclassified under federal law. However, cannabis licensees are required to carry insurance by state law (discussed below), and often by landlords, lenders, customers or suppliers. Recent vaping-related bodily injuries have also highlighted both the need for products-liability coverage and the fact that most cannabis-liability policies contain significant exclusions – and below we provide a few ways to deal with these exclusions.  Finally, we discuss some hope on the horizon in the form of increasing standardization of forms and federal crop insurance.

State Laws. These state-law requirements are not trivial: a licensee that fails to carry the proper coverage could lose its license.