Learn more about harnessing celebrity brands and endorsements in cannabis with Dan Shapiro. Dan is the Associate General Counsel at Greenlane Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: GNLN), one of the largest global sellers of premium cannabis accessories and CBD products. Prior to joining Greenlane, Dan worked at CAA in the Sports Business & Legal Affairs division. Dan is the Founder and Inaugural Chair of the Cannabis Division of the American Bar Association Forum on Entertainment and Sports Industries and a member of NCIA’s State Regulations Committee.

We are certainly seeing a lot in the news about athletes using cannabis. With the Olympics happening this summer as well, there’s debate about whether cannabis is “performance-enhancing” but others see it more as a pain recovery for injuries. We all remember Michael Phelps the Olympic swimmer getting in some trouble many years ago.

There’s the cannabis product itself, the flower, the pre-rolls, the extraction brands and so on that celebrities participate in. But the accessory space, in particular, is what Dan wrote about in the blog most recently, so this includes vaporizers and grinders. Celebrities endorse all kinds of products all the time, like make-up lines, face creams, perfume, so seeing them move into the cannabis endorsement space seems to be helping to normalize our industry. We dive into how this is evolving going forward as we see the expansion of legalization across the country, state by state, and preparing hopefully for federal legalization.