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Washington, D.C. Passes Bill To Expand Medical Weed Sales
Local lawmakers in Washington, D.C. have approved a bill to expand the city’s medical marijuana economy, including a path to legitimacy for cannabis gifting shops.
Local lawmakers in Washington, D.C. last week passed legislation to expand medical marijuana sales, giving the city’s popular but unlicensed weed gifting shops a path to the regulated market. The bill, which was approved by the D.C. district council on December 20, comes after Congress included an existing prohibition on regulated adult-use cannabis sales in the nation’s capital as part of a spending bill approved last week.
The bill significantly expands Washington, D.C.’s medical marijuana program, lifting a cap on dispensaries and increasing the number of authorized cultivation facilities. The legislation also creates licenses for new types of cannabis businesses, including marijuana delivery services, online sales, educational programs such as cooking classes, and cannabis consumption areas at dispensaries. Half of the new licenses will be reserved for social equity applicants, which are defined as D.C. residents who have a low income, have spent time in prison, or are related to someone who was incarcerated for a cannabis or drug-related offense.
Bill Addresses D.C.’s Weed Gifting Shops
The legislation is designed to address the vast unregulated market for cannabis in Washington, D.C., where medical marijuana was legalized by local lawmakers in 2010. In 2014, voters approved Initiative 71, a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana. Under the measure, adults can possess up to two ounces of marijuana, are permitted to grow cannabis at home, and may gift up to one ounce of weed to another adult. However, Congress, which has control over the Washington, D.C. budget, has refused to allow the city to spend money on regulating recreational marijuana sales.
The situation has led to dozens of businesses that take advantage of the gifting provision of I-71 to distribute cannabis openly from storefront businesses. Under the common scheme, businesses sell benign merchandise such as apparel or art, offering what is ostensibly a free gift of marijuana with the purchase. Phil Mendelson, the Chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, estimates the unregulated marijuana market in the nation’s capital is worth as much as $600 million per year.
“There’s always going to be an advantage to unlicensed and unregulated: they don’t have to pay taxes, they don’t have to ensure quality,” Mendelson said in an interview with DCist/WAMU. “Congress is aiding and abetting that by prohibiting us from regulating that. It’s a real public safety problem,” he said.
Patients Can Self-Certify To Use Medical Marijuana
The legislation passed last week also makes permanent an emergency measure passed earlier this year that allows adults to certify their own eligibility to use medical marijuana, eliminating a previous provision that required certification by a licensed physician. At the time, Mendelson and some members also attempted to enact prohibitions on the gifting industry but faced opposition from a group of business owners. Legalizing the shops so they could be regulated was not possible under the congressional ban, making allowing gifting businesses a path to the medical marijuana market an option popular with a majority of the district council.
“It’s going to allow the District to be a lot healthier on the cannabis side,” Terrence White, chairman of a group known as the i-71 Committee and a gifting shop owner, told the Washington Post. “It’s going to allow us to be doing it ‘right,’ as I call it.”
The bill passed by the council last week gives existing operators 90 days to apply for a medical marijuana retailer license and prevents enforcement against gifting shops for at least 315 days after the legislation goes into effect. David Grosso, a former council member and current lobbyist for the D.C. Cannabis Trade Association, a group representing licensed medical marijuana operators, said that the bill is a positive development for the industry.
“We certainly would like to see a level playing field across the board, and that hasn’t been the case for as long as the [Initiative 71] folks have been operating illegally. And so we’re hopeful that this effort will bring them into the legal market and then treat them equally with us,” said Grosso. “And that means all the regulations that come with it, the fees that you have to pay, the inspections you have to endure, all of the restrictions around where you can locate, and everything like that which the current legal market has had to deal with now for more than ten years, which is a huge burden on us.”
Norbert Pickett, the owner of Cannabliss, one of the seven licensed medical dispensaries located in the nation’s capital, agreed, saying that the legislation is an opportunity to expand Washington, D.C.’s medical marijuana market and provide new options for patients.
“It gives patients more access to safe and tested cannabis,” he said. “It unifies unregulated market and the legal market. For me, that’s a win.”
Mackenzie Mann, project manager for the gifting industry trade group Generational Equity Movement, said that the legislation from the district council is a drastic change for Washington, D.C.’s cannabis landscape.
“It’s surreal,” Mann said. “A year ago, they were trying to shut us down.”
Source: https://hightimes.com/news/washington-d-c-passes-bill-to-expand-medical-weed-sales/
New Mexico regulators fined a cannabis operator nearly $300,000 and revoked its license after the company allegedly created fake reports in the state’s traceability software.
The New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (CCD) accused marijuana manufacturer and retailer Golden Roots of 11 violations, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Golden Roots operates the The Cannabis Revolution Dispensary.
The majority of the violations are related to the Albuquerque company’s improper use of BioTrack, which has been New Mexico’s track-and-trace vendor since 2015.
The CCD alleges Golden Roots reported marijuana production only two months after it had received its vertically integrated license, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Because cannabis takes longer than two months to be cultivated, the CCD was suspicious of the report.
After inspecting the company’s premises, the CCD alleged Golden Roots reported cultivation, transportation and sales in BioTrack but wasn’t able to provide officers who inspected the site evidence that the operator was cultivating cannabis.
In April, the CCD revoked Golden Roots’ license and issued a $10,000 fine, according to the news outlet.
The company requested a hearing, which the regulator scheduled for Sept. 1.
At the hearing, the CCD testified that the company’s dried-cannabis weights in BioTrack were suspicious because they didn’t seem to accurately reflect how much weight marijuana loses as it dries.
Company employees also poorly accounted for why they were making adjustments in the system of up to 24 pounds of cannabis, making comments such as “bad” or “mistake” in the software, Albuquerque Business First reported.
Golden Roots was fined $298,972.05 – the amount regulators allege the company made selling products that weren’t properly accounted for in BioTrack.
The CCD has been cracking down on cannabis operators accused of selling products procured from out-of-state or not grown legally:
- Regulators alleged in August that Albuquerque dispensary Sawmill Sweet Leaf sold out-of-state products and didn’t have a license for extraction.
- Paradise Exotics Distro lost its license in July after regulators alleged the company sold products made in California.
Golden Roots was the first alleged rulebreaker in New Mexico to be asked to pay a large fine.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/new-mexico-cannabis-operator-fined-loses-license-for-alleged-biotrack-fraud/
Four marijuana companies, including a multistate operator, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they allege the federal MJ prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act is no longer constitutional.
According to the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, retailer Canna Provisions, Treevit delivery service CEO Gyasi Sellers, cultivator Wiseacre Farm and MSO Verano Holdings Corp. are all harmed by “the federal government’s unconstitutional ban on cultivating, manufacturing, distributing, or possessing intrastate marijuana.”
Verano is headquartered in Chicago but has operations in Massachusetts; the other three operators are based in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the “Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as applied to the intrastate cultivation, manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana pursuant to state law.”
The companies want the case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to represent them.
The New York-based firm’s principal is David Boies, whose former clients include Microsoft, former presidential candidate Al Gore and Elizabeth Holmes’ disgraced startup Theranos.
Similar challenges to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) have failed.
One such challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005.
In Gonzalez vs. Raich, the highest court in the United States ruled in a 6-3 decision that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to outlaw marijuana federally, even though state laws allow the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
In the 18 years since that ruling, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana and the federal government has allowed a multibillion-dollar cannabis industry to thrive.
Since both Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, currently headed by Garland, have declined to intervene in state-licensed marijuana markets, the key facts that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling “no longer apply,” Boies said in a statement Thursday.
“The Supreme Court has since made clear that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate purely intrastate commerce,” Boies said.
“Moreover, the facts on which those precedents are based are no longer true.”
Verano President Darren Weiss said in a statement the company is “prepared to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to align federal law with how Congress has acted for years.”
While the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana would help solve marijuana operators’ federal tax woes, neither rescheduling nor modest Congressional reforms such as the SAFER Banking Act “solve the fundamental issue,” Weiss added.
“The application of the CSA to lawful state-run cannabis business is an unconstitutional overreach on state sovereignty that has led to decades of harm, failed businesses, lost jobs, and unsafe working conditions.”
Alabama regulators are targeting Dec. 1 to award the first batch of medical cannabis business licenses after the agency’s first two attempts were scrapped because of scoring errors and litigation.
The first licenses will be awarded to individual cultivators, delivery providers, processors, dispensaries and state testing labs, according to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC).
Then, on Dec. 12, the AMCC will award licenses for vertically integrated operations, a designation set primarily for multistate operators.
Licenses are expected to be handed out 28 days after they have been awarded, so MMJ production could begin in early January, according to the Alabama Daily News.
That means MMJ products could be available for patients around early March, an AMCC spokesperson told the media outlet.
Regulators initially awarded 21 business licenses in June, only to void them after applicants alleged inconsistencies with how the applications were scored.
Then, in August, the state awarded 24 different licenses – 19 went to June recipients – only to reverse themselves again and scratch those licenses after spurned applicants filed lawsuits.
A state judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based MSO Verano Holdings Corp., but another lawsuit is pending.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/alabama-plans-to-award-medical-cannabis-licenses-dec-1/
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