California’s Permanent Cannabis Regulations: Our Feedback to the BCC
Because if you’re not at the table, you’re on it.
California just got another step closer to finalizing the regulations that will oversee its legal cannabis industry. On July 13, the last round of proposed emergency regulations was released, followed by a 45-day comment period and public feedback sessions with the BCC, the Dept of Food & Ag, and the Dept of Public Health.
Our team spent those 45 days poring over the proposed regulations, submitting comments, and showing up to the public hearings to ensure that the interests of our partners, and the community as a whole, were represented and heard. We attended all three BCC public comments sessions in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.
We expect the BCC to release their revised regulations anytime between late September to mid October, which will likely be followed by a 15 day comment period. Afterward, there may or may not be additional changes and another feedback period — we’ll keep you posted.
Below is a summary of the feedback we submitted — both in person and in writing — to the BCC. Please share your thoughts with us in the comments — we’d love to hear from you!
Track and Trace Implementation
While the BCC is not responsible for the state’s track and trace program, all licensees depend on the system. If track and trace fails, the requirements of the state’s regulations cannot be met.
Therefore, we proposed adopting a staggered approach to track and trace implementation across the supply chain whereby retailers and distributors are required to use a track and trace system only after it has been shown to work successfully at the level of cultivation.
This would reduce the pain of implementation along the supply chain and improve the likelihood of a successful rollout of track and trace while helping to prevent potential outages, gross errors, and interruptions of daily operation.
Temporary License Application Requirements
The final date for issuing or extending temporary licenses should be amended to include the condition that a functioning track and trace system is operational.
Anonymous Orders
Retailers currently must keep the name and customer ID for every order for 7 years in the proposed regulations. This requirement is overkill. These requirements raise serious privacy concerns and are unnecessary to help the state achieve their goals. We propose allowing anonymous purchases, as is done with liquor sales, or retaining customer information for only 24 hours.
Hours of Operation
Extend allowed retailer hours of operation from 6 AM to 12 AM. This will give more people access and bring this regulation more in line with alcohol retail sales.
Customer Return of Cannabis Goods
The requirement that a retailer must destroy all products returned by customers should be relaxed. Retailers should be allowed to send returned products back to the distributor who supplied them.
Daily Purchase Limits
Retailers need greater clarity on daily purchase limits around the definition of “plant conversion.”
Without any method or system to tell us how much plant matter was used in the manufacture of a cannabis product, retailers put themselves at risk of violating the law even as they attempt to comply. Until Track and Trace is live, the “plant conversion” definition will remain an unworkable limit for retailers and unenforceable for regulators.
Please provide a measure that can be used such as a gram limit or average conversion rate between plant matter and cannabis products.
Delivery Employees
All deliveries of cannabis goods should be performed by a delivery employee that is directly employed by a licensed retailer. The BCC should prohibit the “borrowing” of retail licenses by unlicensed 3rd parties. Licensing is a demanding, expensive process and the responsibility for meeting the requirements of the regulations must fall on licensees. Outsourcing to parties outside the Bureau’s purview weakens enforcement on the actual active entity.
Support Compassion Programs
We advocate removing the requirement that a patient must possess a county-issued ID card (MMIC) in order to receive donated cannabis from a dispensary. Compassion has been at the heart of California’s cannabis community for decades, yet many compassion programs have paradoxically been forced to close since the passage of Prop 64.
County ID cards are costly and can be held up by slow processing times and bureaucratic delay. Even more crucially, cannabis patients continue to face discrimination in employment, housing, eligibility for federal benefits, and gun ownership rights. As long as this discrimination remains, patients who formally register with state or county governments will be placing themselves at risk.
Extending compassion to all Californians in need will require serious and continued attention by both regulators and legislators. Removing the county ID requirement is a commonsense but crucial action that can be taken in the short term to make medicine more accessible to those in need. Under the proposed regulations, free cannabis goods are provided only when a patient has a state-issued MMIC identification card. Requiring only a doctor’s recommendation should be sufficient to make sure that free cannabis only goes to medical patients.
Lab testing remains one of the greatest pain points and bottlenecks hindering the success of the licensed market. We’ve had 20+ years of safe, beneficial medical cannabis use in California. The burden of proof should be on the state to justify its sudden demand for clinical purity from an agricultural product.
Lab licenses are not keeping pace since the Category 2 testing requirements came online this July. There is also a lack of methodology and standardization; the same product batch can get a different result at different labs or even the same lab. Millions of dollars of products have been destroyed, but millions more made it to the unregulated/unlicensed market.
For these reasons we request a (6 month-1 year) delay of category 3 testing requirements; a 15–20% variance and margins of error; a method for appeals and retesting an initial failed test; and more allowance for remediation and returns through the supply chain.
In the proposed regulations a “temporary event license is required for any date in which the applicant engages in onsite cannabis sales or allows onsite cannabis consumption.” If you’re at an event with over 50 people in California, odds are someone is consuming cannabis. And if you allow it to happen, your event is now a cannabis event.
Most cannabis events, by that definition, are not the large-scale Cannabis Cups or Hempcons or Emerald Cups. They are the patient advocacy group meeting to discuss promoting compassion programs. They are the growers getting together to work on improving regulations. The inclusion of consumption has had a major chilling effect on the cannabis community. Where there used to be daily events and get-togethers there is now greater isolation and separation.
Many of the events that helped promote (and pass) Prop 64 would no longer be legal under it. The intention of voters was clearly not to make activities already undertaken by consenting adults illegal. For these reasons, we must remove consumption from the event definition. Only events with cannabis sales should require an event license.
We propose a statewide 1–2 year cooling off period before state, county or city officials, can be considered for a stake in a license-holding entity.
No one wants the appearance of conflicts of interest in the formation of this new industry, and a cooling off period is the best way to ensure that. Stop the revolving door and lobbyist-industrial complex before it distorts the law and market beyond salvation.
Communication and transparency are key in these efforts. We would like to reiterate our support for a searchable database of questions asked and answered by the BCC.
We’d like to extend a big thank you to the BCC for listening to our comments and moving this dialogue forward. We’re looking forward to seeing the permanent regulations.
