A new group, identified as Protect Maine’s Cannabis People, explained very last 7 days that “it will get the job done to elevate public recognition about the Maine clinical marijuana industry’s absence of rules and urge the Legislature to mandate both equally product screening and so-termed keep track of-and-trace needs, closing what it claims is a ‘dangerous loophole,’” according to the Portland Push Herald.
The team is drawing consideration to a peculiar disparity between the state’s two hashish applications. As the Push Herald mentioned, whilst the adult-use recreational plan, which debuted in 2020, involves monitoring and screening, the clinical hashish software, which Maine voters legalized back again in 1999, does not.
The president of the advocacy team, Kevin Kelley, mentioned at a press convention on Friday that the inconsistent necessities between the two hashish courses “defies widespread sense.”
Those considerations echo what a person of the state’s top rated hashish officials said past yr.
Erik Gundersen, director of the Maine Business office of Marijuana Policy, advised Maine lawmakers in November that there was persistent illegal exercise inside the healthcare hashish system.
As reported by the Bangor Each day Information at the time, Gundersen mentioned his business “has less means to control the clinical use industry than the leisure market for which retail sales begun just very last calendar year,” and that it “would be helpful if there were instruments to make certain that hashish developed in the clinical program stayed in it.”
The newspaper described that Gundersen thinks “there’s more illegal action linked to the state’s health-related marijuana business and that his workplace has several instruments to prevent healthcare cannabis from discovering its way to the black current market.” With only 12 discipline investigators, Gundersen reported his obtainable means are not “sufficient for performing the required amount of oversight when the investigators are only obtaining to registrants every 4 to 5 yrs.”
In August, Gundersen announced the development of the Cannabis Working Group, which was tasked with making tips meant to strengthen the state’s longstanding medical cannabis system.
Gundersen’s business office claimed that the doing the job team would be “composed of at minimum 16 exterior members who signify Maine’s health care marijuana field, hashish individuals, general public wellness program, and towns and metropolitan areas,” who would “advise on regulatory difficulties, ideal tactics in patient obtain and instruction, add to ongoing advancements in Maine’s health-related hashish software.”
The Business office of Cannabis Plan explained it was searching for “at the very least 5 registered caregivers, two registered dispensary reps, a single cannabis testing facility agent, just one goods manufacturing facility agent, 3 qualifying patients who are not also registered caregivers, two individuals representing municipalities in Maine, and two suitable health care professionals” to serve on the operating team.
“We search forward to the option introduced by convening a team of well-capable people in pursuit of a shared intention to each preserve client obtain and aid the controlled marketplace,” Gundersen said in a press release at the time. “Our eyesight as a cannabis regulator has normally been to create a good faith partnership with our stakeholders by establishing rules and policies that deliver fascinated people with obtain to a controlled sector.”
But the calls for tougher policies and specifications have been satisfied with resistance from some corners of Maine’s healthcare cannabis business.
The Portland Press Herald noted that the market “has pushed back again from tests and tracking needs for in excess of a year, expressing issues about the cost, both equally to the companies and their clients,” most notably a proposed monitor-and-trace process that hashish business enterprise proprietors properly lobbied versus in the legislature.