Green Light, Red Tape: Recreational Pot having a Slow Rollout
California passed recreational marijuana, and January 1st, 2018 became the day that any adult was allowed to walk into a shop and purchase recreational marijuana.
But wait! It has not been that easy everywhere in California.
The city of Los Angeles, home to millions of people, has had virtually no options for residents. Other than 4 locations in West Hollywood, the city of L.A. had 0 locations where people could legally purchase recreational weed.
But why?
Ultimately it boils down to our Governments red tape and the processing of the necessary licenses for businesses looking to operate within certain areas.
The good news is that the process is in motion and more and more dispensaries will be getting the green light for recreational marijuana sales!
Blaze on!
This has been how the rec rollout has gone in every state thus far. But I suspect that Cal will have their shit together far more quickly than the other states did. Because you already have all of the products in production, and it’s been de facto legal for 20 years.
Oregon passed our law in 2014. The first legal flower didn’t get sold until mid 2015. It wasn’t until a year after that, summer of 2016 when concentrates and edibles became legal for rec. There were concentrates and cartridges on sale the day that change was supposed to take effect, but at first, the selection was low. We didn’t already have 100+ businesses with licensed extraction labs with stock yet. The medical only nature of those products kept producers from being able to go too big because of the limited market.
Then, on Jan 1st 2017, the limit was supposed to be increased to 6 grams of concentrate per day(per store,) and 1 lb of edibles, in as many different packages as one wants, as long as there is no more than 50mg THC in each package. Meaning you can buy a ton of 50mg gummies while staying well under a pound.
The initial limit for rec edibles was 1 package of no more than 15mg, which isn’t enough to get a lot of people a buzz.
The new laws didn’t take effect in any stores until early April. Some hadn’t switched over to full rec in October 2017.
What happened is that they all got 92 pages of legalese that they had to have their lawyers sign off on before even starting to implement the new rules. Nobody wanted to lose their shop/license.
I would say that things finally stabilized around June of last year. And since then, prices on things like oil have come down significantly. Though there have been a couple of fluctuations. The Pax Era coming in and fucking up the cartridge industry with their drastically better product for example. But you had the Era in California before we got it here, so that won’t be an issue.
Long story short, it’s gonna be a journey. But I don’t think it will take as long as it took here. You guys already have the production infrastructure in place.
Great post! It is definitely true that the transition almost has to be better here in California because of what you stated. I know my local shop has been making little changes here and there, as they wait for all the paperwork to go through, to open up to rec. Meanwhile their medical operations are still running smoothly, and surely 90%+ of the rec operations will overlap, allowing for a probable smooth start once they get the green light.
That’s actually the opposite of what they did in Oregon.
What they did here was for the first year and a half of the program(I think they ended up needing an extension and it was supposed to be a year, ) they had everything running through the Oregon Health Authority, who had been and still administers the medical side of the system.
But the law we passed stipulated that the rec side be regulated and taxed by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.
Problem is, at the time of passing, the OLCC was working on no such plans, so they had to start from the ground up.
Finally the change happened on Jan 1st of last year.
The transition was awful. Everyone had flower, but on the day that the limit on concentrates was supposed to increase from 1g per person per store per day to 6g, all but 2 of the 20+ testing labs that were operating in the state at that point had to shut down, because they didn’t meet the new standards, and most couldn’t afford to buy the equipment required to do so(gas chromatography is expensive.)
So between the 92 pages in legalese store owners got that day, and the shutdown of the testing labs, product disappeared, and until things got back on track, it was tough enough to find 1 gram of anything for a reasonable price.
Things are great now, especially with delivery, which we’ve only gotten in the last 6 months. But still, we aren’t even finished here...
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