http://www.dailynews.com/opinion/20150924/for-mari... By Susan Shelley, LA Daily News California's medical marijuana industry may soon be craving pain relief instead of selling it.The state Legislature recently passed the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act, a combination of three laws that together will impose a massive, multi-agency regulatory framework on the cultivation, distribution and sale of cannabis. Nate Bradley, executive director of the California Cannabis Industry Association, said his group lobbied Sacramento for “sensible regulations.†In a panel discussion presented by the Republican Liberty Caucus of California at the recent state GOP convention, Bradley said he tells his members it's better than “having your doors kicked in.†The new laws abolish collectives and cooperatives. Instead there will be state licenses for commercial growers, distributors and sellers, and additional licenses required in cities and counties that choose to be “wet†jurisdictions instead of “dry.†The Wild West days are over. From now on, the medical marijuana industry will have to answer to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the State Water Resources Control Board, the Department of Food and Agriculture, the Board of Equalization, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Consumer Affairs, Cal OSHA, the Department of Pesticide Regulation and the new chief of the Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation. Growers will be assessed fees and fines for any impact on streams, rivers, lakes, fish or wildlife. They'll be required to label each plant with a government-assigned “unique identifier,†part of a “track and trace†program that follows every product from seed to sale. Weighing and measuring devices will be strictly regulated. Facilities will be required to have adequate security systems to prevent theft. New tax reporting requirements will log the movement of commercial cannabis and cannabis products through the distribution chain, capturing names, addresses, license numbers, transaction dates and taxes due. There will be new regulations for production and labeling, pesticide standards, requirements for inspections, batch testing and tamper-evident packaging, workplace safety standards, and enforcement measures against doctors who engage in “excessive recommending.†And unions have entered the picture. Licensed facilities with more than 20 employees will be required to enter into a “labor peace agreement†and all growers are required to use a “licensed transporter†to get their products to the market. All government departments may charge fees to cover the cost of implementing the new regulations, and that's on top of license fees and taxes. Welcome to California. The new laws have complicated plans for a 2016 ballot initiative to legalize marijuana completely. Dale Gieringer, director of the California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said two teams of lawyers are working on drafting the language for the initiative, which now has to be written “over†the new medical marijuana regulations. But the regulations may not survive in court. A lawsuit announced by the American Medical Marijuana Association says the new laws illegally modify Proposition 215, the voter initiative which legalized medical marijuana in 1996. Making the situation even more tangled, marijuana remains illegal under federal law. That means a licensed California business can comply with environmental and health regulations, safety and packaging rules, union contracts, tax collections, and laws against marketing to children - and still have the doors kicked in by federal agents. Here's a prediction: This story ends with a thriving, statewide, tax-free, illegal drug trade. Or, as the Sundance Kid said to Butch Cassidy, “Well, we've gone straight. What do we try now?â€
the commercial level licensing is just a nice way to say that wealthy land owners lobbied to get the exclusive rights to grow a cash crop, and making it illegal to compete on any level with them...same bullshit that ohio went through.
I don't mind the environmental stuff or the nute/pesticide regulations.....but this ^^?? Yea they can eat a big ol' dick. God I hope they kill this bill.....I really don't want to have to leave CA.
Brown helped write the bill and it sits on his desk. Our only hope really is that this bill gets ruled as null / void / unworkable in court because it conflicts with Prop 215.
I'm sure at minimum the 100 sq. ft. provision is null and void, just as the previous limits in SB 420 were ruled null and void. Whether cities can ban personal use cultivation is still semi-questionable. Punishing doctors for recommending marijuana for a medical indication will never fly. Hopefully the entire bill is rendered null and void because it will be "unworkable", and not certain sections approved or disapproved. If this is the case, it is likely the effect will be SB 420 destroyed, but Prop 215 intact, throwing us all the way back to 1996. The program will possibly implode on itself if it's not a good model because enforcement and setting up all these bureaucracies is very costly, and if they're losing money, they won't last. Agencies were reluctant to get involved before because of the cost.
The American Medical Marijuana Association (AMMA) is planning on filing a lawsuit against the state and governor Brown because the new proposed regulations modify prop 215, and the California constitution states that modifying a voter approved proposition is illegal. So we'll see what happens with that, I don't think they've officially filed the lawsuit yet. I just hope they hurry up and get this all figured out, all of this is delaying California's attempt to legalize recreational use because there will be less time for signature gathering by the time they come to a conclusion.
Which is silly, because this shows that they're going to write the initiative around AB 266. Instead they should ditch it, write something better that overrides AB 266, and expand our rights with the new initiative. There's no reason to wait.
I am guessing that the intent is to crackdown on the pot equivalent of the pill-mill docs that do nothing but write scripts all day long for Oxy and other highly addictive substances and do not have a substantive practice of patients who aren't pill seekers. It is one thing to be a professional writing the occasional script and another to have a take a number machine to get your card as your basic business model...in other words, if it is going to be medical marijuana, then there needs to be a legitimate doctor-patient relationship.
Prop 215 says otherwise and there's nothing anyone can really do to change the current MMJ doctor system. Initiatives overrule conflicting legislation. It's not the same as prescribing narcotics / pill mills.
They plan to solve the insano regulation enforcement funding issue by taxing the balls of the farmers.......no problem for most folks. If this all goes through however I will likely take my money and leave. Already sold my place in Santa Cruz and if it takes hold I'm throwing a sign in the front yard and leaving. Alaska is looking hella good.
What I read in the bills is that cities are left the costs of enforcement of their zoning powers, I may be wrong though. Oregon is looking better for me every day for every reason, completely aside from weed.
Another View: Laws for medical pot need more public input http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/art... By Rusty Areias and Terence McHale Special to The Bee The tea leaves are as big as palm fronds as the governor is likely to sign the three bills that make up the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act. Almost 20 years after the voters passed an initiative allowing for medical marijuana, the governor's staff teamed with stakeholders to put together a governing structure for the cultivation, processing, transporting and selling of medical marijuana. There are reasons for Gov. Jerry Brown to sign the bills, not the least being that the Legislature has moved legislation acknowledging that medical marijuana is part of our social landscape, and internecine battles between governmental entities over enforcement need to stop. There are also reasons not to sign the bills. We can begin with the admission of the authors that cleanup legislation will be necessary to iron out the problems in bills that are heavily prescriptive and distinguish winners and losers. There is also the suggestion that the bills needed to be sent quickly to the governor because the coalition supporting the proposed marijuana act represent a fragile alliance that might burn out in the sunlight. The governor does not need to rush on legislation that was not seen in public until the afternoon it was passed and will not be implemented until 2018. In fact, the reasons not to sign the bills are real – including problems with who will qualify for licensure (a twisted logic that is too limiting, according to the NAACP, and we agree) and the fact that the voice of agriculture is silent on a crop that could someday be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The business plans allowed are also inhibited for reasons that deserve a robust discussion in a public forum. The governor can send the bills back to the Legislature, where a special session on health care is still open. The marijuana question is one that will impact Californians in myriad ways – workplace, taxes, neighborhood businesses that draw a certain clientele – and, if signed, will be as much a part of the governor's legacy as his Jesuitical commitment. The way we handle medical marijuana is going to have an extraordinary impact on the manner with which we enforce the recreational use that will be on the ballot in 2016, prior to the enforcement of these bills. The resolution on weed, medical or otherwise, needs to be tightly rolled or we will have more smoke than clarity.
Yeah but unfortunately they want to suppress our rights and make the big players with a lot of money even more rich.
That's what it seems like everything is coming down to these days, sadly. We'll never have real legalization with all these backdoor prohibitions. Everyone should be allowed to grow. If we really want to take a shift from the black market, the regulations need to actually be designed the same as alcohol. I keep hearing "regulate marijuana like alcohol", but it ends up that the market is 100x more restrictive than alcohol.
Yeah unfortunately that's what happens, I keep thinking that one possible reason for the tighter restrictions on it compared to alcohol is that marijuana is not federally legal and the Feds said that they will crack down if it's not tightly regulated. Whereas alcohol is federally legal and it doesn't have as many restrictions as legal weed because it's legal at the federal level. I keep hoping that state restrictions will loosen and it actually will be regulated like alcohol once federal prohibition is repealed, but we still have a long long way to go before that happens. The federal/state law enforcement community, the private prison industry, big pharma, the alcohol industry and others are gonna fight like hell to maintain federal prohibition because they stand to lose a lot of money if it became federally legal. So we better get used to these ridiculous restrictions because they'll probably be around for awhile.
The huge problem with tight regulations that you talk about : if a group of federal administrations don't like it while it's Schedule I, it will get shut down, very easily (perhaps that is the goal if that time comes?). If everyone is allowed to grow and possess a reasonable amount of weed, and there's no heavy red tape involved, they can't shut it down. The feds can't rewrite laws against possession and cultivation in those states either. Hypothetically, if something like CCHI 2016 were to pass, they would never be able to touch it hardly (whether the limits are too large for a current vote in that initiative is another topic altogether). They already have a hard time with the way Prop 215 is right now - they can't shut it down. There's no guideline that says the regulations have to be stricter than alcohol and the limits have to be tight anyways. There's really no justification why this can't be done properly except the people who are writing these bills have the strong interests of the "stakeholders". Basically if everyone can grow and share their harvest, they can't stop anything.
Yeah, that's the problem with it being in Schedule I, and I think that one reason why it's still there is because big pharma doesn't want it rescheduled unless they're gonna make a profit off of its new classification, so they're lobbying against rescheduling it. At least one benefit to these legalization laws is that the feds can't force the states to go back to banning personal possession, cultivation, and sharing between friends like you said in your last post. So if we get a new president who wants to crack down on legalization, like Marco Rubio (which I really hope doesn't happen but it worries me because he's rapidly rising to the top in polls) he could only force the states to stop legal sales and production for the legal market, everything else would remain intact so they offer some legal protection. That's also why they haven't been able to take away individual patients' rights to grow and possess under prop 215 even after all the raids that started in 2011, because they legally can't. As for the tight regulations, they're definitely helping out the stakeholders even though they claim that they have to make them reasonable to appeal to the people who are still skeptical about legalization. That's probably a reason for them too, but not as much as helping their stakeholders.
Remove it from the schedule entirely. Then to remove state confusion, amend the state constitution so that the feds cannot keep swooping in and lying about federal drug precedent. The White House government had cannabinoids filed for use as a patent drug ( US2304669 A) in August of 1940, not even 10 years after it was first banned. They've always known that it shouldn't be on the schedule as the highest risk for drug addiction or abuse. https://www.google.com/patents/US2304669?dq=cannabinoid+1942&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMIp7GYheOfyAIVDguSCh3djABe "...Cannabinol (CBN; Figure 1),much of which is thought to be formed from THC during the storage of harvested cannabis, was the first of the plant cannabinoids (phytocannabinoids) to be isolated, from a red oil extract of cannabis, at the end of the 19th century. Its structure was elucidated in the early 1930s by R.S. Cahn, and its chemical synthesis first achieved in 1940 in the laboratories of R. Adams in the U.S.A." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1760722/
The people who have a stake in keeping it illegal have a lot to lose if the general public is able to grow pounds of a powerful medicine in their backyard at a very negligible cost. They'll fight it all they can to prevent that scenario from taking place. Their goal is to keep prices high, availability still limited, and if allowed they will tax it as high as possible to stuff their pockets and keep the black market competitive. The problem with rescheduling is that the focus on this is a distraction for activists the majority of the time. Remember, there are plenty of narcotics that are Schedule II. Putting marijuana in a different schedule would not make it legal, or even give some type of legitimacy for the dispensaries or retail shops. It would have to be removed from the schedule controlled substances for this change to happen. People should focus on rewriting their state laws and focus on descheduling instead, otherwise all this allows for is GW Pharmaceuticals to profit off their designer limited / controlled dosage weed pills. Sure this might benefit a few people, but largely this will do nothing for the legalization movement. They're approved in UK, and we're far ahead of the the UK in the progress for legalization. What you're saying is why we need to write these laws in a similar way of Prop 215. It isn't a perfect law, but as far as the rights we have for personal use, nothing better could be said. Even with AB 266 in the way, many of its provisions will stand. I don't think anybody is against sensible regulations. Nobody wants to smoke or eat pesticides in their weed. But they shouldn't be written to be for the benefit of a few at the expense of others. Regulation shouldn't mean that the state or selected corporations get to grow everything and the average joe is getting a felony if they're caught. A market should allow fair cultivation for quality and price control as well. With alcohol, you aren't limited to a bottle of wine or a 6 pack of beer. A 1 oz possession limit is a joke. The possession limits for personal use should be expanded greatly. A single outdoor plant in a good season can produce multiple pounds, and decent growers can yield give or take 2 pounds per light. As far as public image is concerned, many of these regulations aren't important or bear no reflection on the way they will vote. Judging by the recent outcome in Oregon, the unscientific 5 ng / ml DUI provisions in other states were extremely pointless and are criminalizing people for something that any experienced stoner knows is baloney. People who aren't very interested in pot will simply care about if this law will directly affect them in any way, rather than how much freedom pot smokers have under the law. And the people who don't like the freedom of pot smokers are never going to vote for any amount of it.