Marty's Travels

My house has wheels

Pot: Alaska and Oregon

Alaska now has a fully legal/adult use/recreational regulatory system in place and product started moving within the last two weeks or so. Alaska has a high per-person consumption profile in the US, but has never had any medical marijuana program. For them to pass an initiative and the state to implement it on time, from scratch, is quite remarkable, impossible in any other state.

Oregon is almost up-and-running. Fully licensed retail stores are few right now, and there are supply channel glitches. Oregon has had a fully-functional marijuana system in the form of a black market for decades, so I think it can be said any bumps in the road are likely the cause of the state.

The Oregon Health Authority is in charge of inspecting and testing marijuana for public safety. You would expect that a state Public Health agency would adhere to strict, precise, and thorough testing standards. Oregon has discovered that such tight standards can completely halt the entire market.

Colorado discovered the need for testing for contaminants, molds, and pesticides, and Washington quickly worked the appropriate language into the then being developed regulations. Washington publishes a list of prohibited pesticides, randomly inspect farms for prohibited products, and randomly test final products. This is typical for all agriculture products in the PNW. If you live on this planet, you eat apples, pears, potatoes, mint, and hops subjected to this protocol. It seems to work.

The OHA is testing (or attempting to test) every single product for every single prohibited pesticide. Certified labs are expensive, and they can get cost-prohibitive as you add tests to be done. The labs couldn’t handle the rush, and couldn’t complete the tests in a timely manner. Some producers couldn’t come up with the testing money for their first legal product. Brand new stores had no product to sell.

In the middle of this hassle, Sessions was named as the new Attorney General. For the 10,000 people in Oregon we’d like to make legal and legit, that news didn’t help. “The feds are coming after me, and the state has shut me down”. Not the right message when you want to eliminate the black market.

Oregon will do well. Newly-legalized states seem to always discover new things, and Oregon has discovered one aspect of over-regulation.