California’s Division of Hashish Management (DCC) final week requested the state lawyer normal’s workplace its opinion on whether or not permitting interstate hashish commerce would put the state at “important threat” of federal enforcement.
The inquiry, authored by Matthew Lee, normal counsel for the DCC, comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed laws to permit hashish commerce between states which have handed adult-use reforms. The measure took impact January 1.
“We ask this query towards the backdrop of historic laws not too long ago signed into legislation by the Governor. Till now (within the absence of that laws), California state legislation has flatly prohibited state-licensed hashish companies from exporting hashish exterior the state. Now, nevertheless, new laws … has created a pathway to permit California hashish licensees to have interaction, for the primary time, in industrial hashish exercise with hashish companies licensed in different states. Beneath SB 1326 California may match with different states to barter agreements permitting, as a matter of state legislation, for industrial hashish exercise between California hashish licensees and licensees in these different states. Such agreements would symbolize an vital step to increase and strengthen California’s state-licensed hashish market.” — Lee within the letter
Within the seven-page letter, Lee contends that the federal Managed Substances Act (CSA) “couldn’t constitutionally prohibit California from legalizing and regulating industrial hashish exercise with out-of-state licensees,” arguing that “Beneath the U.S. Structure’s anti-commandeering precept, federal statutes might not ‘command state legislatures to enact or chorus from enacting state legislation.’”
Additional, Lee says that the CSA “doesn’t, in truth, criminalize California’s legalization and regulation of economic hashish exercise with out-of-state licensees” as a result of anti-commandeering precept.
“By its phrases, the Managed Substances Act shields state officers from legal responsibility in reference to their enforcement of state legislation. The Act expressly confers immunity upon (as related right here) ‘any duly approved officer of any State … who shall be lawfully engaged within the enforcement of any legislation or municipal ordinance referring to managed substances,’” Lee writes. “This provision is broad and unqualified: on its face, it might appear to embody all state legal guidelines referring to federal managed substances, together with state legal guidelines legalizing and regulating these managed substances as a matter of state legislation.”
Within the letter, Lee argues that “Federal legislation additional insulates California from important threat as to agreements regarding medicinal hashish,” citing the so-called Rohrabacher-Farr Modification which, since 2014, has forbid the U.S. Division of Justice from utilizing federal funds to intrude with states’ implementation of their medical hashish legal guidelines.
“We don’t depend on the existence of the Rohrabacher-Farr/Blumenauer Modification as dispositive: in our view, an settlement below SB 1326 wouldn’t lead to important authorized threat to the State below the Managed Substances Act even when the Modification didn’t exist, for causes now we have already defined,” the letter states. “However, the existence of the Rohrabacher-Farr/Blumenauer Modification additional insulates the State from any hypothetical authorized· threat as to agreements involving medicinal hashish, and thus additional helps the conclusion that such an settlement presents no “important” threat to the State.”
In Lee’s view, the reply as as to whether the state can be susceptible to federal interference is “no.”
“Beneath the U.S. Structure’s anti-commandeering precept, the Managed Substances Act couldn’t criminalize the State’s legalization and regulation of economic hashish exercise (as a matter of state legislation), together with industrial hashish exercise with out-of-state licensees,” Lee argues. “By its phrases, the Managed Substances Act doesn’t criminalize the State’s legalization and regulation of economic hashish exercise, together with industrial hashish exercise with out-of-state licensees.”
The letter was despatched to Mollie Lee, senior assistant lawyer normal, who has not but issued a response.
Get day by day hashish enterprise information updates. Subscribe