A brand new group, often called Defend Maine’s Hashish Shoppers, mentioned final week that “it is going to work to boost public consciousness in regards to the Maine medical marijuana trade’s lack of rules and urge the Legislature to mandate each product testing and so-called track-and-trace necessities, closing what it says is a ‘harmful loophole,’” according to the Portland Press Herald.
The group is drawing consideration to a peculiar disparity between the state’s two hashish packages. Because the Press Herald noted, whereas the adult-use leisure program, which debuted in 2020, requires monitoring and testing, the medical hashish program, which Maine voters legalized again in 1999, doesn’t.
The president of the advocacy group, Kevin Kelley, mentioned at a press convention on Friday that the inconsistent necessities between the 2 hashish packages “defies widespread sense.”
These considerations echo what one of many state’s prime hashish officers mentioned final yr.
Erik Gundersen, director of the Maine Workplace of Marijuana Coverage, advised Maine lawmakers in November that there was persistent criminality throughout the medical hashish program.
As reported by the Bangor Daily News at the time, Gundersen mentioned his workplace “has fewer methods to manage the medical use market than the leisure marketplace for which retail gross sales began simply final yr,” and that it “can be useful if there have been instruments to make sure that hashish grown within the medical program stayed inside it.”
The newspaper reported that Gundersen believes “there’s extra criminality related to the state’s medical marijuana trade and that his workplace has few instruments to stop medical hashish from discovering its strategy to the black market.” With solely 12 subject investigators, Gundersen said his accessible assets are usually not “adequate for performing the required stage of oversight when the investigators are solely attending to registrants each 4 to 5 years.”
In August, Gundersen introduced the formation of the Marijuana Working Group, which was tasked with making suggestions meant to strengthen the state’s longstanding medical hashish program.
Gundersen’s workplace mentioned that the working group can be “composed of at the least 16 exterior members who symbolize Maine’s medical marijuana trade, hashish sufferers, public well being system, and cities and cities,” who would “advise on regulatory points, greatest practices in affected person entry and training, contribute to ongoing enhancements in Maine’s medical hashish program.”
The Workplace of Marijuana Coverage said it was searching for “at the least 5 registered caregivers, two registered dispensary representatives, one marijuana testing facility consultant, one merchandise manufacturing facility consultant, three qualifying sufferers who are usually not additionally registered caregivers, two people representing municipalities in Maine, and two related well being care professionals” to serve on the working group.
“We look ahead to the chance offered by convening a gaggle of well-qualified people in pursuit of a shared objective to each protect affected person entry and help the regulated market,” Gundersen mentioned in a press release at the time. “Our imaginative and prescient as a hashish regulator has all the time been to develop a very good religion partnership with our stakeholders by establishing guidelines and insurance policies that present shoppers with entry to a regulated trade.”
However the requires harder guidelines and necessities have been met with resistance from some corners of Maine’s medical hashish trade.
The Portland Press Herald noted that the trade “has pushed again towards testing and monitoring necessities for over a yr, expressing considerations about the price, each to the suppliers and their prospects,” most notably a proposed track-and-trace system that hashish enterprise house owners efficiently lobbied towards within the legislature.