Will Problems with Colorado’s MMJ Industry Remain Under A64?

As Colorado prepares to unleash legal retail marijuana, many people are growing nervous about what is to come. Some folks are still convinced that the sky will fall, while others are simply concerned about the way the state will regulate marijuana businesses. While the fear of the sky falling is obviously just the same kind of ignorance that we Weedists have grown accustomed to, there is genuine reason to be concerned about the way the state will regulate the industry.

Though most of us Colorado residents have heard, seen or experienced the haphazard way the Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division squandered their resources, a recent audit of Denver’s oversight of medical marijuana shows that regulation has been severely lacking on the administrative side of things as well. Denver still has not reviewed license applications for several operating dispensaries, and does not even know how many there are or where they’re located. It stands to reason that they aren’t doing much oversight of businesses they do not even know about.

This has the Reefer Madness folks up in arms ‘for fear of our children’, as usual. Of course, if they would actually look at the data, they would see that underage use of marijuana has declined in the state since medical marijuana dispensaries began popping up all over Colorado.

For those of us that know legalization won’t cause hell on Earth, this is troubling because of all the poorly-spent industry dollars. One of Denver’s big excuses for its poor performance on this issue was that the budget was cut. With $6.4 million in taxes from the medical marijuana industry, surely there was enough to staff the licensing offices and periodically inspect dispensaries. Right?

Luckily, lawmakers are working with individuals from the medical cannabis industry to work out the kinks of Amendment 64’s implementation. They’ve finally acknowledged that this industry is not going away just because they screw up their job of doing what the voters have asked, and even in its preliminary stages, Amendment 64 is far more organized and nonsense-free than the implementation of medical marijuana businesses ever was. A couple days ago, I wrote about the fact that the Department of Revenue was shocked to discover that you can’t track the weight of final product during the plant’s growth; this is the kind of nonsense that is being handled for Amendment 64 that just wasn’t discussed (at least, it wasn’t discussed with anyone that knew anything about cannabis) with medical marijuana.