If Washington wants to be as competitive as possible, it has to drop the cottage cloak around ownership at some point — and eliminating it for financiers just isn’t enough.
I absolutely loved Washington State when I lived there. I lived in Seattle for seven years and was one of the first attorneys in the state to take on medical cannabis business clients in 2010 and then again with adult use clients in 2012 when I-502 passed. Our law firm is a pioneer in the cannabis space, but particularly in Washington State where our cannabis practice first began many years ago.
I also think Washington has a top notch cannabis program when it comes to its regulations. They are clear and comprehensive, setting up licensees for success as industry understands what it is getting most of the time from the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (“LCB“). Of course, there are ambiguities with Washington’s administrative code and cannabis (like with all states), and there always will be because different licensing analysts will give competing interpretations of the law and rules on everything from label review submissions to analyses of true parties of interest. I certainly don’t agree with every LCB rule on the books, but I respect the heck out of Washington for the cannabis program it created and has maintained over the years.
All of the foregoing is why I was incredibly excited and honored to testify at a Washington State House Commerce and Gaming Committee Legislative Work Session on March 26. You can watch the entire hearing here. I moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and have really focused on California’s cannabis scene for a while now, but I keep up with Washington’s cannabis marketplace and our firm continues to maintain its cannabis practice out of Seattle.
When I was contacted by the Office of Program Research for the House of Representatives to speak at this Work Session, I was intrigued by the topic right off the bat. My experience with Washington is that its market is pretty small (but relatively mighty) and that the state really had no interest in dropping some of its protective barriers to entry (like that pesky six-month residency requirement for ownership) and other red tape that keeps licensees under “tied house” rules. The specific topic here was “Examining the future of the cannabis industry in Washington state,” with an emphasis on how the state can set up its current licensees for the repeal of federal prohibition; and specifically, what can the state do, and what it should consider, to make its licensees competitive for impending national and international marketplace
Back in 2016, I did a TedX Talk on Orcas Island regarding whether state legal cannabis was actually creating “Big Marijuana” (that talk now has over 119,000 views). Washington State is now directly grappling with the issues I touched on in my talk, but in its Washington way, the state is being careful and thoughtful in how it approaches the national stage. I ultimately think the Committee wanted to hear from me because I have deep business and regulatory experiences in multiple cannabis states at this point spanning a decade (particularly in Washington and California, and the two could not be more different).
Some of the sub-issues the Committee examined during this session were industry…
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