syracuse.com
The Office of Cannabis Management today published guidelines for New York’s first marijuana retail license holders, clearing a significant goalpost in the state’s effort to commence weed sales this year.
OCM’s rules laid out in a 27-page document NY Cannabis Insider reviewed Friday afternoon govern conditional adult-use retail dispensaries and are effective immediately.
“This guidance document serves to provide the framework that will assist Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary licensees plan for how to operate their dispensary before regulations are formally adopted,” OCM wrote.
The guidelines cover topics from recordkeeping requirements to required training for staffers to inventory and tracking requirements, and come about two months before the state’s self-imposed year-end deadline to open New York’s first adult-use dispensaries.
In an interview with the Advance Media New York editorial board earlier this month, Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state’s plan to have 20 conditional adult-use retail dispensaries open by the end of this year is “still on track” – and to expect “another 20″ to open every month or so thereafter.
Regulations governing the industry must first be published before the market fully opens, and estimates for when OCM will publicly release them have been pushed back again and again. Partly as a result, those in and around the cannabis industry in NY – including politicians – have called into question the likelihood of hitting the end-of-year timeline.
Shortly after reading the guidelines late-afternoon on Friday, Kaelan Castetter – managing director of consulting firm Castetter Cannabis Group – said the document OCM promulgated seems mostly good, and pretty standard; but he thinks one section could cause serious problems.
The guidelines say retail dispensaries’ true parties of interest, passive investors and service providers cannot have interest in any businesses – in or outside of New York – that cultivates, processes or distributes weed. That rule effectively bars vertically integrated multistate operators from cannabis retail in NY.
“I see what they’re trying to do, but it’s a very protectionist approach,” Castetter said. “What it basically says is: if you are in business in any other state – unless you only own a dispensary in another state – you can’t be part, in any way shape or form, a retailer here … it’s very anti-MSO.”
H/T: www.Syracuse.com
