Last April, I wrote a column about what I call “The Great Oregon Extract Debacle.” That incident arose from the Oregon Health Authority (the regulator for OMMP, Oregon’s medical cannabis program) announcing that new rules would prohibit the sale of concentrates and extracts unless they came from a licensed processor. They also announced that licensing for processors was still Wa couple of months out.

This obviously caused quite a stir, as such a rule would temporarily shut down the market for concentrates and extracts in Oregon. We would have seen a number of processors forced to shut their doors with adverse effects extending to growers, retailers, wholesalers, and ancillary businesses. Our industry was facing a catastrophe.

Fortunately, the Oregon Cannabis Association, along with other industry representatives, coordinated an immediate response. The Association engaged directly with the Oregon Health Authority and the Governor’s office. We also alerted key legislators who were able to weigh in.

The result was a compromise. Processors who applied for a license would be able to continue operate until their application was either approved or denied. This allowed the processors to stay in business and the industry to suffer minimal detriment.

This type of incident happens to the cannabis industry with a regularity that would be alarming in most sectors. We are a newly legal line of business transitioning from the black market. Most lawmakers and regulators have little or no understanding of our industry. At the same time, many of them fear and worry that their constituents fear us. So when it comes to regulating cannabis, we see a level of restriction unprecedented in most other areas.

This means that government relations, a crucial component in business, takes on enhanced importance for those of us who sell cannabis. We were only able to bring the situation to an acceptable resolution because of the government relations work that we had already done, to use the example of the Oregon Extract debacle.

We set ourselves up to succeed by cultivating relationships with key officials and building our credibility with those folks over time. When issues like the Extracts Debacle arise, we have people in government who trust us to provide useful information and value our input to call.

A big piece of this government relations strategy revolves around the Oregon Cannabis PAC, a controlled entity of the Oregon Cannabis Association. For full disclosure, I am currently the co-chair of the Oregon Cannabis PAC and my wife Meghan serves on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Cannabis Association.

The PAC Process

A PAC, or political action committee, is an entity that exists to support and work towards the election or defeat of political candidates. PACs are highly regulated entities under both federal and state law, which means they are only permitted to act in specific ways.

In a nutshell, a PAC may endorse candidates and make political contributions, but it really can’t do much else. So PACs are typically affiliated with a particular business or trade organization. As mentioned above, the Oregon Cannabis PAC is a controlled subsidiary of the Oregon Cannabis Association.

The two organizations work closely together. The Association’s Legislative Committee identifies policy goals and priorities. It is then the PAC’s job to find officials who support these policy goals and help them to get elected or re-elected.

The OCPAC is a state level PAC, prohibited by law from working at the federal level. Even with this restriction, we don’t have the resources to get involved in every state and local election in Oregon. Instead, we look at everyone up for election in a given cycle for statewide office and the Oregon House and Senate, as well as local races.

The PAC has specific criteria to help us determine which races are worthy of our time and resources. Once we decide we are interested in a contest, we invite the candidate or candidates (depending on the race) for an informal interview.

We ask some questions to see where the candidate stands on our issues and how valuable that candidate would be as an ally. After we interview all candidates, we discuss their answers and determine who we think that we should support. We make recommendations to the OCA Board, which in turn votes on our slate.

Once the slate is approved by the board, we make endorsements and donations. By taking the time to meet candidates and by working to support their election, we begin to cultivate relationships that lead to opportunities for further collaboration once the candidate is in office.

Sometimes a PAC is associated with a specific company rather than an industry association, but most cannabis companies are relatively young and rsmall. Most are reinvesting every available dime into their business and few can afford to have their own lobbyist or PAC.

That’s where organizations like the OCA or the OCPAC can step in to fill the void. Whether or not you live in Oregon, if your state has a market for the cannabis industry (or will likely have one soon), it is probably home to more than one industry association and PAC. If not, these organizations are not terribly difficult to create.

Whether you are joining or forming an organization, the members in that group are key. The OCA is comprised of many of the leaders of Oregon’s cannabis community. While we are all competitors on some level, our organization works because we have all agreed that the industry as a whole is more important than any individual business. After all, no cannabis business can survive without a viable industry in which to participate.

This means we check our egos at the door (mostly, we’re human after all), and each of us advocates for the position we support. Once the organization decides, we all get behind that position—whether we agree with it or not.

Professional representation is also crucial to the success of the PAC. Hire seasoned veteran lobbyists to represent your PAC. They will have a knowledge of the political process, as well as (more importantly) the relevant players that will help you allocate your resources most effectively.

There is a tendency in the cannabis industry to hire cannabis activists as lobbyists. While these people understand our community and our industry, they often lack the knowledge and relationships to be optimally effective lobbyists.

As one of our (professional) lobbyists likes to remind me, the realtors don’t have a realtor doing their lobbying and the winemakers don’t have a winemaker doing the same. They hire professionals because these are the people that get the job done.

The next ten years will see a great deal of back and forth between the cannabis industry and federal, state and local governments. The framework through which this will occur is already in place. We don’t get to create it or change it to make it more to our liking.

The sooner we learn how this political system really works, the sooner we can channel and harness it toward our own end, namely the creation of a fully functioning cannabis industry in all 50 states, throughout our nation and around the world.

Using organizations like PACs effectively will open up a wide range of possibilities as we work toward that goal. By pooling our resources and working to get friendly candidates elected (and unfriendly candidates unelected), we can create better conditions for the policies we support to take root.