Medical pot patients could see their marijuana become cleaner and safer, with the cost jumping about 10 percent, under new draft regulations for California’s multibillion-dollar medical cannabis industry.
Friday afternoon, a trio of state agencies released 114 pages of draft rules for the medical cannabis industry. The rules cover every aspect of growing, processing, distributing and selling medical pot in the state, and kick off a 45-day comment period before they become law. Similar rules are pending for the much larger recreational marijuana market. The medical rules will take effect by the end of the year through 2018.
All medical marijuana would be lab-tested and tracked from seed to sale. Patients would be limited to buying up to 8 ounces of cannabis flowers a day, and dispensaries could no longer give free samples.
“It’s a very big deal. All of the nitty-gritty details about how people will operate and what things they’ll need to do to get compliant or stay compliant — that all comes out in these rules,” said Nicole Howell Neubert, a cannabis industry attorney in San Francisco.
“This is the next step toward having a more regulated marketplace in California, the largest cannabis market in the U.S. It’s super important,” she said. [Read more at SF Gate]
