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Legislative Priorities

Each year, in an effort to understand our members’ most pressing issues, The Cannabis Alliance surveys our membership on their legislative and regulatory priorities. Each of our members receive one vote (e.g. 1 membership = 1 vote). Our members pride themselves on caring about the entire community including consumers and patients. These values are reiterated by our membership’s selected priorities

HB 1581/SB 5546 Cannabis Research Commission

A small investment of dollars earned in exponential dollars in the future.  

Summary

Washington State has 21 agricultural commissions. Commissions were established in the 1930’s explicitly to provide a way for farmers to pool their resources to address their cultivation issues and improve their market conditions. Commissions represent 100% of the farmers that grow the crops; hops, wine grapes, blueberries and, of course, apples are all represented by a commission. Some commissions do strictly research, education and representation; some focus on marketing and some do both. A recent JLARK study of various Washington commission members found value in their participation. Farmers across various commodities are happy to have their commissions at their backs.

HB 1453 Excise Tax

Summary

Currently patients in Washington State utilizing cannabis to help with their conditions must pay a 37% excise or “sin” tax on their medicine. Not only is this fundamentally wrong but it creates several additional consequences such as forcing patients to use cheaper products since they cannot afford the higher quality and more costly items or, worse, it forces them to seek their medicine on the illicit market.

Remove the excise tax for qualified patients. This will not only help patients acquire their medicine at a more reasonable cost but it will incentivize retailers to carry DOH compliant product (tested for pesticides and heavy metals) and incentivize producers and processors to grow and manufacture DOH compliant or “medical’ product.

HB 2194 Homegrow

Summary

Why Homegrow?

Washington State Residents should be able to grow a few plants of something that our state allows to be sold like beer or wine. Our state law allows each adult to brew up to 200 gallons of beer or wine at home each year but growing even one cannabis plant is a felony unless authorized for medical purposes.

This is contrary to the spirit and intent of initiative 502, which reformed our state law and created a regulated system of licensed production, processing and sales of marijuana that has brought hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to our state government, profits to those businesses, jobs to those who work in those businesses and economic benefit to the state and the communities where those businesses and workers spend their money.

SB 5376 Cannabis Waste

Summary

Right now, cannabis biomass is considered hazardous waste and producer/processors must mix biomass with a neutralizing medium (sand, kitty litter, etc.). In addition to missing out on a possible avenue for revenue, producer processors are being forced to contribute unnecessarily to landfills.

In the years we have worked on this issue, we have built broad stakeholder support across agency, waste management, the environmental sustainability community, and the cannabis industry.

Let’s make another big step towards waste reduction!

HB 1249/SB 5340 Low Dose Beverages

Summary

Early regulation did not yet contemplate this product type and restricted beverages by volume rather than content and this bill is our opportunity to improve in our state’s ongoing evolution.  We are currently in a regulatory reality where I can purchase 72 airplane bottles containing 100mg of THC each…totalling 7200 mg of THC, yet If I wanted a more reliably mild experience, I can only purchase a six pack of cans of low-dose THC seltzer totaling…of all six cans…less than half the THC allowed in one single unit of the airplane bottles.  In a two-adult household that might enjoy an occasional beverage or two, that purchasing pattern would mean more than one trip a week to a cannabis retail store, which ultimately discourages folks from purchasing this type of product.

House Bill 1249 does not increase any of the amounts of THC available to purchase at one time, it simply creates an additional, sensible lane of product type geared to allow adult-use consumers the opportunity to purchase this increasingly popular format.

HB 2320/SB 6220 Potency

Summary

We are in alignment with some proponents of this bill who are seeking opportunities to reduce harm.  HHS last week released their analysis of the scheduling of cannabis and found significant medical benefits.  The dangers of addiction, overdose, disease are harms that we see in a variety of products we trust adults to make informed decisions about all the time.  The task at hand is to develop meaningful programs that support parents and community leaders with quality education resources.  In order to do that we need funding for research that looks at the actual medical impact of cannabis, its benefits and risks rather than follow the lead of skewed behavioral assessments.  Finally much more attention needs to be paid to the sea of identical, unregulated products readily available under the farm bill.

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