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KNOWING THE PROBLEM IS THE SOLUTION


Hemp and Cannabis News focus are on the products and responses of the political climate of how best to regulate them. With the numerous articles based on factual analytics, creating a level playing field for all cannabis players is the only solution for success. We believe every challenge requires study and understanding the problem in itself becomes its own solution, it focuses us to change our thinking in order to find it.

Cannabis legalization has been at the forefront with enough dialogue to make a unified approach impossible. Since the federal government has abandoned common sense, the states have taken an abstract concept and reduced it to the semblance of a workable objective -- legalize marijuana.

Our analytics from legal-cannabis state has offered important object lesson within regulatory details that may have flushed out an industrial model. Provisions relating to taxes or licensing are having an impact on what the market looks like—or even whether that market is allowed to exist. Last month we saw legalization measures in New York, and New Jersey falters due to disagreement over taxation, licensing, and equity details. Only by “passing the buck” with voter referendums can the political environment be structured for the benefit of the majority.

On a national basis, sixty-four percent want legalization for adult use marijuana, and it is clear that the public demands that the matter settled on a national stage. And yet for the time being, the states control the bounce of the ball. Therefore, unbiased analytics require careful review.

With the support of our SP+GTM algorithm, six key issues must be universally accepted and implemented as law: 1. Transparency in regulation and compliance: (a)Ensure that the regulating agency is diverse, independent, subject to full transparency, and appointed by different people. (b) Demand regular data reporting. Require the regulating agency to collect data on each of these items, report the data regularly, and take remedial measures when the evidence is not satisfactory. Give the regulating agency broad flexibility and authority to accomplish this. 2. (a) Dedicated tax revenue. Don’t allow legislators to divert cannabis tax revenue. Demand that it be reinvested into disproportionately harmed communities. Give this measure teeth; don’t let that revenue be “subject to appropriation,” and don’t require bureaucratic application processes that only privileged communities will be able to tap into. Tie tax revenue to met mandates. Make this a statutory requirement: Tax revenue flows only to municipalities that have honored these mandates. Leave it up to the municipalities to figure out how to make their local laws and processes inclusive to disproportionately harmed communities before receiving any local taxes. (b) Tie tax revenue to met mandates. Make this a statutory requirement: Tax revenue flows only to municipalities that have honored these mandates. Leave it up to the municipalities to figure out how to make their local laws and processes inclusive to disproportionately harmed communities before receiving any local taxes. 3. (a) Establish equity assistance programs. Separate from that reinvestment, invest a specific percentage of tax revenue into technical assistance, hiring programs, and interest-free loans for disproportionately affected communities with a funding mechanism for initial programming and outreach as soon as the law passes. (b) Deadlines must be met. It is essential that you hold the agency or agencies in charge of specified deadlines. Impose consequences for missing those deadlines (c) Automatic expungement for cannabis convictions—in the same law at the same time as legalization. 4. Limit licenses and require diversity goals. Require state regulators and local governments to ensure diversity in the industry at ownership and employee levels, with goals, measurement, and accountability for the regulators. Impose and enforce limits on the number of licenses a single entity can control. 5. License holders must contribute to government-set goals. Require every licensed cannabis business to provide to these goals in addition to but not instead of the government’s role. One option is to require diversity plans and affirmative impact plans as requirements for license and renewal. 6. Set maximum standards for THC at fifteen percent and CBD at twenty percent. Establish an independent agency to test and enforce compliance with fines and loss of licenses.

Makes these six proposals universal among the states would ensure lasting results and accelerate the process for a federal mandate to legalizes cannabis.


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