KEVIN JACOBY | MARCH 13, 2024
On February 27, 2024, OLCC quietly introduced a discover of proposed regulation which might delay the implementation of the OLCC batch marking rule from its present (and beforehand delayed) implementation date of April 22, 2024 to June 17, 2024. That is the newest in a protracted line of delays and apologies from this company for a really lengthy delay. reform that the licensees have been looking for for years. As mentioned under, OLCC obscures the rationale for the delay, which ought to give the hashish trade a priority as as to whether the company that guidelines is dealing instantly with its constituents and most of the people.
What's all this about “batch tagging”?
Earlier than we dive into what batch labeling is, let's begin with the fundamentals. The Oregon Legislature assigned OLCC the duty of making and sustaining a “seed-to-sale” monitoring system of all leisure (and a few medical) marijuana grown in Oregon. There are, after all, laudable objectives in monitoring marijuana as a client agricultural commodity—offering transparency to customers that the marijuana they're shopping for is what it purports to be and offering accountability to producers and licensees. downstream when there are issues which will come up. resulting in product recollects as pesticide checks fail. At the start of the leisure marijuana program in 2015, there was an extra motive for monitoring the seed on the market – marijuana is a Schedule I managed substance and due to this fact, the state wanted to have the ability to rapidly say and simply if marijuana had been diverted to the illicit market with a purpose to successfully maintain the federal authorities from shutting down this system wholesale. Nevertheless, with federal reprogramming on the horizon, that justification carries much less power right now than it did in 2015.
In 2015, OLCC revealed its first algorithm surrounding the seed-to-sale monitoring system, and in addition signed a 10-year contract with Metrc to construct the system, largely round its programs of comparable monitoring that he constructed for Colorado and Washington. . OLCC guidelines required that every marijuana plant over 36 inches tall be individually tagged with a novel radio frequency identification (“RFID”) tag, with every tag being assigned a novel quantity within the monitoring system of seeds on the market. What the growers rapidly discovered was that these plant tags had been costly – Metrc fees 45 cents per tag. With growers who’ve 1000’s of crops to trace for every harvest and lots of who’ve a number of harvests per yr, that tough price provides up, to not point out the numerous labor price required to individually tag every plant. So as to add insult to damage, OLCC hardly ever even makes use of the RFID performance of the tags, however usually dings licensees for not having them. Labeling particular person crops additionally doesn’t advance any public well being objectives – marijuana harvested from a selected plant is combined with different crops harvested on the similar time, of the identical pressure, and grown beneath the identical situations and positioned on a brand new tag Metrc. (referred to as “bundle tag”). In different phrases, there has by no means been a approach to hint a batch of marijuana flowers to a person plant tag, solely to a bunch of a whole lot of plant tags that had been the identical pressure and harvested on the similar time.
Many licensees had been vocal in regards to the lack of any price/profit benefit to the labeling of particular person crops earlier than this system, and lastly some traction to OLCC for reforming this rule when govt director Steve Marks was invited to a farm to witness first-hand the labor-intensive job of inserting a ineffective RFID tag on 1000’s of particular person pants. In 2022, OLCC started to take critically a proposal to permit licensees to trace crops through batches of not more than 100 crops, which is now what is named “batch tagging”, and promised to enact a rule change to permit batch labeling.
March 2023 – Batch marking rule adopted with implementation date of January 1, 2024.
On November 28, 2022, OLCC introduced a discover of proposed regulation proposing to implement the idea of batch tagging, and March 17, 2023 made the ultimate rule with an efficient date of January 1, 2024. Particularly, the language of the rule mustn’t require particular options within the Metrc system because the set off. Certainly, the language of the rule presumes that the present RFID plant tags that licensees have bought for every plant will merely be used for a batch of as much as 100 crops as a substitute of a single plant. And with that, the trade breathed a sigh of aid, proper? Not so quick.
December 2023 – First delay introduced
On December 15, 2023, OLCC introduced in a publication who’ve briefly modified the rule to delay the implementation of the batch marking rule till April 22, 2024, indicating a “contract course of with Metrc” that “has not been accomplished”. OLCC defined that an amended contract with Metrc was required to incorporate batch labelling. Nevertheless, smarter folks than me reviewed OLCC's contract with Metrc (which is public file) and located that the contract didn’t deal with Metrc's tag gross sales to licensees.
Certainly, these within the know had heard that Metrc was delaying the OLCC rule change exactly as a result of it threatened a captive income to Metrc from producer licensees. Making issues worse, OLCC indulged Metrc's push reasonably than correctly inform them that the contract didn’t shield this explicit income. With the Metrc contract due subsequent yr, one wonders why OLCC has failed to make use of its energy to guard licensees from the greed of an out-of-state contractor, and as a substitute is bending over backwards to delay this long-awaited reform. essential
The place issues stand now
As famous above, late final month OLCC introduced one other delay in implementing the batch tagging rule, citing the identical lame excuse. To reiterate, the rule language they completely adopted final yr doesn’t require modifications to the Metrc contract – it merely permits licensees to make use of their present stock of plant tags to cowl a batch of as much as 100 particular person crops. What’s now being defined by OLCC is that Metrc wants this extra time to develop a brand new product – a brand new sort of tag for various quantities of crops as much as 100, presumably with a higher worth for licensees. This final excuse is, to place it bluntly, a load of baloney – Metrc presently has the flexibility to assign a batch to a single tag. Certainly, that is exactly how bundle tags work.
The underside line is, why is OLCC delaying the implementation of this rule that they’ve had on the books for over a yr? The apologies made to date don’t add up, and there seems to be some dishonesty on the OLCC employees stage to implement the coverage put in place by the OLCC Board of Commissioners final yr. Hopefully there’s an investigative journalist on the market who is perhaps keen to dig slightly deeper to see how Metrc's affect peddling is so profitable.
Name to Motion
The OLCC is conducting a public listening to on the newest batch marking rule delay this Friday, March 15, 2024 the place public remark could be obtained. You could find directions for attending this public listening to just about right here. Moreover, it’s possible you’ll provide written touch upon the proposal to delay batch labeling till March 31, 2023 by emailing OLCC.Rulemaking@oregon.gov.
You possibly can contact Kevin Jacoby at kevin@jacobylawllc.com or schedule a session by calling (503) 208-4470.
