{"id":24416,"date":"2018-03-13T15:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2018\/03\/13\/california-cracks-down-on-renegade-marijuana-delivery\/"},"modified":"2018-03-14T00:45:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T08:45:37","slug":"california-cracks-down-on-renegade-marijuana-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2018\/03\/13\/california-cracks-down-on-renegade-marijuana-delivery\/","title":{"rendered":"California Cracks Down on Renegade Marijuana Delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Legal medical marijuana delivery services have been frustrated for years by competitors who haven\u2019t bothered to acquire licenses or pay taxes. California state regulators have finally taken notice. Will they take action?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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In 2011, Kevin Reed, a San Francisco businessman, went to authorities with a problem.<\/p>\n

Reed\u2019s business, The Green Cross, delivered medical marijuana to qualified patients. It was the only one of its kind with a permit from the city of San Francisco to operate, but there were at least 19 other cannabis deliveries in San Francisco \u2014 Reed\u2019s competitors \u2014 advertising their services in print and on the web. None of those outfits had bothered to get a license or pay the attendant permit fee of roughly $9,000 a year. And since the illicit delivery services weren\u2019t permitted, it was reasonable to assume they also weren\u2019t paying state or local taxes.<\/p>\n

Reed didn\u2019t ask for a crackdown,\u00a0he merely asked for a \u201cleveling\u201d of the playing field<\/a>. City public health officials acknowledged that the unlicensed deliveries were probably breaking the law and not paying their taxes, but also said there wasn\u2019t much they could do about it. Law enforcement wasn\u2019t interested either. And so Reed\u2019s complaints went unheeded.<\/p>\n

In the rest of California and the western United States \u2014 including in jurisdictions like Los Angeles, where delivery-only companies are still ostensibly banned<\/a> \u2014 cannabis businesses operating without state or local permits have flourished. These delivery companies have found the atmosphere so accommodating that they didn\u2019t think twice about advertising their services publicly on sites like Weedmaps.<\/p>\n

Flush with advertising dollars from these illicit outlets, Weedmaps also flourished. The company bought billboards<\/a> all over North America, including in Hollywood and San Francisco, and ran print and web advertisements throughout the state. Weedmaps had enough spare capital after the rapid expansion and attendant marketing blitz to help bankroll Prop. 64<\/a>, the ballot initiative that legalized adult-use marijuana in California.<\/p>\n

Investing in legalization seemed like smart business. Prop. 64<\/a> legalized adult-use cannabis as well as commercial marijuana sales, and so it would reliably lead to an explosion of outlets needed advertising services. But it may turn out to be Weedmaps\u2019s undoing \u2014 and may finally provide a measure of the justice Reed requested earlier in the decade. (Though a bit late: A few years after reopening a storefront dispensary, Reed shuttered the delivery service<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

On. Feb. 16, Lori Ajax, chief of California\u2019s new Bureau of Cannabis Control, sent WeedMaps CEO Doug Francis a sternly worded letter. By offering advertising for cannabis dispensaries and delivery services without state licenses, Weedmaps is \u201caiding and abetting\u2026 violations of state cannabis laws,\u201d Ajax wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeedmaps.com<\/a>\u00a0must immediately cease and desist all activity that violates state cannabis laws,\u201d wrote Ajax, who warned that failure to comply could result in \u201ccriminal and administrative penalties.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It remains to be seen whether Ajax and the BCC will follow up the letter with enforcement \u2014 and what form that may take. Either way, the letter demonstrates a marked shift in California\u2019s supposedly permissive marijuana policy.<\/p>\n

Though Weedmaps was the only advertising outfit to receive a warning from the BCC, the agency has sent more than 900 other unlicensed marijuana businesses similar letters since January 1, BCC spokesperson Alex Traverso told the Orange County Register<\/a>.\u00a0Of these, 375 were sent in response to complaints, including complaints from operators of registered, compliant businesses.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re starting to see more and more licensed cannabis businesses that invest millions of dollars and go through the process to do things the right way and to pay their taxes \u2014 which they have to pay a lot of \u2014 those businesses are demanding that individuals who don\u2019t follow the law be put out of business,\u201d Aaron Herzberg, a Southern California-based cannabis attorney who is a partner in two dispensaries, told the newspaper.<\/p>\n

In a way, these complaints violate an old cannabis industry ethos, which goes something like this: Authorities are all the same \u2014 they\u2019re the authorities, they\u2019re the entities who try to shut marijuana outfits down. But nowadays, that counterculture attitude appears to be an outdated approach that\u2019s harder to find, and harder to defend.<\/p>\n

Along with licensing and registration requirements, marijuana businesses must test their products for contamination and potency. Those requirements don\u2019t take full effect until later this year, but it\u2019s safe to assume that a business not bothering to seek state and local permitting \u2014 as they were required to do as of Jan. 1 \u2014 may not also bother to test its products before selling them to the public.<\/p>\n

Instances of lax enforcement like the Weedmaps situation led to a prevalent conception of California as a cannabis-friendly \u201cWild West,\u201d and led to other states passing much stricter medical-cannabis laws. It\u2019s not clear if enforcement when people like Reed asked for it would have changed this public perception, and it\u2019s also not clear if the pre-Prop. 64 \u201cWild West\u201d days are over or not.<\/p>\n

As the Register noted, Weedmaps is continuing to run advertisements for dispensaries and delivery services in areas where both outfits are banned. It appears it will be up to the BCC to decide if it wants to start behaving like a sheriff.<\/p>\n

TELL US,<\/strong> do you think California should shut down unlicensed cannabis businesses?<\/p>\n

The post California Cracks Down on Renegade Marijuana Delivery<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: California Cracks Down on Renegade Marijuana Delivery<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Legal medical marijuana delivery services have been frustrated for years by competitors who haven\u2019t bothered to acquire licenses or pay taxes. California state regulators have finally taken notice. Will they take action? In 2011, Kevin Reed, a San Francisco businessman, went to authorities with a problem. Reed\u2019s business, The GreenContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,2882,80,81,151,387],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24417,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24416\/revisions\/24417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}