{"id":51079,"date":"2021-11-10T08:05:58","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T16:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2021\/11\/10\/montana-regulators-open-to-revising-marijuana-industry-employment-and-cbd-restrictions\/"},"modified":"2021-11-10T13:47:21","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T21:47:21","slug":"montana-regulators-open-to-revising-marijuana-industry-employment-and-cbd-restrictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2021\/11\/10\/montana-regulators-open-to-revising-marijuana-industry-employment-and-cbd-restrictions\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Regulators Open To Revising Marijuana Industry Employment And CBD Restrictions"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are doing our very, very best to effectuate legislative intent.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

By Arren Kimbel-Sannit, Daily Montanan<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Montana Department of Revenue told lawmakers Tuesday that it\u2019s open to amending a pair of controversial rules the agency drafted in order to implement House Bill 701, a sprawling bill passed this year regulating the state\u2019s newly created recreational marijuana industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat bill is anything but a piece of perfection as far as legislative intent goes,\u201d said the DOR\u2019s Brendan Beatty to the Revenue Committee. \u201cThat thing goes live January 1 whether we have rules or not, and we need rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of the rules that have been most at issue, one restricting dispensary employment opportunities for those with prior criminal<\/a> or marijuana-related convictions and the other effectively banning dispensaries from selling CBD products, are part of a series of larger rule packages that the department needs to develop under\u00a0HB701<\/a>, which becomes effective January 1 of next year.<\/p>\n

While many of the department\u2019s rules have received pushback, these have been especially\u00a0hard to stomach for the burgeoning recreational pot sector, and have caused additional concern among lawmakers that they were veering from legislative intent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really need these to be changed,\u201d said Sen. Jill Cohenour, D-East Helena, the chair of the bipartisan Interim Revenue Committee, which reviewed<\/a> a batch of DOR rules on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0employment rule<\/a> pertains to suspension or revocation of marijuana worker permits, a new requirement under HB701. While the bill requires sector employees to undergo a criminal background check and notify the department of a felony conviction, a marijuana law violation in another jurisdiction, or a citation for selling alcohol or tobacco to a minor within 10 days, the rule that the department drafted to implement that provision notes that a conviction, guilty plea or plea of no contest for any crime in the previous three years would be \u201cgrounds for suspension or revocation of a [marijuana] worker permit,\u201d as would be the \u201cconviction, guilty plea, or plea of no contest to violating a marijuana law of any other state\u201d at any time.<\/p>\n

To legalization advocates and policymakers, the deviation from statute, though technical in nature, seemed to contradict the goals of economic gain and restorative justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would certainly say that in reading that rule and the language that\u2019s put in there, in my opinion, it\u2019s not legislative intent,\u201d said Sen. Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, a key player in the passage of HB701 through the upper chamber and a member of the legislative Economic Affairs Interim Committee (EAIC), which has oversight authority on certain rules. \u201cIn discussions [on HB701], it was my belief that the intent of the legislature was, if a person had a minor conviction that would now be not a conviction, for instance, if somebody was caught with a small amount of marijuana, that would not rise to a felony or a situation like that. It is my belief that the opinion of the legislature as I see it is we don\u2019t want to keep people from working.\u201d<\/p>\n

Courtney Cosgrove, an attorney for the DOR\u2019s Cannabis Control Division, told lawmakers Tuesday that DOR developed the rule based on its understanding of the background check and conviction notice requirements in the bill.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween [those requirements], the department interpreted the legislative intent to mean you must want us to do something with this information,\u201d Cosgrove said. \u201cOur original language\u2026mirrored the statute. It said conviction for a felony. We then had discussions with a member of EAIC who felt that the definition should be broader than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, she noted that the department has received feedback from the public, industry and lawmakers involved in the interim committees to the contrary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are open to amending that rule,\u201d Cosgrove said.<\/p>\n

She had a similar response to concerns on the department\u2019s\u00a0proposed ban<\/a> on licensed dispensaries selling CBD, which she said stems from a section in HB701 that explicitly excludes hemp from the definition of marijuana, \u201cincluding the seeds and all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids\u201d and so on\u2014in other words, CBD.<\/p>\n

Cosgrove noted that the rule would constitute a dramatic change for the industry, but that the department was following what it understood to be the plain language of the bill. But lawmakers on the committee said that their intent was to protect hemp growers, not ban the sale of a value-added product.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do believe it would be in the department\u2019s best interest to work on that sooner rather than later,\u201d said Cohenour. \u201cI do not believe that it was the intention of the legislature to remove CBD products from being able to be sold in a marijuana dispensary.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean that the bill says something other than what\u2019s written. Cosgrove said DOR is nonetheless willing to make adjustments \u201cif there was some other signal of legislative intent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to an EAIC meeting later this month, the rules will be subject to public feedback at two separate hearings in November.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are doing our very, very best to effectuate legislative intent,\u201d Beatty said. He noted, though, that parsing through the language of a 100+ page bill can be difficult.<\/p>\n

This story was first published by Daily Montanan.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Two Dozen Governors Call On Congress To Pass Marijuana Banking Reform Through Defense Bill<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The post Montana Regulators Open To Revising Marijuana Industry Employment And CBD Restrictions<\/a> appeared first on Marijuana Moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\u201cWe are doing our very, very best to effectuate legislative intent.\u201d By Arren Kimbel-Sannit, Daily Montanan The Montana Department of Revenue told lawmakers Tuesday that it\u2019s open to amending a pair of controversial rules the agency drafted in order to implement House Bill 701, a sprawling bill passed this yearContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":457,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51079"}],"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\/457"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51080,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51079\/revisions\/51080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}