Posted on 06/17/2017 12:05:51 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Cannabis is joining the ranks of the financial, advertising, real estate and alcohol industries with the formation of its first self-regulatory organization.
The National Association of Cannabis Businesses (NACB) launched Thursday with a powerhouse leadership team and an ambitious plan: Develop and enforce national standards that will increase compliance and transparency, spur growth, and shape future federal regulations. The NACB’s slogan is “Be ready,” in anticipation of federal legalization of cannabis.
The cannabis industry is on a historic growth trajectory even as its businesses operate in a fractured regulatory environment and in the face of uncertain federal policy, NACB president Andrew Kline told The Cannabist.
“What we’re saying is, ‘Let’s take control,'” he said. “Let’s set our own standards so we’re not limited by varying state regulations or subject to what the feds come up with.”
“The formation of NACB is absolutely a coming of age moment for cannabis,” said Ean Seeb, co-founder of Denver Relief Consulting and a member of the group’s advisory panel. “The industry has reached a stage where businesses are no longer only beholden to state regulations and obligations. It’s time to take the next step to be proactive so that when – not if – marijuana is legalized, we’re prepared.”
Self-regulatory organizations (SROs) are industry-financed, non-governmental groups working to supplement and replace regulatory activities that might otherwise emanate from local, state, and/or federal agencies.
Kline brings decades of experience operating in highly regulated environments, having previously served as a special counsel in the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau. Prior to that, he was a senior advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden; he also was an assistant U.S. attorney.
A D.C. insider and self-described “student of history,” Kline said he was drawn to the position because, “Cannabis legalization is the purest form of democracy I’ve ever seen.”
Colorado businesses and the they’ve lessons learned from the state’s “mature” regulatory regime will play an important part in the NACB’s initial efforts, Kline said.
“The state has been at it longer than anybody else, so it provides the largest window into what works and what hasn’t worked,” he said.
As the NACB concept developed over the last three years, the group enlisted two prominent players in Colorado’s cannabis industry to serve on its six-member advisory panel: Ean Seeb, co-founder of Denver Relief Consulting, and Adam Orens, co-founder of Marijuana Policy Group.
Seeb cited Colorado’s pesticide testing and enforcement as an example of a state-developed system that could be exported to a national level. “The state recognized early that clean cannabis was a public safety issue,” he said. “And the testing standards it developed are replicable in other states as we see in Oregon, for instance. But it’s also scalable to a national level,” he said.
Three Colorado businesses are among the NACB’s seven founding members: Boulder’s Green Dot Labs, Denver’s Local Product of Colorado and Pueblo’s Mesa Organics.
The founding businesses are models of state-level compliance and they’ll be pioneers in the NACB’s development of a first-of-its type digital compliance certification platform, NACB chief legal officer Douglas Fischer told The Cannabist. The technology is being built in partnership with IBM and will provide member businesses with real-time compliance management and supply chain tracking.
“It will create an auditable and transparent trail of data for consumers, state regulators, investors and — someday — federal agencies, that shows the business is compliant now and has been compliant historically,” he said.
Beyond providing financial institutions with the data to complete their due diligence, developing a national compliance regime and digital compliance platform that is efficient and effective has the potential to unleash the cannabis industry, said Jim Parco, owner of Mesa Organics and an economics professor at Colorado College.
“Compliance is expensive and time-consuming,” he said. “We’re not in the cannabis business; we’re in the compliance business. If we do it right, we get to sell some cannabis. You wouldn’t believe what I go through to get a clone from my greenhouse to our store, for instance.”
Jumping into the type of self-regulatory environment favored by the financial, advertising and alcohol industries doesn’t faze Parco. He said he was encouraged that the industry would look to Wall Street where the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regulates the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ and the American Stock Exchange.
“Cannabis cannot be so insular that we miss an opportunity to learn from other highly regulated industries how to make our own (industry) better,” he said.
A cannabis SRO could learn from the history of the Distilled Spirits Council, Seeb noted. That SRO formed in 1970 when three Prohibition-era alcohol-industry groups merged.
“Similar to cannabis, those founding SROs represented a substance that was legal and then made illegal through prohibition,” Seeb said. “When prohibition was overturned, these groups helped spirits navigate the new regulatory and taxation landscape.”
Ultimately, cannabis has been legalized at the state level because voters have approved of doing so in a regulated fashion, Kline said. The nascent cannabis SRO is a logical next step in nationalizing standards to help shore up that consumer and voter confidence.
“It’s an exciting time and a rare opportunity where an industry with such amazing growth potential is on the verge of professionalizing,” he said. “If we do this right, we can take the industry to a place where national standards and regulatory certainty allow businesses to do what they do best.”
Pothead nation.
you people(weed proponents) are insane....
Freedom. This is not an issue for constitutionalists. Pot does less damage than alcohol, but if it did more damage it still isn’t one of the more important fish we have to fry right now. Freedoms aren’t just the ones you already enjoy. They are for other people too, who may choose other pursuits than you.
Seriously?
Beergut nation!
Trump ain’t gonna legalize weed
Fake News
Man no kidding
Where I live you go to Walmart in low rent white areas and 90 percent of the women are morbidly obese
And half the white women are unmarried with mulatto kids
It’s nutz
*
LOL
Not quite what I meant but, yeah.
You’re probably right about Trump not legalizing pot but that’s one bet I wouldn’t put money on.
Meanwhile crack open a bud with dad or sip some bourbon with him
That’s just great
Fcuk alcohol
It’s frigging poison
Marijuana ain’t crap compared to the destruction of that venom
I’m not too big on alcohol myself. I’ll have a rum and OJ once in a while and sip on it for three hours or a BelHaven Ale when it’s hot. And likewise nurse it for hours.
“What we’re saying is, ‘Let’s take control’”
It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, that there’s so many cannabis proponents that want to go the route of massive governmental regulation and control, rather than just decriminalizing it, or going the route CA and NV did by simply allowing adults to grow a certain quantity of plants and have up to a certain amount of the weed on their person. Many of these same proponents WANT to settle for less freedom and more new taxes.
>> Kline said he was drawn to the position because, “Cannabis legalization is the purest form of democracy I’ve ever seen.” <<
Yo, dude - put down the lighter, walk away from the bong, and get a real life...
How long would it be before the feds control production, potency, distribution, sales and taxation? That individuals growing plants becomes illegal?
Corporate America and the tax man are going to end up controlling this, of course. It's not their nature to be left out of something so profitable. I'm seriously anti-drug, so think it's funny, except for the part about civilization is falling apart. Anyone who thought they'd be better off in the long run with legal marijuana than with illegal but tolerated if use was discrete marijuana must be stoned.
...”Pothead nation.”...
And, much worse. I believe addiction to the use of substances and alcohol might be a major problem in the very leadership of this nation and way beyond. Only now has a major book been written about how Germany legalized the same mind altering drugs for Hitler, his government, his staff and even his doctors who were addicted themselves, which played a definite role in the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Every American, at this moment in history, should read the well researched story of all that in Norman Ohler’s book, BLITZED, Drugs in the Third Reich. It should be required reading in high schools and colleges, as well, for I believe it is a major elephant in America’s room today and is responsible for much of the narcissism which is clearly evident in the media, academia, the legal profession and governments. When the brain’s frontal lobes are not functioning due to drug use, the animal in human beings takes over and the outcome is always tragic in one way or another. READ THIS BOOK!
For your intrest.
Fake News
Nope. It's the voters who are doing it.
Thanks for the ping.
As voters across the country are voting for medical cannabis programs & recreational cannabis programs it’s no surprise to me a group like this would form.
I’d much rather the legal cannabis industry set high quality standards for cannabis production than see the federal gov’t force a set of regulations that only serve gov’t’s need to grow itself.
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