The Office of Medical Cannabis is concerned that it does not have the authority to regulate the raw flower sold, and therefore, the law needs to be changed.
By Peter Callagan, MinnPost
Minnesota regulators will request a state law that would help them regulate the sale of raw marijuana flower. This product was not clearly regulated in the recreational marijuana law for 2023.
Charlene Briner is the interim director of Office of Cannabis Management. She said that she will ask for legislation this summer to transfer the oversight and enforcement of products derived from hemp to her office, rather than waiting until next spring. Briner said that the speeding up would fill in a gap created by the new recreational marijuana laws, which gave her office authority to inspect raw cannabis flowers but not staff.
The Office of Cannabis Management will be able to oversee hemp products immediately and the Medical Cannabis Office can concentrate on its core business.
was questioned last year after medical cannabis regulators claimed they did not have the legal authority to regulate raw cannabis flower. This has allowed registered hemp retailers sell raw flower that is often sold under the THCa label. It could be legal hemp, but it could also be illegal marijuana. Although it’s legal for adults to grow a few marijuana plants at home, it is not legal to sell outside tribal reservations.
Medical cannabis staff cannot test for potency without legal authority. The police departments have the authority to enforce, but they are hesitant. This is because it’s a state-run job that has mostly civil sanctions and not criminal ones.
The Office of Medical Cannabis already has inspection teams in the field, working with hemp retailers. However, they do not have the authority to test or sanction the sale of raw flowers that may be illegal. The Office of Cannabis Management, on the other hand, has clear legal authority to sell raw cannabis flowers but it does not have an inspection and enforcement operation in place.
Briner described the regulatory gap as “an interesting dynamic” during a webinar on Wednesday, where he was asked to describe the progress made by the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) in achieving retail sales.
Briner said that bringing the enforcement team over from the Office of Medical Cannabis to OCM by July 1, 2024 will help us integrate these operations and develop additional consistency in the enforcement approach.
Briner’s Office has now taken a second step to address concerns raised by some hemp-derived retailers who believe that retailers are working at the edges of the law. They are selling raw cannabis flowers that can be vaped or smoked as legal products when they could be illegal.
She stated last month after a meeting with representatives of local governments and law enforcement associations that her office would craft interagency agreement with the Medical Cannabis Office and the Department of Agriculture in order to deputize their inspectors for the OCM to enforce its legal authority over raw flowers.
Briner explained that bringing early medical cannabis inspectors to OCM is not just to close the enforcement gap.
She said in an email that “the early transition was something we had identified as making sense, from a perspective of capacity building and aligning ourselves well before the raw flower issue had even been identified.” She described the transition and previously announced interagency agreement as both/and.
Briner stated that “we are in the process of executing those agreements as we speak.” Briner also said, “We’re currently implementing them.” We are also pursuing an early transition of the team that is responsible for hemp-derived products at the Minnesota Department of Health to build OCM’s capacity. This is not because of a ‘loophole,’ but rather because the team will be coming over anyhow. Bringing them on earlier helps us better align our efforts.
The current law would be accelerated if the inspectors were brought under the Office of Cannabis Management in July. This would allow all cannabis regulations to be under OCM by March 2025. This coincides with Minnesota’s expected recreational marijuana roll-out and will be the time when all cannabis products, including medical, recreational and hemp-derived products are under the Office of Cannabis Management.
Why the confusion? The Office of Medical Cannabis was given the temporary task of regulating medical marijuana as well as hemp-derived products which were legalized by 2022, without a robust regulation system. According to federal and state laws, cannabis plants that contain less than.03 percent of THC are classified as hemp. The plant does not become intoxicating at these levels, even when it is burned. Hemp-derived product undergoes processing to increase the THC level to create an intoxicating result.
The Office of Cannabis Management is unable to regulate the product because it has not been processed.
The original publication of this story was by MinnPost.
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The original Marijuana moment article Minnesota Marijuana regulators ask lawmakers to fix loophole that allows high-THC raw cannabis to be sold as legal hemp.
