California Cannabis Industry Association Gives Regulatory Recommendations

The California Cannabis Industry Association (CCIA) has issued a list of comprehensive recommendations aimed at improving the state’s licensing and regulatory framework for cannabis. These recommendations are the product of several months of discussions with CCIA’s board of directors with extensive input from its seven policy committees and over 400 members.

As the state continues to pursue solutions to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recession, CCIA’s recommendations were carefully developed with the goal of minimizing the impact to state revenue. They were also prioritized and evaluated using the following criteria:

1. Does the proposed change enhance employee and public safety?
2. Does the proposed change increase efficiency and/or cut costs for existing licensees?
3. Does the proposed change reduce barriers to entry and/or improve access to legal cannabis?

The report includes two tax proposals to provide short-term certainty for the industry and establish a new cannabis tax category. They are followed by recommendations for consolidation as the state continues the development of its plan to merge the three cannabis licensing authorities into a single Department of Cannabis Control. In this section, CCIA highlights several key areas it believes need refinement, which will reduce administrative costs and improve the overall efficiency of the licensing system.

Additional sections focus on standalone issues affecting various parts of the cannabis supply chain, including prohibitions on premise sharing and other licensing restrictions, issues with testing standardization, and METRC challenges.

“We believe these recommendations will improve the state’s cannabis framework by reducing excessively high operational costs for licensees and barriers to entry for those operators seeking to participate in the legal cannabis marketplace,” a CCIA letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom.