Massachusetts state lawmakers this week said they’re not likely to deal with intoxicating hemp goods during this year’s legislative session, meaning the issue won’t change, from a legal perspective, at least until lawmakers reconvene in Boston next year.
After a hearing this week of the legislature’s Joint Committees on Agriculture and Cannabis Policy, state Rep. Paul Schmid said that a “well-thought-out solution will require continued conversations into the next session and beyond,” the CommonWealth Beacon reported.
This year’s legislative session is slated to end on July 31, and next year’s session won’t kick off until January.
But it’s near-certain that the question of how to appropriately regulate federally legal intoxicating hemp goods at the state level isn’t going away, Schmid indicated.
“This is a matter that involves significant portions of local, state, and federal law, whose concerns must all be satisfied,” he said in a statement. “We have a situation where intoxicating hemp products are being produced probably from hemp that isn’t grown in Massachusetts, in labs that have no supervision, being put into packages that have no age requirements, and they’re competing with our lawful cannabis retailers.”
In Massachusetts, it’s not even clear where hemp goods fall in terms of jurisdiction for various state agencies, the Beacon reported. The Department of Public Health, the Department of Agricultural Resources, and the Cannabis Control Commission all sent representatives to testify during the legislative hearing this week, underscoring that it’s not clear which of them is supposed to run point on hemp products.
The first two agencies contend that the hemp products in question are already illegal under state law and should not be allowed to be sold outside of licensed marijuana shops. Cannabis Control Commissioner Kimberly Roy also referred to such hemp goods as a “public menace,” given that they typically are not lab-tested for consumer safety the way marijuana products are. The growth in the hemp sector has also come at the cost of the legal marijuana trade, she said.
“Licensees who have in some cases spent a large portion of their personal savings and devoted their professional lives to building a compliant, regulated business are faced with the demoralizing site of intoxicating cannabinoid products being sold down the street with no regulation, no testing, and no protection for children,” Roy said at the most recent hearing.
To date, a lot of the enforcement responsibility fell to local boards of health, which say they don’t have the resources to crack down on intoxicating hemp goods being sold across the state by a wide array of mainstream retailers. And, one local health board spokesman pointed out, such agencies have no jurisdiction with regard to convenience stores or gas stations, which are major purveyors of intoxicating hemp goods.
To fix the overall issue, the legislature needs to act to solve who will enforce the rules and how, the three state agencies said during the hearing.