OR: Deadline Near For Marijuana Dispensaries

Katelyn Baker

Well-Known Member
The end space inside the strip-style retail building at U.S. Highway 20 and Dean Swift Road in Bend was blank Wednesday, empty except for contractors putting the finishing touches on walls and floors.

But the owners of Plantae Health, a cannabis business with a Deschutes County farm and dispensaries in Madras and Prineville, expect to be up and running there by the first week of January, selling dried marijuana flower, extracts and edibles infused with the active ingredients in marijuana. Although the storefront is empty, co-owner Jocelyn Anderson and General Manager Kristen White said they expect a visit within a week from inspectors with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission and receipt of their OLCC retail license shortly afterward.

"We knew it wasn't going to be easy," Anderson said. "But we were prepared, and we asked a lot of questions."

Plantae Health operates its dispensaries under the Oregon Health Authority, but the company, just as other medical marijuana dispensaries in Oregon, faces a deadline Saturday. After that, medical marijuana dispensaries may sell only to cardholders in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. Most marijuana business owners plan on switching to OLCC licenses, because the adult-use market is considered the largest and most lucrative.

The Health Authority reported that 319 medical marijuana dispensaries out of 352 total took part in the early sales period, a program the Oregon Legislature created last year to allow any adult age 21 and over to purchase small amounts of marijuana and processed marijuana products. The program, which ends Saturday, started Oct. 1, 2015, to allow consumers to buy those products while the OLCC issued licenses and created a regulatory framework for the adult-use cannabis industry.

Most marijuana business owners, including those in Central Oregon, plan on acquiring OLCC licenses that allow them to produce, process and sell marijuana for all the adult and medical markets. Once marijuana retailers acquire OLCC licenses, they may only sell products obtained from other OLCC-licensed growers, processors and wholesalers. The transition from medical to adult-use retail is another hurdle, one of the most significant, for marijuana business owners in Oregon.

"It's hard for us to figure out how many people are flipping" from strictly medical marijuana businesses to OLCC-licensed operations, said Mark Pettinger, spokesman for the OLCC Recreational Marijuana Program. "The Oregon Health Authority has a list of dispensaries but not a list of processors. Dispensaries are public facing but growers and processors are not. We have no eyes on that."

The OLCC expects to license more than 100 marijuana businesses across Oregon this week, he said. In Des-chutes County, six retailers, all in Bend, are licensed by the OLCC. Another 14 still operate under the Health Authority, although five are approved for OLCC licenses but have not obtained them.

The license is not issued until the applicant pays a fee. Some applicants said they are waiting to ensure a reliable supply of product from OLCC licensees before taking possession of their own license.

In Madras, five dispensaries still operate under the Health Authority, although four have applied for OLCC licenses. In Prineville, one dispensary, owned by Plantae Health, will remain a medical marijuana dispensary because the city has banned recreational retail sales. In Madras, Plantae Health plans to switch its dispensary to an OLCC-licensed operation, Anderson said.

In Deschutes County, a total of 77 marijuana-related business applied for licenses, including 25 retailers, 28 growers, 13 processors, nine wholesalers and two testing laboratories. Two growers have obtained OLCC licenses, with another two approved for licenses, as of Tuesday. One wholesaler is licensed and another is approved. One laboratory in Bend is licensed, another was approved.

For established businesses, obtaining a license comes down to passing a site inspection, Pettinger said. Many have their completed applications assigned to OLCC inspectors.

"The director of licensing told me 50 people around the state are working on applications, background investigations or inspections," Pettinger said. "Dispensaries, in some cases, have many if not all their security requirements in place. For them, it's not a heavy lift."

The OLCC started the licensing process earlier this year with outdoor growers, which took more time than anticipated because of the nature and location of those operations. Dispensaries, wholesalers and processors have had time to prepare and meet their requirements, including Oregon Department of Agriculture inspections of processors that make edible products and certification of labs by the Health Authority.

The push to license recreational marijuana businesses comes as many of those businesses adjust to a string of regulatory changes designed to ease the cost and reduce the time required to test their products for potency, contaminants and pesticides, and package and label them appropriately. A bottleneck resulted after October at the few laboratories certified to test marijuana flower and processed products for pesticide contamination. The OLCC shares oversight of pesticide testing and regulation with the Health Authority and the Agriculture Department.

In Bend, Juniper Analytics, a marijuana testing lab, on Thursday installed a pesticide testing machine, a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, which lab owner Carl Carnagey expects will be certified and running sometime in January. If so, it would be the first lab certified to test for pesticides in Central Oregon.

"The turnaround time for statewide testing has really been bottlenecked by pesticide testing by about three to six weeks," Carnagey said. "That's just a hard way to do business, and people want to get products on their shelves and make some money. They have no net earnings over decades in business to sustain them."

One retailer in Bend, Oregrown Industries LLC, which operates a dispensary on NW Wall Street, is already selling its products under an OLCC license, including cannabis extracts such as hash oil. Dispensaries may continue selling products they received prior to Oct. 1, provided they are appropriately marked.

Oregrown co-founder Aviv Hadar said the long road this year through the creation of an entirely new, regulated industry separated business owners who prepared from those who did not. Oregrown, which has a growing and processing plant on 84 acres, a former goat cheese factory near Tumalo, is still waiting on county approval before starting that operation, he said. Marijuana business owners must adapt to regulation and oversight just as mainstream businesses have done, he said.

"We're doing our best to deliver a professionally made, high-end, clean product. That's what you'll see here. The entire situation with testing and pesticides and having very little product available (as a result), it's forcing people to be really professional and really clean," he said Thursday. "I don't see anything going backward; I see it getting more and more stringent."

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News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Deadline Near For Marijuana Dispensaries
Author: Joseph Ditzler
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Photo Credit: Gustovo Turner
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