California Retailers Have to Destroy Hundreds of Millions Worth of Non compliant Cannabis Products

July 05, 2018, California

If you have visited any of the cannabis stores in California after 1st July, you might have noticed emptier shelves. It is because the transition period for selling noncompliant cannabis has ended on June 30th. When recreational cannabis became legal in the golden state on January 1st, the regulators granted cannabis retailers six months of grace time to take up all the compliance measures.  

This transitional period was an acknowledgment of the fact that the non-regulated strain made a large part of the cannabis economy in the state. The state wanted to give them a chance to become a part of the legalized system. However, many retailers have failed in complying with the regulations established for legal cannabis products. As a result, the retailers are now required to get rid of all the noncompliant cannabis products.  

Even though Bureau of Cannabis Control still providing leniency on different specific regulations, but seed-to-sale tracking went into effect on July 1st. This means cannabis products that can’t be tracked to their cultivators have rendered noncompliant. According to one estimate, more than 300 million dollars worth of cannabis had to be lifted from the shelves due to the failure of meeting the sales-to-sale trail.  

selling noncompliant cannabis has ended on June 30th - Image powered by Desertsun.com

In the lead up to the end of the transition period, retail cannabis stores offered whopping discounts on all the noncompliant products. But still, a plenty of cannabis products remained unsold by the end of the deadline. The Bureau of Cannabis Control also devised a rule for destroying noncompliant cannabis products.  

Retailers have to put it in the composite bin with other debris and to shoot a video of the whole process for the record. This process was devised to make it certain that all the noncompliant products become unusable. 

As per the spokesperson of California Cannabis Industry Association, Josh Drayton, the figure of $300 dollar is just a rough estimation. The actual value of destroyed unregulated cannabis products can be more than that. Drayton is right because no formal evaluation has been carried out of the destroyed cannabis products. In Los Angeles alone, tens of thousands of noncompliant product have been dumped.  

July 1st Transition: A Hard-Learned Lesson  

July 1st Transition - Image powered by Indicaonline.com

After the commencement of recreational sales in the state, cannabis retailers became negligent about making their operations compliant with the regulations. They were thinking that the grace period will extend time and again. On the other hand, there were some who didn’t get the gist of the seed-to-sale system and never really bothered to understand it.  

When the state didn’t extend the grace period, retail cannabis store owners got panicked and offered tremendous discounts on the unregulated products. However, it is impossible to sell months of stocks in a couple of days no matter how lucrative the discounts are.   

According to an industry expert, the implementation of seed-to-sale regulation on time has taught an important lesson to the retailers on implications of the legalized market. In few months, when shelves will be decked with fully compliant products, the cannabis retail owners might forget the horror of July 1st ‘Marijuanapocalypse’.  

The post California Retailers Have to Destroy Hundreds of Millions Worth of Non compliant Cannabis Products appeared first on I Love Growing Marijuana.