Last week saw a triad of notable marijuana law and policy developments in Oregon, and our Portland office has been busy fielding questions from clients on a few of these changes. Rather than devote a full blog post to any one item, we have decided to present a round-up of last weeks key developments around the state. Enjoy.
New Pot Testing Rules
On Wednesday, December 14, the Oregon Health Authority released yet another set of temporary testing rules with the intention of relieving some of the testing burden on producers and processors. These rules improve upon the temporary rules issued on December 2, which were designed to do the very same thing. We wrote that the December 2 rules were still pretty tough, so we were glad to see some progress.
The new rules took effect on Thursday, December 15, and still apply to both medical and retail marijuana items. Batch and sample size requirements are now friendlier to licensees, and the reporting deadlines for labs have been kicked out to January 31, 2017. For an overview of these developments and more, the OHA published a summary bulletin here. If you are an Oregon cannabis producer, processor or lab, we recommend that you acquaint yourself yet again with the revised testing regime.
Portland Pot Delivery?
We have never had nice things to say about the City of Portlands marijuana regulatory program, and our clients experiences with its Office of Neighborhood Involvement have been uniformly dismal. When a detailed report surfaced last week that the program isdriving people out of business, we were not surprised. That said, if you want to run a delivery service in Portland next year, you probably can!
Marijuana delivery is allowed under state rules with a retail license, although Portland had forbidden it. Last week, the City unanimously approved amendments to its existing regulations which would allow for delivery under a marijuana retail courier license. The City has also extended the hours of permissible operation for marijuana business, and now seeks to license microbusiness entrepreneurs (unfortunately). We expect these ...
