On Monday, recreational marijuana shops become legal in Massachusetts. But no dispensaries will actually be open.
Yet while the state is missing its target date for legalized pot, there will be a significant milestone on Monday. The Cannabis Control Commission is scheduled to vote on whether to approve a license for the state's first-ever recreational marijuana retail shop. It’s in Leicester, and it’s called Cultivate.
Sam Barber, the company's president, said he wasn't expecting to be the first dispensary in the state but was happy to get the news. "At the same time, there's still a few other details that do need to be figured out at a state level before we're actually able to sell,” he said. “But it does look like we're getting very close to that start for ‘rec’ in Massachusetts."
Among those issues is a lack of testing laboratories. Any marijuana that's sold in a recreational dispensary has to be tested in a licensed laboratory. The labs check for heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, as well as a microbiological analysis for things like mold, bacteria, salmonella, and E. coli. They also test the potency of the drug, so customers know exactly how much they're getting.
There are three labs already doing this for the state's medical marijuana program, and they're all expected to apply for licenses, but none have completed applications yet. That’s in part because they need to get host-community agreements with the city or town where they're located.
“We were not required to have a community-host agreement prior in order to set up shop, because we were, at the end of the day, just another chemistry lab,” said Michael Kahn, president and founder of MCR Labs in Framingham, one of the labs currently testing for the state’s medical marijuana program. “And now there's a new application process and we're working through that."
Members of the Cannabis Control Commission said this week they were worried about not having any supply because of it, so they voted to prioritize their review of laboratory applications received in the next month.
So far, the only recreational license that’s been awarded is for Sira Naturals, for a cultivation site in Milford. Sira Naturals is also up for licenses for product manufacturing and transportation, which will be voted on Monday. The company’s president, Michael Dundas, said he’s not concerned about the hold up with the labs.
"Keep in mind that all these initial licenses, the cultivation license, product manufacturing, transportation and retail licenses that look to be granted potentially on Monday, these are all provisional licenses, so it will take some time for the Cannabis Control Commission to conduct their inspections and then issue final licenses,” he said. “So we believe that in the interim time it’s not unreasonable to expect that a laboratory license would be issued as well.”
Cannabis Control Commission Chair Steven Hoffman points out that the July 1 target was not a statutory deadline.
“We care at the Commission much more about what this industry is going to look like July 1 on 2019 and 2020, and I hope the citizens of the state agree with that,” he said on WGBH’s Greater Boston. “I understand there were expectations that were not met, but we’re doing this the right way.”
