Leaders in the state medical marijuana program say there’s not enough being done to protect patients from unregulated marijuana found in vape shops.
Dispensary owners confronted the Medical Marijuana Oversight Committee on this problem.
Alan Welsh is a Managing Partner of Dakota Herb. He acknowledges there’s only so much law enforcement can do. He said, however, nothing is being done to stop the spread of unregulated marijuana.
Welsh said it is not fair that he has pay for testing and compliance when local shops are selling marijuana under the guise of THC-A and other variants.
“When the state talks about tracking from seed to sale, we spend $600 a week just on metric tags to tag every plant to track it. We pay $1,000 to test every batch and make sure it passes testing. Our facilities have to be compliant; we have a security system in our dispensary, that the state has access too," said Welsh. "The state at any time can go look at our cameras and go look literally at our cultivation, at our dispensaries, and they can see everything that’s going on in there.”
Welsh said dispensary owners have had to sell their products cheaper than the illegal competition to keep the medical program running.
Brian Mueller is the Sheriff of Pennington County and a commission board member. He agreed with Welsh that the selling of marijuana at local vape shops has been an issue for some time.
Mueller said he wanted to wait for more information on the different cannabinoids before alerting local shops.
"Really it comes down to an issue of testing compacity in the state for us right now before we go seize a bunch of products and send it in some place to get tested. So, before we send a letter out we waited for this meeting today,” said Mueller.
The committee’s next meeting is scheduled for October.
