YES on Prop 64
So, California decided to adopt the new Adult Use Act. What does that mean for you?
If you are already a medical user, the short answer is… Basically nothing.
The slightly longer answer is dependent on how long a time line you are looking at.
The Control, Regulate and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act (yes, that is the real name of prop 64), isn’t very important for the next few years. Far more important is the California Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA) that will take effect Jan 1st 2018. We’ll take a brief look at a few aspects of MMRSA in this article, but if you’d like more detailed info, you can find it under Why haven’t I heard of MMRSA?
The MMRSA was enacted by California state legislature because they were tired of California being the wild west of medical marijuana. They recognized that Ca is basically a rubber stamp state and that most medical recommendations are given to stoners who have little to no true medical need.
MMRSA aims to combat this by, among other things, instituting a marijuana oversight agency of the state government. This oversight agency will issue 17 different licenses that will allow med shops to operate under, in different capacities, depending on which license the shop received.
This was a huge spring board for Prop 64 because the authors could site that Ca was already moving toward a more regulated environment. In fact, Prop 64 tasked the new oversight agency with handling all recreational licenses as well.
Knowing how large a task this would be for an agency that hadn’t even been put together yet (remember, MMRSA doesn’t drop until Jan 1st 2018), the Prop 64 authors specifically laid out that the new recreational licenses were to be put on hold until all of the new medical licenses were in effect.
As you can see, Prop 64 isn’t scheduled to take effect until after MMRSA. This means that the earliest anyone is looking at obtaining a recreational license and thus providing a legal means to buy/sale recreational herb is going to be some time 2019.
The current estimation of recreational licenses coming online is actually sometime 2021.
Bottom line – change is coming; but it’s not coming from Prop 64. Not anytime soon at least.