Vermont currently has five medical cannabis dispensaries in operation, all of which are vertically integrated operations and all are at least partially under the control of out-of-state companies.
CCB Chair James Pepper announced that his agency had already received 395 prequalification applications as of the Mar. 28 CCB meeting.
The state will begin accepting applications for small cultivation licenses, for those seeking no more than 1,000 square feet of cultivation space, and testing lab licenses, on April 1.
“I mean, you spend a half a million dollars on a piece of equipment. Let’s say there’s five hundred growers and they’ve got twenty samples each a month and you divide half million by, you know, with a payback of maybe two or three years, you’re still looking at three or four hundred dollars per sample.”
Rhode Island allows medical patients to possess up to 12 adult plants and 12 immature plants at one time.
Pepper encouraged applicants to participate, in order to make it easier for them to enter the market without significant financial risks before getting approved to open for business.
“This is a massive amount of plastic waste that we’re necessarily going to create,” said Commissioner James Pepper.
Rather than act as a central storage repository for the data, Koski said that Metrc provides state governments with the tools to monitor their own databases that the state operators report to.
Vermont’s Cannabis Control Board is on track to meet its May 1 deadline to begin accepting adult-use license applications.
It’s been a familiar progression in Concord. As New Hampshire lawmakers put forward the latest round of marijuana legalization bills for next year’s session, the outcomes appear all but predetermined.
