Page 76 - BusinessWest August 18, 2021
P. 76

 Growing
 Concerns
Cannabis Industry Grapples with Many Federal and State Challenges
 Meg Sanders says the state’s onerous regulatory hurdles have made the cannabis space an unfair playing field, especially for smaller shops and social-equity applicants.
 Cannabis
Everyone has seen the dispensaries and other cannabis businesses sprouting up in communities across Massachusetts — and the
long lines of customers often stretching out the door. And they might think this business is easy money. But that’s far from the truth, thanks to an onerous tax situation, the illegal nature of the product on the federal level making it tough to enlist financial and other partners,
and the slow march from stigma to acceptance of this still-new industry. All of that, however, could be changing, although it will take federal action to loosen some of those shackles.
MBy Joseph Bednar
eg Sanders is a cannabis- industry veteran, most notably in Colorado, the nation’s first regulated market for legal can- nabis. So she’s no stranger to
the growing pains the industry is now dealing with in Massachusetts.
But as a local business owner — as CEO of Canna Provisions in Holyoke and Lee — she’s frustrated by them, too.
“We’re limited on what we can do with adver- tising, and the amount of product we can sell to a customer at a time,” she said, citing just two examples of regulations set forth by the state’s Cannabis Control Commission (CCC).
“The whole idea was to regulate cannabis like we regulate alcohol, and we’re not doing that. Actually, they’re going way above and way over the top, and I don’t think that’s helpful to the industry. I don’t think it’s helpful to individual businesses, and it’s definitely, in my opinion, not in the spirit of the CCC, which is supposed to pro- mote social-equity and economic-empowerment applicants. But the bar for entry is really high, and the bar to stay out of trouble with the CCC is really high.”
In other words, despite the number of canna- bis businesses currently operating across Massa- chusetts — 267 and rising every week — this is a tough field to enter and a tougher one to succeed at, Sanders told BusinessWest.
“I think of people who are bootstrapping, mom-and-pop stores, teams that are working with a limited amount of cash, and it’s not a level playing field,” she went on. “And a lot of things we
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CANNABIS
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