Randy
Oliver has a pressing question as legal marijuana sales are about to
begin in Washington state: Where's all the weed?
Oliver is the
chief scientist at Analytical 360 in Yakima, the only lab that has been
certified to test the heavily taxed marijuana that will wind up on store
shelves next month. So far, just two licensed growers have turned in
samples for testing, with another due to turn in a small batch next
week, he told The Associated Press on Saturday.
"There's such a small stream of samples coming through," he said. "There's going to be some long lines and some high prices."
The
state's Liquor Control Board has been warning of shortages when the
first stores open. The board plans to issue the first 15 to 20 retail
licenses July 7, with shops allowed to open the next day if they're
ready. It's not clear how many that will be. Board staff said at a
meeting last week that only one store in Seattle is ready for its final
inspection.
Only 79 of the
more than 2,600 people who applied for marijuana growing licenses last
fall have been approved, and many of them aren't ready to harvest.
"Will
there be shortages?" Randy Simmons, the board's legal-pot project
manager, said in a recent AP interview. "The answer to that is yes."
But
the figures provided by Oliver on Saturday suggest just how serious
those shortages could be. The samples provided to Analytical 360
represent a maximum harvest so far of 190 pounds — and Oliver said he
expects 20 to 30 percent of the samples to fail because of high mold
counts. Marijuana associated with those samples can't be sold as dried
bud, but can be used to make cannabis oil.
The amount harvested so far "isn't going to stay on the shelves very long," Oliver said.
Oliver
said he's worried that his lab could see a crush of samples provided in
the days before the first stores open, swamping his lab and delaying
the arrival of product on store shelves.
"We
can probably handle 100 samples a day, but if we get 300 samples thrown
at us?" he said. "I'm worried about everybody coming to us at the last
minute."
Growers have to provide samples for every strain of cannabis they grow, and for every five pounds of flowers they harvest.
Oliver
also said glitches with the software the state is using to track the
bar-coded marijuana from clone to sale could compound the issue. He said
his lab has had trouble entering test results in the program, and some
marijuana that passed has shown up as having failed. It took one grower
five days to provide the samples to the lab because of software
problems, he said, characterizing the bugs as nothing unusual for a new
program.
It isn't clear how
soon other labs might be certified or be ready to handle samples.
Seattle's Sea of Green Farms is one of the two growers who have had
their pot tested. Bob Leeds, a partner there, confirmed that as of
Saturday, the only certified lab that shows up in the tracking system is
Analytical 360.
The other
grower tested is Spokane's Kouchlock Productions. Kouchlock and Sea of
Green were among the very first growers licensed back in March.
Spokesmen for the liquor board did not immediately return a call or emails on Saturday.
The
Sea of Green team was spending the weekend packaging the approximately
40 pounds of marijuana it harvested recently, Leeds said. It has
contracts with four shops to sell most of it already — for an exorbitant
$4,000 a pound. That's nearly $9 per gram before the retailer's
mark-up, 25 percent retail excise tax, and state and local sales taxes.
At the state's unlicensed medical dispensaries, cannabis often sells for
$8 to $12 per gram.
"When
people start calling we have to tell them we're not going to have
anything for them until August," Leeds said. "That's a long way off when
you're trying to open a business."
No comments:
Post a Comment