As Colorado prepares for the opening of historic recreational marijuana stores, state officials are preparing for something equally as unique — a regulatory challenge of almost maddening complexity.
Consider the headaches:
• Regulators must precisely audit the transactions of every pot store, even though those stores currently can't take credit cards and do business almost exclusively in slippery $10 and $20 bills.
• They must track the inventory weight of every business down to the gram, even though the weight of the same amount of marijuana can fluctuate daily based on things as variable as humidity.
• They must guard against both cash and marijuana leaking out of the legal market and into the black market, all while the federal government watches over their shoulder.
Faced with these challenges, marijuana regulators in Colorado stop short of guaranteeing an airtight system. But Ron Kammerzell, the state Department of Revenue's deputy senior director of enforcement, is confident the department will be able to catch most fraud.
"No control system is going to give you absolute assurance," Kammerzell said. "It's going to give you reasonable assurance."
Colorado's recreational marijuana regulatory plan — as well as its revised plan for regulating medical-marijuana dispensaries — will rely on two systems that dovetail together, Kammerzell said. The first is an inventory-tracking system. The second is a store's sales-tracking system. Together, Kammerzell said they should allow the state to monitor marijuana from the grow room until it leaves a store's showroom.
The
inventory-tracking system, known as MITS, is intended to track the growth of radio frequency-tagged marijuana plants and also record
the weight of the marijuana buds that are harvested off the plant. All marijuana businesses are required to enter inventory data into MITS.
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Colorado faces historic challenge in regulating marijuana stores - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/marijuana/ci_24303436/colorado-faces-historic-challenge-regulating-marijuana-stores#ixzz2igQ07Zkx
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