Like Vancouver, Wash. state moving toward regulating unlicensed pot shops

Washington’s state legislature and Vancouver City Hall are both moving toward regulating previously unregulated, unlicensed medicalmarijuana dispensaries.

In Washington, alongside roughly 170 state-licensed recreational pot shops, the last two years have seen a proliferation of hundreds of unregulated, unlicensed shops.

But this month, a new law comes into effect in Washington, bringing medical shops under the same regulatory regime as the recreational stores.

Many medical shops are expected to close. Seattle’s city attorney, Pete Holmes, said his city has 16 statelicensed recreational pot shops, and more than 100 unlicensed medical shops in the city. He expects more than 60 of those medical shops will not be able to come into compliance with state regulations by July 2016, meaning they will have to close.

Meanwhile in Vancouver, city council voted last month to become the first jurisdiction in Canada to regulate retail marijuana stores.

City hall is now accepting applications from dispensaries looking for business licences, with a deadline of Aug. 24, said Andreea Toma, Vancouver’s chief licence inspector, adding: “Decisions will be made within a few days to a few weeks after the application period closes.”

At some point after August, city staff will begin enforcement actions against the dispensaries who don’t apply for licenses, Toma said in an email. Enforcement could include injunctions, tickets and prosecutions, Toma said, but an exact timeline is unknown.

One local weed expert sees parallels between Vancouver and Washington, as both jurisdictions try to curtail recent proliferations of previously unregulated and unlicensed medicalmarijuana stores.

But the difference is B.C. has no legal recreational pot stores like Washington’s, said Vancouver journalist David Brown, and instead has several ‘medical’ dispensaries that are essentially filling both a medical and ‘recreational’ need.

Brown, who writes for marijuana industry website Lift Cannabis, said: “Like Washington, Vancouver’s regulatory approach will likely see about half of the current dispensaries closed.”