#californiacannabis – ““There’s two challenges. One is on the regulatory side, and that has a lot to do with smoking, but also public health concerns. And then the other one really is what is the business model? How does it work? Because you have to pay rent on that space. I think that’s the key challenge for lounges,” Dominic Corva, co-director of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research at Cal Poly Humboldt, said.
The regulatory challenge Corva referred to is about California anti-indoor smoking regulation meant to protect employees from working in smoke-filled environments, though the regulations were initially targeted at cigarette smoke….
“There aren’t any rules and regulations that directly regulate cannabis consumption indoors, so you have to follow those tobacco laws until the state adopts indoor cannabis consumption laws. What we have to adhere to is just making sure that we don’t violate any of the indoor consumption laws,” Ray Markland, High Tides’ manager, said. “The actual space (for smoking) has to be a separate confined space, we have to have a complaint HVAC system, that system has a minimum number of air changes per hour, we have to make sure that we monitor and keep track of the data from that so that way our employees aren’t subjected to having to work in that environment.”….
While not all areas are receptive to the idea of cannabis lounges — 57% of California’s cities and counties have outright banned all types of cannabis businesses — Corva noted that Humboldt County’s culture and world-famous legacy of cannabis cultivation, legal and illegal, mean that cannabis consumption locally lacks the stigma frequently associated with other parts of California.”
#cannabisindustry – Federal Protection – “The text released on Tuesday didn’t include the sweeping protections, however. Instead, it simply maintained an existing rider preventing the Justice Department from using its appropriated federal funds to interfere in the implementation of state medical cannabis programs only, not extending those protections to all state marijuana programs including recreational laws….
That more limited language has been annually renewed in federal law each year since 2014.”
Law Office of Dale Schafer 