Civic Engagement in California Cannabis Policy Development

ABSTRACT

During the regulatory drafting process, California considered allowing police officers to become licensed owners of cannabis businesses, an action that would have codified a conflict of interest (COI), allowing police to exert influence in two market strata, enforcement and licensure. Up until then, no state specifically excepted law enforcement from COI prohibitions, making California’s proposed medical cannabis regulation unique. We performed two 50-state surveys and examined 298 public comments submitted to the Bureau of Cannabis Control during the initial medical cannabis rulemaking process in June 2017. After public comments, the Bureau withdrew this provision. However, that the exception was even considered is cause for concern in this new area of policy development. The progression from proposed medical cannabis rules to emergency rule adoption and now, into proposed final regulations, highlights the value of civic engagement with the rulemaking process. Jurisdictions should adopt bright-line COI rules within their cannabis codes that limit the relationships that law enforcement may have with the private cannabis markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict of interest
• government ethics
• cannabis legalization
• law enforcement
• policy process
• civics

Acknowledgments

We thank Dan Orenstein, Tanner Wakefield, and Dharma Bhatta for comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

CMB was a temporary contract employee for Green Rush Consulting (GRC), LLC that provides consulting services to applicants applying for cannabis licensure, as a copyeditor of technical writing from October-December 2017 and March 2018 for an average of 25 hours per month of active service. SAG has nothing to disclose.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by National Institute of Drug Abuse grant DA-043950. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.