Compliance Fail

During the last few weeks of December, while most Oregonians were busy shopping or celebrating the holidays, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) was performing sting operations using decoy minors at dispensaries throughout Oregon. The goal—to find out the rate of compliance for licensed cannabis dispensaries in Oregon, which are required to prohibit sales to minors. Persons under 21 years of age are obviously not allowed to buy cannabis through Oregon’s recreational market. However, the OLCC found that many dispensaries failed to consistently prohibit minors from purchasing cannabis.

Between Dec. 20 and Dec. 29, 2017, over 60 dispensaries were visited by a decoy in all areas of Oregon. With each visit, dispensaries were given the opportunity to prohibit the sale to a minor, yet four out of seven dispensaries in the Portland area failed.

“One of the basic tenets of Measure 91 is the protection of children by discouraging their use of marijuana.”

This data allowed the OLCC to compare compliance rates. Central Oregon’s compliance rate, based on visits to five different dispensaries, was the outlier of the group, with 100 percent compliance. That means that no transactions were made to the minor sent by the OLCC. However, the Portland area had the lowest compliance rate at four percent. Seven dispensaries were visited by a minor OLCC volunteer, and four of the dispensaries failed to prohibit the sale. They sold cannabis to a minor, whether they realized it or not. Because of these low compliance rates in Portland and other areas in Oregon, the OLCC will have to devise ways to impose stricter regulations for Oregon licensees.

“These overall results are unacceptable,” said Steve Marks, executive director of the OLCC.  “One of the basic tenets of Measure 91 is the protection of children by discouraging their use of marijuana. Oregonians who voted for legalizing recreational marijuana implicitly told the cannabis industry to abide by public safety laws. Clearly they’re not, and we need to continue this type of enforcement activity.”

Almost any Oregonian would agree that cannabis should not be available for sale to minors, and the OLCC is responsible for making sure that businesses are complying with state laws by preventing these sales. Decoy operations like the ones that were recently performed regularly by the OLCC to ensure that dispensaries are doing their job and keeping in line with regulations. A 67 percent failure rate for the Portland area does not look good and will prompt change in the system so that the failure rate decreases.

Any one of the dispensaries that did not prevent a sale to a minor could be liable for a major fine or a license suspension. For the first offense, a dispensary owner could be fined as much as $1,650 or face a 10 to 30-day suspension. Thirty days of lost business would be a major blow to any cannabis business, not to mention all of its employees. Even just failing to check an ID before a cannabis transaction, regardless of age, could result in a seven-day license suspension or a fine of over $1,000. The system the OLCC uses for ensuring dispensary compliance is modeled after the system they use to regulate liquor licenses. The consequences for a dispensary failing to prohibit sales to minors are very similar to those that the holder of a liquor license would face if they were caught selling liquor to minors.

A big factor in deciding the level of punishment is based on whether or not the OLCC believes that the sale was intentional. So, if the sale to a minor happened on accident, the penalty could be somewhat less harsh than if the sale was intentional. Either way, the OLCC is doing its job by exposing these discrepancies. Oregon voters approved Measure 91 in 2014 under the assumption that sales would only be made to consumers over 21 years of age, and Portland dispensaries clearly need to take some steps to make sure that prohibiting sales to minors is a top priority.