Massachusetts Cannabis Commission Rescinds 10 Business Applications

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]T[/dropcap]he Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) was established nine months ago and has been approving business licenses steadily since its inception. However, on May 8 the Commission announced that 10 applications that were approved should have actually been denied.

The CCC’s Executive Director Shawn Collins stated that 10 out of the 146 approved businesses were supposed to be rejected, according to WBUR. “Upon further review, we’ve identified a number of applicants that had previously been included in a batch for approval that, based on a transcription error, should have been in fact in a batch for denial,” Collins said. “It is unfortunate and we will absolutely be in touch with each of those applicants to identify this error that did occur.”

Apparently it was disorganization error. “The staff actually reviewed these certification applications and made the correct recommendations,” said CCC Chairman Steven Hoffman. “What happened is as each of the staff made recommendations we compiled a master list and recommendations from the staff that said deny ended up just getting put in the wrong column. But the actual analysis of the applications was done correctly.”

As a result, the CCC met to discuss how to resolve the issue, and the members decided to rescind the original approval, and re-review each of the 10 applications once again. Hoffman believes that most of them will remain denied, as they did not originally meet the necessary requirements.

Massachusetts Gov. Charles Baker signed a recreational cannabis bill back in July 2017, and since then the state’s cannabis teams have been working diligently to make the cannabis program work. In fact, the state recently approved of four cannabis billboards that went up late last year, has discussed the possibility of cannabis clubs, and approved the details of its new recreational regulations in March.