纽约大麻项目诉讼再起波澜。
在一次诉讼导致纽约州条件性成人用大麻零售药房计划（CAURD）大部分内容暂停后，规范安全大麻获取联盟于2023年3月16日向大麻管制委员会（CCB）、大麻管理办公室（OCM）提起新诉讼。 CCB主席特雷梅因·赖特及OCM执行主任克里斯·亚历山大提起的新诉讼，旨在彻底废除CAURD计划，并立即开放零售药房申请通道。
据《纽约大麻内幕》记者布拉德·拉西诺率先报道，该联盟包含多家纽约注册机构（即医用大麻供应商），包括Acreage Holdings、PharmaCann、Green Thumb Industries和Curaleaf四家企业，两家潜在零售药房申请方以及一名医用大麻从业者。
Here's what the "petitioner" is requesting from a legal perspective:
- a judicial declaration that the OCM's creation of the CAURD program exceeded the OCM's authority under New York's constitution (i.e. abolishing the CAURD program completely);
- 一份司法命令，要求加拿大大麻局（CCB）和大麻监管机构（OCM）立即开放成人娱乐用大麻零售店申请窗口（即允许任何人立即申请）；以及
- 一项司法命令，要求加拿大税务局（CCB）和加拿大边境服务局（OCM）采取行动，制止非法和无证大麻业务。
Here's the fulcrum of the policy argument (setting aside the technical constitution and procedural argument):
"Defendants-Respondents’ arbitrary and capricious foray into legislative policymaking has (i) harmed those individuals the MRTA was designed to benefit (e.g., veterans, women-owned businesses, distressed hemp farmers and those communities most affected by the War on Drugs to name just a few), and (ii) diverted Defendants-Respondents’ attention from the enforcement tasks with which the MRTA entrusts them. As a result, Defendants-Respondents have allowed New York’s illicit market to flourish, putting medical patients and adult-use consumers at risk and robbing communities impacted by the War on Drugs of critical tax revenue. Thus, as of this writing, only four licensed adult-use retail dispensaries are open in the entire State of New York.11 Meanwhile, thousands of illicit retailers are selling unregulated, untested, and untaxed cannabis products of questionable origin and dubious safety across the State. In fact, it is estimated that there are 1,400 stores retailing illicit cannabis in New York City alone."
The petition also takes the OCM and CCB to task for their alleged practical failures to establish New York's legal adult-use cannabis industry:
"In short, OCM and CCB have failed to fulfill their principal responsibility under the MRTA. Instead, Defendants-Respondents have (i) taken twenty months to propose a set of regulations for the adult-use marketplace and still have not finalized or promulgated them; (ii) routinely violated – and continue to violate – the State Administrative Procedure Act by governing through an ever-changing set of guidance documents to regulate cultivators and processors because final rules still do not exist; (iii) licensed only sixty-odd CAURD dispensaries – only four of which have opened; (iv) promised to provide CAURD licensees state-subsidized real estate and government loans but it has delivered neither; (v) induced New York’s conditional adult-use cannabis cultivators to grow 350,000 pounds of flower in 2022 without creating an adequate retail infrastructure to sell it; and (vi) waged a thinly veiled attack against the registered organizations that has harmed – and continues to harm – the existing medical market and threatens to impede their expansion into the adult-use market."
There is obviously a lot to unpack here, but it's not particularly surprising that New York cannabis industry stakeholders are taking action to try to move the licensing process forward. With the full application portal still closed and no clear indication on when it will open, this litigation was an obvious (and potentially the only option) to force the OCM and CCB to take action. Stay tuned!
