The Washington, D.C. city council is apparently fed up with Congressional obstructionism when it comes to the city’s legal cannabis industry.
Councilors this week unanimously approved an enormous expansion of the medical cannabis program to ostensibly get quasi-legal “gifting” businesses into the licensed medical side of the trade. And it’s all a workaround to how Congress has prevented city leaders for the better part of a decade from standing up a fully recreational cannabis market.
According to DCist, the council gave the green light to the Medical Cannabis Amendment Act of 2021, which will in effect transform the capital’s medical cannabis industry into a quasi-recreational one, since customers will no longer need a doctor’s recommendation to make purchases, but will be allowed to “self-certify” as medical cannabis patients.
The new ordinance – which has yet to be signed into law by Mayor Muriel Bowser – would also create a pathway for the so-called “I-71” gray market cannabis businesses to join the city’s seven licensed medical cannabis dispensaries and eight cultivation facilities.
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