Maine’s Legislature Confronts the Unintended Consequences of Required Marijuana Testing, Before Those Consequences Even Happen

The Maine Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs will consider a host of marijuana-related bills next Monday, January 27. Check all five of them out here. The one I want to focus on is LD 1545, An Act Regarding the Testing of Adult Use Marijuana and Marijuana Products because this bill tries to address what has been a serious problem in most states launching adult use programs: a shortage of testing labs and resulting bottlenecks in those products.

For starters, LD 1545 seeks to amend language in Title 28-B, governing adult use marijuana in Maine, which currently requires ALL adult use marijuana or marijuana products to be tested by a licensed lab before sale. So what’s the problem with this? There’s serious and well-founded concerns that Maine simply won’t have enough testing labs at least for the launch of the program. This will lead to bottlenecks and significant delays in selling products to consumers. LD 1545 addresses this by permitting any product that has been held by a testing lab for five days without being tested to be sold anyway, with a disclaimer that the product hasn’t been tested.

This seems like a straightforward solution to an anticipated problem, but it seems worth looking briefly at the experience of other states with testing bottlenecks and lab shortages.

California’s lab shortages and bottlenecks circa 2018 were the stuff legends are made of. Now, if anything, California seems to have overcompensated in response and has 27 licensed labs (which isn’t that many, considering the state’s population), none of which report being at full capacity. These labs are facing business problems of their own, with many customers not paying timely or not paying at all. Some suggest that this is a symptom of the broader problem that California’s illicit marijuana market remains dominant and may even be getting stronger.

Closer to home, a shortage of testing labs has been a problem for Massachusetts. As is expected for Maine, Massachusetts started off with only two licensed testing labs. Labs were reporting demand for up to 4,000 tests per day, though, within a year of the adult use program’s launch, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission was reporting that, even with two labs, wait times were down to just a couple of days.

It’s hard to know exactly how Maine’s testing laws will affect the adult use market until that market has really taken off. Certainly, any serious impediments to selling product quickly will encourage return to the black market. I’m sure this will be part of the discussion in the VLA committee on Monday. See you there!