Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: What? Tucker, I'm looking at you. What did we leave on with?

[Tucker (Legislative Counsel)]: I believe he left out lunch delivery.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: On delivery. And we were talking about numbers within the packages.

[Tucker (Legislative Counsel)]: That was the beginning of the conversation. Yeah. A package, it's not the number, it's the total THC milligram content per package, which is also separate from transaction and possession of NC.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Right.

[Tucker (Legislative Counsel)]: So trade cannabis and other limitations on it just size

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: and I think what would be helpful to us is to hear from the chair

[Tucker (Legislative Counsel)]: of the cannabis board. Absolutely. It's always.

[Senator John Benson (Member)]: Then Senator Ann Cummings that she was gonna go from one

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: She's going from one place to the next. Oh, yeah. We know we know where I wasn't there. So I don't want to undermine the work that economic development has done. I think our goal here is to just really understand the sort of the healthcare consequences that we've put that. Thank you. So my

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Cannabis Control Board, and just to pick up where I left off yesterday. Everything that is in this bill has been implemented safely and effectively in other states. So we're not breaking a lot of new ground with this, except we are breaking new ground in Vermont with many of these concepts. But but, you know, coordinate with my fellow regulators around the country and these concepts have been implemented safely. Now what the long term public health outcomes are, we don't know. But we do know people have been using cannabis for pre legalization at the highest use usage rates, both amongst the adults and the youth population in the country. So that was pre legalization, and we haven't had As far as I can tell from the Monitoring the Future surveys and the youth risk behavioral surveys, we have kind of plateaued on youth usage. We haven't seen an increase, but we started off with a very high number. It was almost kind of full saturation prior to the launch. Right.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: So we've just been starting to get it under some kind of regulatory environment.

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: That's right. If you have any specific questions about this, the nature of my testimony in the Economic Development Committee was more along the lines of not whether you should or shouldn't do these things. It was more of what do we take in order to implement these things effectively. Did raise some concerns around delivery, mostly because, you know, the point of sale is one of our most highly regulated pieces in our rules, in our focus of our enforcement. That's the point where, at least theoretically, there could be diversion, there could be tax avoidance, there could be sales, there could be break ins, public safety risks. This is largely a cash industry. You know, every one of our regulations around that point of sale is aimed at reducing the risk of those kind of negative outcomes. And so, they can move from kind of a fixed point retail location to kind of a diversified points of where the sale is actually going to be happening with the transfer. It gives us some pause, but I should say that it is a pilot. It's limited in the number of permit or delivery permits we can hand out. And there is a very broad grant of authority to the board to do this safely and effectively. And I can point you to that broad grant of authority in the bill if you'd like to see it, but I've been assured by alleged counsel that essentially gives us the ability to kind of regulate every aspect, like

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: we would a retail sale. So What what are you thinking? So what is the implementation date for the delivery piece then? Effective date for delivery?

[Tucker (Legislative Counsel)]: The program becomes effective under the bill of July 1, and then it would be up to the CCPA to roll out the application process and forms that would be necessary for the current new program to even exist, And additionally, the procedures would have to be adopted. The timeline for that is much shorter than administrative rules, but it still does require The process with the board. Right. So you're looking at some point after July 1. And

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: senator senator Benson has a question, and I'll ask you a question.

[Senator John Benson (Member)]: So it makes reference in here. It says a plan that intoxicated person. So I'm curious. How do you know? To my knowledge, there's no way for testing like there is for alcohol or cannabis. So when we make reference to an intoxicated person in the rules, how does one determine that?

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: Every person who's authorized to make a sale, interact with a customer, has to go through a training, it's mandated by the board, and, you know, there are, of course, breathalyzers on the alcohol side, but not in the cannabis side, but it's not like the bartender is breathalyzing him at the bar, it's really just visible cues that a person's intoxicated. We have trainings to make sure that people aren't selling to intoxicated people currently. That's that's already that's under the recent under the existing statutes were prohibited, you know, flood tenders, as they're called, are prohibited from selling to the size of the of people. But it's more just visual signs. You

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: swear it's page.

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: Hey. I I the only other thing that I wanted to mention on delivery, because I know that when you write this authorization into statute or session law, and it says the board shall not grant more than 15 delivery permits annually, and it's is a two year pilot. This be 30 over the course of two years. We're gonna have to roll this out slowly, and we may not issue all 30. I just wanna be very clear with the committee of jurisdiction and this committee and anyone I talked to that we have to do this safely and we have to make sure that we have the staff and the oversight over it. And so we may not get the 15. And I just wanted that to be, if, if

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: The economic development hear that same comment?

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: They heard the exact same comment. The finance committee heard it yesterday. I just wanna be very clear on the record that we're gonna we're not getting additional staff to implement this. And so I just don't want the expectation to be amongst the legislature that we're absolutely gonna do 15 annually, because this also comes with an event permit as well, and we're also on a different bill taking over hemp processing regulation with no additional staff. Just wanna make sure that that's clear, that we will do this safely. It's a discretionary grant to issue no more than 15. You know, we'll probably start trying to roll it out slowly and see how it works. If it's not as huge on the board, we'll roll out some more.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Thank you for that. But one of the things that this committee is going to be looking at overall in the next few weeks is preventions, and then we're going to pay attention a little bit to the excise tax fund, prevention fund that we have. And so your recommendations going forward will be really important because it's access for minors that is of concern and then high dosage is also of concern. Some of that has been dealt with in economic development, and you are reassuring me as you're speaking that this is gonna be appropriately implemented. So in terms of the procedures that Tucker was talking about, so the bill goes into effect on July 1, then what are you looking at for a timeline on developing procedures?

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: So we won't be starting from scratch. As I mentioned, every New England state has delivery, and in fact, Vermont has delivery, like, in a very limited sense on the medical side. Yes. And it's a very different model than what's contemplated here. It's essentially, you know, the retail store can deliver their own products to a verified address of a verified medical patients. So we're not gonna be starting from scratch when it comes to developing procedures. We are gonna need to have public notice and comment on them to make sure that they're actually workable and that they address everyone's concerns, not just the industry's concerns. So, I mean, best case scenario, if this goes into effect July 1 and we know that it's been enacted and signed by the governor and all the rest, By July 1, he'll probably, as soon as it is signed or not, there's action on it, we'll start developing the procedures, hopefully have it ready by July 1. We

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: have a 40 page amendment that was sent to you for when we want it by

[Tucker (Legislative Counsel)]: Fantastic. Downloads. No,

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: we don't have. Questions for change Questions?

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: Anything else on the bill that you're concerned about? Again, I'm looking at it at the lens of can we implement these control, let's say, implement that, or whether or not we should do them.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Well, I think the Economic Development Committee has whittled down some of the big areas of concern for us. At some point, it would be helpful to have you come in and talk about the medical program, where it is and how it's going on because it's not really in here. No. And so that would be helpful to us. Then as I said before, looking at what are the prevention needs that we have in the community. And I know there are concerns by the retail folks regarding marketing, that's not our area until it starts to affect minors. We're not

[James Pepper (Chair, Vermont Cannabis Control Board)]: gonna deal with that right now. We just Right. Yep. Yeah. I'm happy to talk to you about the medical program whenever you want. I would just say, at the outset, because of work that you did two years ago, medical patients are seeing unprecedented access for the history of the program. And it's been rolled out safely. No, you know, there has not been any issues with that. You I think you've also effectively reduced the fee to become a medical patient by a third by extending the expiration date of the medical card. Are some, and we're seeing the first uptake in a number of patients, servicer patients since 2018. It's a modest uptake but it's the first time that it hasn't been kind of falling off the cliff since 2018.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Good. Thank you for that. Alright, that's good. We're gonna just take three minutes to talk about whether or not there's any suggestion for an amendment on this bill committee. Anybody have anything? Okay, we're good. And so straw poll, I mean, why don't we have a straw poll? We don't need anything. Our committee has evaluated the bill and we don't see any need for any changes in the bill at this point. And I can say that on the floor. And I'll also speak to Senator Bogart's proposal as well. We'll be good. And then tomorrow morning, we'll look at whatever we have on S-one 190, understanding, and I'd just like to say this, that both us and the board have legitimate positions. Our goal has always been alignment. What we do also as we're aligning some of our reference based pricing, we do not want to sacrifice the hospital so their expectation of one level of savings is different from what they're now they're seeing something else. So the goal here is to get some language that allows the board to go forward and us to know that there's alignment going on. So we'll just see what comes through. So we're gonna wrap. We need time.