A Colorado marijuana farm filed suit against the state’s primary industry overseer, alleging that officials ignored their duty to keep the illicit market in check by not acting to curtail unlicensed marijuana businesses.
According to Law360, Mammoth Farms filed suit in Denver District Court on Monday against the state Department of Revenue, which also houses the state Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED). MED is tasked with overseeing the state’s regulated cannabis industry. The lawsuit claims that the MED’s lax oversight has allowed lawbreaking companies to illegally export legal marijuana to other states and unlawfully import synthetic cannabis, all while avoiding state tax bills.
Mammoth asserted that the state’s seed-to-sale tracking system, run by Florida-based Metrc, is effectively useless because it’s not set up to flag potential illegal discrepancies in inventory levels, Law360 reported. Although Metrc does have tools that the MED could employ for this purpose, the lawsuit claims the MED simply has chosen not to use them. That has led to bad actors exploiting the system, Mammoth claimed.
To make matters worse, the lawsuit alleges MED knows that “millions” of incorrectly labeled cannabis products are being sold within the state, despite having been contaminated by imported synthetic cannabinoids, which are made with an industrial chemical called methylene chloride and could be toxic.
The MED doesn’t test for methylene chloride in cannabis products or to discover whether marijuana goods being sold are naturally produced or chemically altered in any way, the suit charged. And the tests that are conducted by the MED can be easily beaten by simply providing regulators with clean product samples instead of a randomly selected batch.
Mammoth further claimed in the suit that it and other licensed cannabis companies have attempted to report on bad actors, but MED has done nothing with the information. Instead, Mammoth claimed, the MED retaliated against one whistleblower cultivator named Purplebee’s with a product recall.
The Department of Revenue declined to comment to Law360.
The lawsuit claims that lax oversight has allowed illegal exports of marijuana and unlawful imports of synthetic cannabis. Read More
