Is Colorado really experiencing a recreational pot shortage?

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Marijuana grows on trees, but some newly minted Colorado recreational centers faced a shortages less than a week after opening — even though medical dispensary shelves remain stocked. As a result, several retail stores, including the high-profile 3D Cannabis Center, have voiced concerns that they won’t be able to keep filling the bowls of recreational tokers.
Though demand is high, the shortage isn’t necessarily due just to tourists and herb-hungry locals pilfering pot by the pound from the shelves. Instead, the shortage was likely caused before sales could even begin, thanks to a quick timetable for centers going through the recreational-sales process and a limited number of plants shops were able to transfer over to the recreational side.


Unlike medical marijuana, which sprang up as an industry in Colorado before there were even laws to govern it at the local and state levels, recreational pot has been strictly regulated from the beginning. Nothing could happen without a license. That meant the earliest recreational grows could be up and running was the last week of December, when the state issued the first licenses.
Current rules restrict centers to transferring 15 percent of their entire medical inventory to recreational sales — including not just smokable herb, but everything from hash and edibles to clones and plants in various stages of development. Furthermore, this transfer is only allowed once.
Under these regulations, a large medical center serving up to 500 patients would be able to transfer about 450 plants total. Recreational centers are currently only allowed to purchase 30 percent of their supply from someone other than their designated retail cultivating facility until the rules keeping vertical integration in place are dropped in October.
Although several activists have argued that the 15 percent conversion amounts to a theft of patient medicine, the state doesn’t see it that way. Not only were the shops allowed to bring their medical inventory back up to 100 percent immediately after the transfer by cloning new plants and purchasing cannabis wholesale, but the plants being grown in a medical marijuana center technically don’t belong to the patients to begin with.
Read the rest over at Denver Westword.

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