SMART MOVE!!!
Small Marijuana Growers Could Sell Directly To Consumers Across State Lines Under New Congressional BillPublished 3 hours ago on September 14, 2022By Kyle Jaeger
To Bonno Share
A pair of congressmen filed a bill on Wednesday that’s intended to help small marijuana growers compete against large corporations when cannabis is federally legalized, proposing to give them the ability to ship and sell products directly to consumers within and across state lines.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) is leading the legislation—titled the “Small and Homestead Independent Producers (SHIP) Act”—alongside Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR).
As Congress continues to work toward ending cannabis prohibition, there have been concerns that smaller businesses will struggle to compete against the handful of multi-state operators that have the resources and infrastructure to quickly expand, threatening to further consolidate the market when the federal floodgates finally open.
The SHIP Act is designed to minimize that risk and maximize opportunities for those smaller farmers and producers.
“It is a daunting business environment that they’re facing. Markets are consolidating,” Huffman told Marijuana Moment in a phone interview ahead of the bill’s introduction. “We want to make sure that the smaller operations have a chance to compete and succeed.”
Direct-to-consumer models have historically benefitted small farmers in traditional agriculture markets, allowing them to bring their products to market without going through third-party distributors or retailers that would require additional spending.
The SHIP Act would extend that marketing opportunity to the cannabis sector, but only after marijuana is federally descheduled. Huffman said that getting a policy ready for that “inevitability” is an important step “to provide some regulatory certainty and assurances for folks that want to be able to do business out of state.”
The text of the legislation states that a “small cultivator of marijuana and a small manufacturer of a marijuana product may ship and sell marijuana or a marijuana product to an individual located in that State or another State in which possession of marijuana or the marijuana product is lawful by that individual, using the Postal Service or any private or commercial interstate carrier.”
Small cultivators are defined as those who grow up to one acre of “mature flowering marijuana canopy” for outdoor cultivation, up to 22,000 square feet of cannabis canopy using greenhouses or up to 5,000 square feet for indoor cultivation.
For manufacturers, they would meet the definition of a small operation if they produce “a manufactured marijuana product, including a salve, “tincture, edible, or concentrate, with a gross annual revenue of less than $5,000,000, inclusive of all marijuana product manufactured by that person.”
