Current United States cannabis regulations are a fertile breeding ground for public health, consumer safety, and environmental issues. The disconnect between state and federal laws, combined with rapid-paced, industry driven voter initiatives, has forced the responsibility of developing cannabis regulations into the hands of inexperienced state agencies with no previous knowledge of cannabis. As such, attempts to control for the quality, safety, and consistency of cannabis are mandated solely through testing – a reactive process that most frequently happens in a laboratory. In other federally regulated industries – whether pharmaceutical, agricultural, or industrial - Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) are in place to guide daily business operations that ensure product quality, safety, and consistency controls exist to protect the health and safety of end users. The basic tenant of GMP is that quality cannot be tested into a product – it must be built in to every step of the process. Yet, regulations for cannabis - a substance that is often considered medicine – has no such controls for health and safety. This session will provide illustrations of this issue, share examples of previous US hyper-growth industries that have been in this same predicament, and offer solutions to this rapidly growing public health concern.

Time for a proactive approach to protecting public health and consumer safety in the cannabis industry

254th National Meeting (2017)

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