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California regulators have rolled out a new marijuana database that’s meant to help consumers, stakeholders and lawmakers better understand industry trends—including monthly sales data and information about cannabis licensees.
The state Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) officially unveiled the online resource on Wednesday, highlighting four interactive dashboards with data on cannabis licensing, harvests, pricing and monthly sales.
This is “for folks who are interested in cannabis industry trends and things of that nature to be able to use these dashboards to their heart’s content,” a DCC representative said during a virtual briefing on Wednesday.
Users can apply filters to each dashboard to narrow the data in granular detail. For example, they can look up the number of active licenses for manufacturers and further break it down to find the number of provisional versus annual licenses.
They can also look up harvests by county, or the sales total for specific categories of each product such as flower packaged by 1/8th of an ounce.
The monthly sales dashboard currently only features data from 2020 through June 2023, leaving a sizable gap. DCC said that they’re aiming to update with all 2023 data within the next few months, but after that point, they expect to update monthly sales on a quarterly basis.
California stands out in that regard, with multiple other legal cannabis states providing monthly updates within days of the close of the prior month’s sales.
Sean O’Connor, chief information officer at DCC, told Marijuana Moment that the state’s sales data is extracted from the department’s “track and trace software provider Metrc and is entered by cannabis businesses.”
“The Department validates and tests this data at a detailed level to verify the information displayed online is as accurate as possible,” he said. “This validation and testing process is the reason data is not provided in real-time.”
DCC separately released another online tool in 2022 that allows people to view an interactive map showing where marijuana businesses are permitted—and where they are blocked from opening—throughout the state.
The tool draws attention to the fact that more than half of the state’s cities and counties do not allow any type of cannabis licensees to operate in their area, which advocates say is a problem that has allowed the illicit market to persist despite voter-approved legalization.
Meanwhile, as the governor of California pledges to continue working to “strengthen” the state’s marijuana market, last month he also proposed to help close an overall government budgetary deficit by borrowing $100 million from a cannabis tax fund designated for law enforcement and other public safety initiatives.
The California legislature is also looking at ways to build on the state’s cannabis market, while exploring other drug policy reforms dealing with issues such as psychedelics.
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Assemblymember Matt Haney (D) is renewing his push to legalize cannabis cafes in the state, with a recently introduced bill and plans to work with the governor and regulators to address concerns that resulted in the last version being vetoed.
Also, bipartisan California lawmakers recently introduced a new bill to legalize psychedelic service centers where adults 21 and older could access psilocybin, MDMA, mescaline and DMT in a supervised environment with trained facilitators.
The Republican Assembly sponsor of that legislation is also behind a separate psychedelics bill focused on promoting research and creating a framework for the possibility of regulated therapeutic access that has already moved through the Assembly this year with unanimous support.
Photo courtesy of California State Fair.
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