Pot marketers eating up opportunities, shaping regulation

The swift emergence of legal marijuana, for medical or merely recreational use, continues to be a story of fascinating challenges.

Particularly challenging are the questions about how these products’ content or sale or labeling can or should be regulated by government.

We examined many of these questions in this space in July 2014, and now, as Colorado and Washington State settle into implementing legalization of recreational use, and California plans a ballot initiative on whether to legalize recreational use next year, and the idea seems to be capturing attention in other states, packagers are starting to think in terms of best practices for a wider market.

Marijuana-infused edibles, rather than smoke-able marijuana, present a range of unique issues. A big part of the reason is that they don’t squarely fit into any of the traditional product categories.

After all, as I am fond of saying when I have had the privilege of teaching students and industry officials about the regulation of foods and drugs, if you tell me what the product is, and especially what its maker’s intended use for it is, then I can tell you what the regulatory requirements for it will be. I used to think that dietary supplements were the perfect law professor’s “hypothetical” when examining questions like this, as they have a combination of characteristics that squarely challenge the traditional definitions, in some ways like foods, in some ways like drugs.

Well, as a dream hypothetical, dietary supplements may have met their match in edible cannabis products. Not smoke-able marijuana, and not marijuana for medicinal uses, but candy, snacks, and other products intended to be eaten that are infused with marijuana or its active ingredient.

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