How’s it growing folks?! Welcome to a special edition of Here Weed Go! These sort of episodes happen when the largest cannabis-legal state in the country, California, gets one step closer to possibly opening up the floodgates to interstate commerce for cannabis.

If you’ve been living under a rock the past week, here’s what happened… On January 27, California’s marijuana regulatory body, the Department of Cannabis Control, decided to officially solicit an opinion from the state’s attorney general about the opening of the California cannabis marketplace to allow for trade with other states.     

“I think we have a pathway forward toward interstate commerce in cannabis,” Matthew Lee, the general counsel for the DCC, said in an interview with Politico.

If that’s true it could potentially be a game changer -- not just within the Golden State, where producers large and small have been struggling to break even since the state’s recreational program came online in 2016 -- but for other Western states and potentially any state with a medical or recreational program.

To help walk me through where California could be going, I spoke with Justin Strekal. Strekal is the former national political director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the nation’s largest cannabis consumer advocacy organization and currently is the head of BOWL Pac, the political arm of Better Organizing to Win Legalization, a group working for marijuana legalization and justice for people harmed under criminalization.

Our conversation kicks of with Strekal explaining what the letter from California’s Department of Cannabis Control is arguing for and what it would mean for nearby states.

MORE INFO

For more on Strekal: https://www.instagram.com/justinstrekal/, https://twitter.com/justinstrekal

For more on BOWL Pac: https://thebowlpac.org/

For more on NORML: https://norml.org/

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Podcast is produced by Pascal Albright/Arizona Daily Star.

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