Health committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. For the record, I'm Rick Garza, the director of the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board. I provided you—and I think you have a hard copy—of a presentation that I'll go through. I know I only have 10 minutes. How

Health committee  The only thing I want to add is about the whole issue of consumer safety around pesticides. Typically, we can look to the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, to provide us guidance with respect to that, but that's something we continue to struggle with because of the confli

Health committee  Go ahead, Michael.

Health committee  I can speak to the youth access piece of the first question. One of the things that we have at our schools for eighth, tenth and twelfth-graders is called a Healthy Youth Survey. It was something we were looking at after legalization. There's an obvious question in the survey th

Health committee  We didn't. As the regulator, it was done by initiative. The authors, I think, did exactly what we heard was done in Colorado, which was to use the same age as the drinking age.

Health committee  Nothing.

Health committee  No, it's very similar. I think what's important is that there was no DUI nanogram threshold before legalization, and in our state, like in many of the states, medical was totally unregulated and vertically integrated, which is why it took a couple of years to bring them together

Health committee  It's interesting that it really hasn't changed a lot over the last three years since the first retail stores opened. About 68% of what's consumed today is bud and flower. It was about 72% for the first year, and then about 12% edibles and infused products, and also the concentrat

Health committee  Mr. Chairman, if I may, I wanted to add that we do have a point system in Washington with respect to someone's criminal background. We're looking for an egregious pattern of illegal activity or criminal activity. We have that same point system for licensees for alcohol. I think,

Health committee  There are those who are reporting some of that information, but we have not looked at that. We had assumed, after the first year, that we would be somewhere between 5% and 13% of the marketplace. Right now, at $1.3 billion in the third fiscal year, that's much larger than we an

Health committee  I think there was so much cynicism in our state with law enforcement because medical marijuana was unregulated that there were real concerns about whether this could be regulated and enforced. Again, I think the merging of medical and recreational that occurred last year has chan

Health committee  It's similar in Washington.

Health committee  What's interesting is that the excise tax applies to both medical and recreational cannabis, so we don't have the issue in Colorado, where people are sticking with the medical program, where they can easily get an authorization to use medical cannabis. It's of real concern when t

Health committee  I would like it to be stronger for the producer-processor, just to be candid. Much of the effort initially was focused on the whole issue of youth access and making sure the compliance checks were being done often in order to make sure that youth did not have access through the m

Health committee  It's the same experience in Washington state. Early on we had discussions with the Washington Poison Center because they were seeing an uptick in calls and visits to hospitals with respect to panic attacks, normal things that, honestly, I wasn't even aware of at the time, but I t