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The Guam Post
It has been almost seven years since the Guam Cannabis Act was passed into law, but not a single business is licensed and operational for legal cannabis retail sales.
Why the industry has failed to launch after so long was the focus of a roundtable hearing held Thursday by Sen. Telo Taitague and the Committee on Economic Investment, Military Buildup, Regional Relations, Technology, Regulatory Affairs, Justice, Elections, and Retirement.
Of the several topics discussed, industry insiders pointed to a lengthy, difficult licensing process as the biggest hurdle.
Since recreational use cannabis was legalized in 2019 there have been 15 applicants for a cannabis license, but currently only two are active, “It’s been slow, no one’s near completion,” said Department of Revenue and Taxation director Marie Lizama.
There is a multi-step process to acquire a license, and the closest business to getting one is Guam’s Real Deal LLC. Owner Stephen Roberto keeps track of how long its taking by counting the number of times he’s had to renew his annual Cannabis establishment license: three times.
“The (license) requires me to get clearances from all line agencies under the act to make sure that I’m in full compliance,” he said.
One of his biggest frustrations is that employees at all the multiple agencies he has to go through are not familiar or trained on the cannabis approval process.
“They don’t know how to handle that particular piece of paper. So you’ll get the response of, ‘what is this? Oh, this is the cannabis, this is the marijuana,’ and ‘I forgot what to do about this’ …They’re trying. They really want to help. They really, really do,” Roberto said.
After three years his company has one more clearance that GPA engineering has to pass. “It’s been difficult, but not impossible. I think the difficulties lie in the fact that there’s been a lot of slow walking, for whatever reason,” Roberto added.
Andrea Pellacani was with Grassroots Guam, the first company to secure a license for medicinal marijuana. She sympathized with the difficulties Roberto’s business has faced.
“We urged the (Cannabis Control Board) to take a different approach in envisioning the licensing process. (Roberto is) talking about the cost of his license, but the cost of three years of not making any revenue, you will lose the shirt off your back,” she said.
Despite the pleas of her goup and others to streamline the licensing process, Pellacani said the CCB and later the legislature, failed to do so. “We urged four times, five times to re-envision the licensing process.”
She said the biggest regulatory hurdle is the tax. “You need to have enough funding to make it past losing pennies off the dollar every single day you’re operating because of this tax burden,” she said.
“Why isn’t Grassroots Guam open? I’ll give you the honest answer. We had a land deal. We had funding in escrow. (But) Department of Public Health and Social Services could not approve our license within the time mandated by law,” Pellacani said.
Pellacani said the long delay caused everything to spiral downhill, “We lost our land, we lost our funding, and we were never able to get that back. That is the burden that these businesses are being put through.”
She said the government needs to support the businesses and remove the challenges, “we just need to listen to them. It’s not that hard.”
The legislature did not draft legislation to incorporate the industry input and allowed the rules established by the Cannabis board to lapse into law. “And then here we are three years later going, oh, why don’t we have any cannabis businesses? Everything was testified to you already. Everything’s on record,” she said.
Jonathan Savares, another longtime cannabis advocate and medicinal marijuana patient shared similar stories about other groups such as Grassroots Guam, and Greenland Farms.
Savares said he watched the movement “collapse and was just pushed to the side because it wasn’t a priority. And it made it very clear to me that as a patient, that we’re not priorities.”
“I have the picture with Greenland Farms’s owner and their responsible official holding their certificate to proceed. But guess what? They were tapped out,” Savares said, “They were tapped out because it was so much money that they had to wait. It took almost three years. Three years, but not a single person in the government of Guam cared.”
The first cannabis statute the legalized medicinal marijuana passed in 2015. Savares said ten years later they’re back again at the same table, “and yet we cannot move this industry forward, and I’ll tell you why, we put a burdensome regulation in place.”
“These agriculture regulations that you guys are putting in place is not consistent. These regulatory hurdles that are put in place is making it so difficult and so costly that the businesses are going to struggle to survive,” Savares said.
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Sean Hocking
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