Say W.H.A.T.?: Washington Has Adequate Traceability?

Note – in an ongoing effort to make my communications regarding the inadequacies of the regulations constraining and enabling this market more “glass-half-full”, I am using the mantra that “All is good.  Things are working fine.” throughout this post.  I hope you find most such uses appropriate and accurate.

According to the legal arm of the LCB, their current traceability solution (cum compliance reporting app) meets all legislative requirements expected of a traceability solution.  According to the LCB Washington’s regulated cannabis market has adequate traceability.  The LCB says so, hence it must be so.

All is good.  Things are working fine.

In English, that means that the LCB Enforcement and Education Division (also known as “The Revenoors”) appears to be doing a very good job of enumerating and tracking retail sales and calculating the resulting taxes owed and ensuring that those taxes are paid in the appropriate manner, form and amount by all appropriate parties within the mandated deadlines.  On the rare occasion that non-compliance is observed, the LCB weighs the infraction with their current mood and quickly compares the result against the current status of the fine-fed office-party and executive first-class travel fund and makes a judgement of whether a penalty is required and, if so, at what monetary level it should be set.  It is rumored that LCB executives are lobbying for a private jet to increase the efficiency of airport departures and thereby free up the time necessary for them to pay enough attention to get future versions of the traceability software back on schedule sometime in the next year or two.

All is good.  Things are working fine. 

Hundreds of millions of new “spoils of cannabis” tax revenue are being collected.  LCB Board members and senior leadership are being flown around the country to be wined and dined (and 4/20’ed) by entities with lots of money and access to the best hedonism available in NYC and that other Washington.

All is good.  Things are working fine.

Their “ready for prime time system called LEAF” is not tracking the weights associated with product transfers.  It is changing product identifying (key) numbers most every time a product is “touched” or changed and, yet, does not seem to be ensuring the integrity of parent/child relationships amongst those entities.  It is also not ensuring parent/child relationships amongst users of the system or third-party integrators or industry associations valiantly trying to help with productive solutions to the traceability meltdown …. but then, again, that is likely a job better served by DSHS.

All is good. Things are working fine.

Product seems to appear, disappear and change at seemingly random times.   Plants appear and disappear from “batches” when moved from room to room.

Quality assurance and potency data are collected in PDF form only and are not being integrated into the centralized data repository which LEAF is alleged to possess (the existence of which has been largely confirmed by the copies thereof which have repeatedly been made available for a fee on the “dark web”).  Users can manually over-ride failed QA test results and assert that a batch has passed all tests.

But all is good.  Things are working fine.

Through October of 2017, we were all burdened by an extremely detailed and transparent monthly offering of traceability data all rolled up into a SQLite Database that worked just fine.  It was, in the end a very large and rather ungainly database — but one that functioned and added tremendous value to those interested in the rollout of regulated state-legal cannabis in Washington.  It offered tremendous value to the LCB Revenoors, in that evidence of unexplained variability across the labs, evidence of vertical integration, evidence of hidden ownership, evidence of illegal pricing practices and evidence of cross-state diversion were all sitting there plainly visible for those wishing to look.

But no, more.  Now, the data being spit out of the LEAF system and shared with Washingtonians amount to 11 numbers (see below) that the LCB has updated a handful of times on their traceability page during the time since LEAF went live on Feb 1.  We are no longer burdened by detailed facts describing product production levels, product conversions, product flows, product pricing, product sales and product safety and product potency.  Our brains can take a break and we can pay attention to more important things (such as paying those mandated taxes and fees and fines in the full amount in the manner and form specified within the required timeframes).

All is good.  Things are working fine.

It is now necessary for me to take a deep breath and, while clicking my heels together, chant:

All is good.  Things are working fine.

All is good.  Things are working fine.

All is good.  Things are working fine.

OK – I’m back on track.  I almost found myself falling back into my old negative communication patterns.  Having an agency suddenly slam the door shut on data that were integral to the work I do almost took me back to that dark place.

I almost began complaining that the LCB’s inability or unwillingness to tie product safety and potency information to product flowing through the marketplace fundamentally compromises their ability to identify and track “bad” product should any “bad” product be discovered.  I almost started worrying again about consumer and public health and safety, as they relate to state-legal cannabis.  I almost started worrying about how legacy Friendly labs (and newly opportunistic wannabees) might be taking advantage of the absence of transparency that has existed around lab test results for almost 6 months now.

I also almost began writing about how the inability to track the AMOUNT of product flowing from point A to point B within the market fundamentally compromises the ability of the LCB to know how much product there is in any given business at any given point in time or, indeed, how much product there is in the regulated system, period.  At least they have a quarantine period to enable them to catch people that might be cheating …. or was that key enforcement tool removed in a recent “feel good” change to the rules?  It is hard to keep track sometimes.

I also almost began to write about how the lack of publicly available data describing the operations of this market has removed what appears to have been the only viable external check and balance on the regulatory and enforcement performance of the Liquor and Cannabis Board with respect to state-legal cannabis.

Repeat after me:  We Have Adequate Traceability here in Washington.

We should consider ourselves lucky.

As of April 9, 2018 (10 weeks following launch), only 273 documented bugs remain to be fixed in the system, and a complex plan involving 5 parallel overlapping 6.5-week release cycles is in place to address all of those between now and sometime this summer.

On March 30, (and I quote from a recent OCIO Project Status Update):

“MJ Freeway did not baseline the project plan that was due on 03/30/2018”.

They must be too busy fixing bugs.

All is good.  Things are working fine.