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Cannabis Industry Is Heavily Regulated, But There Are Systems to Help Train Employees

A passer-by examines a cannabis sample at the New England Cannabis Convention held in Boston back in March. Some polls show that six in 10 Americans favor marijuana legalization.
Steven Senne
/
AP

There are regulations on contamination, waste disposal, surveillance systems, and internal temperature, among many other things.

Cannabis businesses have no shortage of regulations to follow. A company called Rootwurks creates programs to train employees in how to comply with them.

Founder Chase Eastman said it’s been especially tough for cannabis because so far regulation has been a one-way street.

“The industry is so new that the industry hasn’t had time to be able to come back and work with the regulators, if you will, on ‘Hey this isn’t practical, here’s a practical way of solving this same problem,” he said.

He said some of those problems are proper waste disposal, surveillance systems, and avoiding outside contamination.

“Contamination prevention is a massive thing in the industry,” he said. “There’s so many ways that that can go sideways. You talk about folks going from one cultivation facility to the other and inadvertently bringing spores and things into facilities. It can be on the soles of your shoes.”

Another environmental concern, he said, is the temperature in the facilities.

“There’s a lot of safety plans or safety systems that you have to write from a documentation standpoint that says you’re gonna validate and verify temperature controls around certain products,” said Eastman.

He also said workers need to be trained in what kinds of questions they can answer for customers. A lot of those questions, Eastman said, should be directed at medical professionals.

Janice Kirkel is a lifelong award-winning journalist who has done everything from network newscasts to national and local sports reports to business newscasts to specialized reporting and editing in technical areas of business and finance such as bankruptcy, capital structure changes and reporting on the business of the investment business.