Mexico’s lower house has postponed Cannabis and hemp authorization reform to early next year.
According to the country’s media reports, legislators argued that they require more time to go through the bill. The existing policy legalizes industrial hemp and recreational marijuana but strictly prohibits medical cannabis regulation.
Based on a Supreme Court order, congress was supposed to have legalized marijuana by Tuesday.
The Deputies Chamber or lower house is expected to request the Supreme Court to extend the deadline. This will be the 3rd time the deadline is postponed.
The Supreme court initially set October 2019 as the deadline; however, the senate got an extension after failing to attain a consensus.
The deadline was then set to April 30, 2020, to accent a bill that legalizes marijuana across the state. According to local media reports, the April 30 deadline was missed after the two Mexican legislature houses suspended their work due to the COVID19 pandemic.
According to the bill’s latest amendments, a regulatory department would be created later to analyze the new cannabis and marijuana industries’ provisions. This process may take several years.
The proposed reform has been severally amended; thus, more modifications may be expected. The bill’s latest version may:
- Reduce foreign funding in a marijuana venture licensee to 49 percent
- Stop vertical integration by permitting a business to hold only one license type-selected from transformation, commercialization, cultivation, export, and import.
- Minimize horizontal integration such as restricting the permitted number of retail sale points or reducing the size that authorized cultivators can cultivate
According to the proposed bill, vulnerable local agrarian communities affected by cannabis prohibition may be excluded from some of these rules.
Despite a legal amendment accented by Mexico’s legislators in mid-2017, the country’s prospective medical cannabis sector is still stagnant.
The 2017 House-approved amendment authorized medical marijuana; however, since the necessary regulations were inappropriately created, businesses didn’t stand a chance.
