Massachusetts Officials Repeal Marijuana Rule That Has Required Two Drivers For Deliveries

“We’ve always started from a place of a highly regulated market, but I would say overregulated in respect to the delivery.”

by Bhaamati Borkhetaria, CommonWealth Beacon

The Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, after nearly a year of review, scrapped its two-driver rule for marijuana deliveries, which has been heavily criticized for making the delivery business unaffordable.

“This is a day I dreamed of for many years,” said Devin Alexander, the CEO and co-founder of cannabis delivery company Rolling Releaf. “We’re grateful to everyone who has helped these changes come to fruition—from the Community to the Cannabis Control Commission.”

“This is a huge accomplishment,” said commissioner Nurys Camargo as she thanked the commission’s staff. “We started this months ago [initial approval came in December 2023], when we were low on bodies on the legal team.” 

Yet, even with the latest change, Massachusetts continues to have one of the most heavily regulated marijuana delivery models in the country. Most of the regulations date to 2020, when cannabis delivery began in Massachusetts and the commission threw a whole kitchen sink of safeguards at operators.

To list off just some of them, every delivery vehicle had to be unmarked and have two drivers, three cameras inside the car, and a separate locked compartment for cash and cannabis. The vehicle also had to be tracked with GPS and drivers needed to wear bodycams while making deliveries and check in with a dispatcher every 30 minutes and whenever making a delivery

Alexander said a year ago that the regulations felt less like delivering cannabis and more like transporting plutonium.

Shaleen Title, a former commissioner who said she ultimately voted to approve the regulations in order to get delivery up and running, has opposed some of the regulations since day one, including the two-driver rule and the body camera requirement.

“I thought that some of these regulations were unnecessarily burdensome for delivery operators when we didn’t have any data from other states that required so much control and surveillance,” said Title. “Some things are necessary, like showing the routes that you’re going to take, making sure that the delivery vehicle is unmarked. But then other things like having the two agents, body cameras and the amount of check-ins seemed unnecessary.”

A license to deliver cannabis is unique in that only those who qualify as social equity applicants—people who have been disproportionately harmed by the war on drugs—are able to obtain it. The intent was to give social equity applicants a leg up in the industry and allow them to reap the profits that the cannabis business was supposed to bring. But amid all the regulations, which drove up costs, delivery businesses say there has been precious little profit.

“Chairman Hoffman said we were the guinea pigs of delivery,” said Chris Fevry, the co-owner of Dris Delivery, referring to Steven Hoffman, a previous chair of the commission. “Thankfully we didn’t die in the experiment. We’ve been close to it.”

Delivery operators say the regulations have made it difficult for their businesses to survive. Some failed before getting off the ground and some failed after opening. All of them have struggled.

“I think what we’re seeing is the result of overregulation,” said Fevry. “There have been hundreds of thousands of deliveries completed, and we’ve seen that there have been practically no incidents. And so, at this point, I don’t understand the continued stress around making sure that all these safeguards are in place or heavy regulations are in place.”

Having more strict regulations was part of the compromise of allowing cannabis delivery to happen at all, according to Title. However, she and other commissioners believed the regulations would be adjusted and potentially made less severe as more information and data trickled in

Four years later, cannabis is becoming more ubiquitous and accepted. The fears that there would be robberies, an increase in violent crime and fraud haven’t materialized even as the popularity of marijuana has increased.

“It does make sense politically and from a safety perspective to start out erring on the side of minimizing risk and having more control,” said Title. “But over time it makes sense to consider rolling those [regulations] back because people will have gotten used to delivery happening. People have more experience making deliveries and receiving deliveries and will have more information from which to make decisions.”

Removing the need for a second driver during deliveries is a major change, but many stringent regulations remain on the books.

“Massachusetts is more highly regulated than other states with respect to marijuana and probably the best example of that is in delivery,” said Adam Fine, an attorney at Vicente who works on cannabis law and policy in the state. “We’ve always started from a place of a highly regulated market, but I would say overregulated in respect to the delivery. It’s kind of overkill in terms of what was needed. We were definitely an outlier in terms of the stringency of our regulations. ”

No other state with legal cannabis delivery had the two-driver rule. Certainly, no state has all of the requirements that Massachusetts does, even apart from the two-driver rule. Some, like Maryland, do have camera requirements and require drivers to wear body cameras. Connecticut, like Massachusetts, has a dispatch requirement where drivers have to call in after every delivery and every 30 minutes. These states are outliers.

In most states, there are no body camera requirements and no dispatch requirements. States like California, New York and Michigan all have a much more relaxed approach in that they allow for an “ice cream truck model,” where a vehicle can have a stock of cannabis onboard that can be sold as orders come in.

“Other states don’t have as crazy laws as us,” said Alexander, the Rolling Releaf executive. “So we can point to them and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. Everything’s fine over there. Let’s follow them.’”

Cannabis operators like Alexander and Fevry give credit to the current commission for revising some of the more burdensome rules. Not only did the commission get rid of the two-driver rule in this regulatory round, but they relaxed the dispatch rules so that now delivery drivers will have to call their dispatch only when making a delivery or an unscheduled stop. They won’t have to call every 30 minutes. The time during which deliveries can be made was also expanded, from the current 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.

However, Alexander, Fevry and other operators scoff at the dispatch requirement at all. There is a perception that it is silly to require in the regulations that a delivery driver call the business to inform them that the car has been in an accident or an unscheduled stop has been made. After all, there is GPS tracking and cameras that track every movement of the car.

Fevry pointed out that in any normal business, if a delivery vehicle breaks down, the driver is going to call the cannabis business staff. The dispatch regulation falls, according to him, into the category of telling operators how to run the nitty-gritty of their business.

“It’s overkill,” said Fevry. “We should be creating regulations that are rooted in some type of level of business logic. Creating regulations just to regulate things is not good. We have to make regulations that safeguard the community, which is a priority but that don’t also overburden the businesses.”

Commissioner Camargo proposed getting rid of the dispatch requirements altogether, but her bid was rejected.

At a legislative hearing Wednesday on the Cannabis Control Commission (CCC), industry officials who testified complained about the snail’s pace at which the commission dealt with regulatory issues.

“There is a disconnect between the CCC’s many meetings and the implementation of changes, including the industry’s regulatory proposals,” said Ryan Dominguez, the head of the Massachusetts Cannabis Coalition, at the legislative hearing.

Industry officials have a long wish list of things they want to see changed. Social consumption, for example, was legalized in the same law that legalized marijuana in Massachusetts, but it still hasn’t gotten off the ground.

The commission currently doesn’t allow companies to deliver cannabis to municipalities that initially opted out of allowing retail marijuana establishments, but delivery operators say they should be allowed to serve customers anywhere.

Advocates and cannabis business owners will also be pushing to extend the exclusivity period for social equity businesses with delivery licenses, particularly as a social equity fund designed to provide financial support begins operating.

“You can’t make all these reforms and then have all this money come from the state social equity trust fund and then not allow the social equity delivery companies to thrive as they were intended to,” said Alexander.

Commissioner Kimberly Roy said extending the exclusivity period is a priority.“We hear you,” she said. “We know this—the exclusivity period—is on the horizon.”

“What we need is bravery,” said Fevry at the legislative hearing. “We’re still treating something we legalized as an illegal product. We’ve seen this play out since marijuana was legalized. There are no robberies [and] people are not dying from consuming edibles. We need to deregulate.”

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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